Bukkake? Yes! Ass-Pickles? Nonono!

One thing I absolutely love about my job is to add nasty, filthy jokes to everything I write, just to see whether the guys at the office will find and/or censor it. Just to see if I can get away with it. And to make the whole thing a lot more fun to read, obviously. This weekend I was asked to play-test Nosgoth and in my article I've compared F2P-shooters to ass-flavoured pickles. I've also mentioned how I got surrounded by enemy players, who then proceeded to blow their load right into my face like I was the female lead in a Japanese movie for adults. I'd ask you to guess which of these two jokes got censored, but I kinda gave it away with today's headline.

Crazy thought: It's much more important to write a fun article about a game than a scientific analysis of how good or bad every individual component of a game is. I'll go even further and say that, at least in case of a print article, you can fuck most of the facts about the game you're reviewing and readers will still appreciate you if you're entertaining. Tell you what, I don't know shit about most of today's games: I flat-out refused to be part of the Elder Scrolls Online beta, I'm not looking at WildStar and I quit WoW a year before Pandaria came out. I mainly write for a role playing magazine and the only games I've touched the last couple of weeks were Street Fighter, Warframe and Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior. And 2013 has been the most successful year for my career thus far. January 2014 is looking pretty good, too. Because I write comedy.

Ironically, there's an old posting hidden deep within this blog where I moan about people who want to abandon rating systems for game reviews and talk about how we should stop analyzing them. Heh. My bad. I kinda get it now.

Seriously though: Why would you buy an overpriced print magazine about games, which is chock-full of information you could have obtained for free on the internet at least a month ago? No, really, why the fuck do you people waste money on that? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it and I am deeply grateful to all of you for putting food and video games on my table every month. And if I had to guess, I'd say a decent portion of our readers buy the magazines, because they want more than just bare-bones information. They want to be entertained. That or they're complete idiots who have never heard of the internet before. I'd like to go with the former.

A while ago, the publisher asked me to review this horrible zombie survival online game. I don't care about zombies. In fact, I have a real phobia of zombies, which prevents me from showering with the curtain closed. Some unresolved childhood trauma thingie. I don't care about this particular type of game. I don't know shit about it. I didn't know how to review that stuff. So instead of writing a serious, fact-based, analytic review I wrote a survivor's diary, based upon my experiences with the game.
Basically, it describes my change from a curious, friendly player to a murdering asshat, who lures other survivors to their deaths and takes their shit. Which really happens in just about every zombie survial game, because it always turns out that zombies are mostly harmless and the real assholes are the players. Big surprise there, I know. You either ragequit from getting killed by assholes all the time or you survive long enough to see yourself out-assholing everyone on the fucking server.

The whole thing ends in, "I watch myself cracking the poor guy's skull open, before I proceed to rummage through his belongings for some beans and a cool new hat. I am scum."
The whole thing describes my gameplay experience. No "visual quality is suchandsuch" or "there's a frame dip of 2.5 in this particular area of the game" or shit like that. And my boss asked, "Are you sure about this? It looks strange." But they usually trust me and let me get away with my crazy shit and they printed it and people liked it. Some actually commented on it and said they wanted to see more articles like that.
Ironically, when I filled out the mandatory score thingie where you have to rate each individual component of the game, I was way, waaaaaaay off and gave the game the dumbest review rating of all times, demonstrating how much I suck as a professional reviewer. But people didn't really mind, because the article was still a pretty good read.

Let's be realistic here for a moment: If you see a magazine on the shelf that has, say, Neverwinter on its cover and you buy it because of that, chances are, you already know about Neverwinter, anyway. You've looked up gameplay videos on Youtube, you've checked out the website, maybe you've even joined the beta. You don't really expect to learn anything new from my review, you just like to read about that particular game. Heck, chances are, you're gonna look right at the score, maybe the screenshots and you'll skip most of the actual article because, again, you already know everything I have to tell you. But a surprise dick joke might get your attention, right? You may find yourself reading the whole thing, just to see if I put any more in there. And if my next article contains an even filthier joke or two, you might end up reading stuff about games you don't even care about, just because you see my name underneath and you're hoping for more silly stuff. Or you'll hate me and ignore my stuff altogether, but we can't all be loved by everybody.

No, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!

Of course you can't overdo it, or things go from funny to just plain stupid and nonsensical. But it's nice to be the guy who gets away with it. It's nice when people put enough trust in me to let me do my weird stuff and print (most of) it. It's what makes the whole thing so much fun. I was invited to a gaming podcast a few months ago to stand in for a guy who quit last minute. I had about an hour or so to prepare, I didn't know shit about half of the stuff people were discussing on there, so I just raved and screamed and moaned about one of the games, its publisher and its player base and people thought it was fucking hilarious. Sometimes zero preparation is all the preparation you need. Though I don't think I want to repeat that anytime soon. The same old joke can only be funny so many times.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Today started with a bukkake joke being published along with one of my articles. And it made me happy. I love my job.

-Cat