2003 – Year of the Geek
Article by Chiz

Seeing as I'm kind of this media catch all for Modern Stud I thought I'd give some year end stuff and some in the future stuff. 2003 seemed to be the year of the geek. Martini glasses and reluctant assassins gave way at the box office to super-heroes and all things pointy eared. Network television has officially lost the male demographic to geeky cable shows. Do you want to watch the hackneyed sitcom about the career woman who has to chose between her husbands kidney transplant or that new pare of shoes she has always wanted sense this morning, or how to make a MOAB out of lava lamps, a camp stove and a orange VW bug. Porn, not just for geeks anymore, has turned breast implants into the Hubble Figurine collections for our generation. But video games have become the synergetic center for the geek. Sending it's tendrils out into the mainstream. A generation that have more fond memories of Miss Pac Man then tether-ball, $40 dollar tickets to live the dream, and in a world were we seem to get do less and less the games let you do more and more. Few of us can vacation in Europe but all of use can blow up a nice size chunk of it.

So for the video games, the franchise tie-ins have been rocking. For many years if a game was based on a TV show or movie you could guarantee that it would suck big donkey. Or if it wasn't too offensive it tended to have very little to anything do with the franchise it was tied into.

Simpson's Hit n Run, or if you don't get it you're in the wrong place.
We finally got a good Simpson's game in Hit and Run. This is a fan boy's tour de force of Simpson's trivia. It is mostly a driving quest game like Driver but with a bit of plot former thrown in for good measure. They captured the look and the attitude of the show very well. It has great voice acting by the normal crew from the show. They introduce vary little new to the game material. I'm sure there are people out there who are angry because this or that is missing. These people need to be reminded that no one likes them, I want to feel their eye jelly surge around my teeth as I bite down. When they put there more complete game in my hand I'll start listening, this will never happen sense they'll never stop masturbating and it's hard to code one handed. There are problems. The physical borders for objects in the game do not always match the animated ones. You can find yourself standing in the air between the blades of a ceiling fan and then falling through an awning trying to jump to a roof top. Some missions seem to require more luck then skill to beat. I had to repeat one race until the AI car nosed into a barricade to get past it. But the missions are not too long and restarting is very simple and fast. You also have to dodge the odd suicidal mad men that try to kill themselves on your bumper.

9 out of 10 better then any other Simpson's game worse then if they had given Homer a sniper riffle.

Battlestar Galactica, or knee deep in toaster blood.
Ok so who hasn't wanted to fly great metal penis through space, shooting photon ic sperm at metal vulvas. I've wanted this game senesce I realized that Buck Rodgers was a pussy. Though my loyalties stand with the classic, and not the new mini series which the game is a prelude to, there was no way I was not going to get my geek on. Over all levels are well put together with two exceptions. Once you know what you are suppose to do it becomes fairly clear, but getting to that point can be a out right bastard. There are no checkpoints or save points during the missions, some of which get dam long and hard. And after replaying some of the missions ad nausea it feels like you just got done in by some thing long and hard. But the nimble and responsive Viper does not disappoint. There are other crafts that you get to fly as well as steel.

vehicles and gun emplacements on the Galatica. Playing the game for a bit is great. But if you stall, finishing it will become a labor of love.

Over all it's a 7, or a 6 if you didn't grow up watching the show. Better then Freebooter worse then Colony Wars.

LOTR Return of the King, or orcs bet you can't just kill one.
This hack and slash master is a great improvement on it's predecessor. It puts you in the movie the same way some fresh liver and a old tube sock can put you into your favorite geriatric porno. Until they invent the genital mitt peripheral I'm not sure if they will have a better movie to game crossover. It seems the secret is to distill it down to the base and never give up good gaming for accuracy. Just like making a good movie means following the fact only until they get in the way of the movie. You can't change the fact just because. The more you change the harder you have to explain it. Look at the difference between Spider-Man and the Hulk. Which of those did you enjoy watching and which did you spend asking yourself why they changed this or that.

Back to the game. The controls were slick and the button combos were easy to get down. And above all the game was not populated with characters that are tired with there station in life and want to jump off any cliff they can walk next to. Timing was a bit odd but passable. Graphics were sweet and maps were well thought out. And lets face it, it's all about getting your geek on. And the LOTR films are the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria sailing out and proving that the world is geek. The game was beautiful but with the great pre-rendered back grounds comes lack of camera control. Yes I'm a greedy fu*k.
Over all a 9. better then LOTR The Two Towers worse then when I dream of the genital mitt and blood squirt attachment.

Right now even our TV cops are geeks, catching crooks with cotton swabs and not sweet chases through back alleys, but how long will that last? We all know it's just geek sheik for now. But for the geeks out there these may well be the salad days. But this is an unnatural surge in a ecosystem that does consist of limited resources. So when the kull comes what survives will be stronger and more evolved, or a limping evolutionary dead end. Strip-mined to the edge of annihilation but not quite dead yet. Kind of like that Galapagos Tortoise that's it's last survivor of his species. He may live for a hundred years but never get to fu*k.

Review Archives