FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

The Boyfriends & Girlfriends Issue

Games

VIRTUA FIGHTER 5There are few things more boring than a really good fight, like one where the fighters are well matched and at the peak of their health. Nobody wants to sit around looking

UITAR HERO II

Publisher: Activision

Platform: Xbox 360

Genre: Rock Simulation

This is the way a video game sequel should be: more of the same, only way, way better. It’s like the lineage from

Call of Duty 2

to

Call of Duty 3

. You take the basic formula of the last game and then you trick it out in various ways that make fan boys want to shit their pants with glee.

So what does

Guitar Hero II

add to its predecessor? First and foremost, you can play the bass now, which is beyond rad. There are also new chords that require three buttons to play, which is fucking hard but if you nail a couple of them you start to feel like a god. Oh and there’s a thing called Practice Mode, where you can focus on just the verse or chorus of a song. (If you think this sounds way too nerdy, you probably shouldn’t even be reading this, by the way. This is the games reviews section. What do you want?)

Advertisement

The new songs are great too. The best thing about the

Guitar Hero

games is that you can take a ridiculous guilty pleasure tune and listen to it as many times as you want because, you know, you’re trying to win the game. So there’s your excuse for playing shit that is way too lame to say you like but which secretly gets your inner jock fucking PUMPED. There’s Rage Against the Machine, Primus, Nirvana, Rancid, Foo Fighters… even that little troll Matthew Sweet gets dug up and thrown onstage.

Apparently they have some “hip cats” working at the

Guitar Hero

office too, because they’ve added stuff like Danzig, the Stooges, the Butthole Surfers, the Pretenders, and Suicidal Tendencies.

Multiplayer on

Guitar Hero II

opens up a whole new world of dorkdom. Riffing on a tiny plastic guitar while you talk through a little headset to some chubby 14-year-old gamer in Kansas? It’s the stuff geek dreams are made of.

GUS NAYHAY

VIRTUA TENNIS

Publisher: Sega

Platform: PS3/Xbox 360

Genre: Real Tennis

Which would you rather do: Have your face caked in a layer of human shit for two hours or spend months and months and months of your life hunched over in front of a monitor carefully rendering the digital hair of a digital tennis player so that it doesn’t look like a cartoon helmet only to have the product of all your labor completely replaced two years down the line by a new version of the exact same game? Being the hair guy for a game like this has got to be the most soul-crushing gig since books were made in monasteries and one monk’s entire job would be copying the same page of Psalms over and over again. Oh, and PS: With the shit-mask, you have to keep your mouth closed for the first 20 minutes.

Advertisement

THELDON BOIS

WING ISLAND

Publisher: Nintendo

Platform: Wii

Genre: Bird Flight

Isn’t this supposed to be for kids? It took me three hours of wobbling around my living room like a moron just to keep from flying straight into a cliff right away. It probably doesn’t help that it was four in the morning and I was trying to take my mind off the caffeine overdose I’d accidentally given myself by tossing back a coffeepot full of TheraFlu and coffee residue in a last ditch effort to kill the head cold I’ve been living with for the past two weeks, but three fucking hours? And then, once I finally got the hang of it, I puked. Probably the TheraFlu’s fault, but still.

HAYMAKER SHLEMMER

VIRTUA FIGHTER 5

Publisher: Sega

Platform: PS3

Genre: Pain Simulation

There are few things more boring than a really good fight, like one where the fighters are well matched and at the peak of their health. Nobody wants to sit around looking at fine physical specimens dealing out perfectly placed and landed punches. All that “power of the human physique” shit is for closeted gay jocks in the 1950s and Leni Riefenstahl.

What makes a fight worth watching are the little mitigating factors: drunkenness, a major physical discrepancy between the fighters (200-pound woman versus her 15-year-old nephew), impromptu use of foreign objects, and hastily improvised moves. I would rather see a pair of scrawny, balding accountants go at each other over who’s been emailing dick pictures to the other’s wife than a thousand ultimate warriors battling each other just to win some tournament of ultimate champions. Call me a straight man, but hey that’s how I roll.

Advertisement

My opinion on real-life fights carries through to my take on video games that are about fighting. It may be a feat of unequalled computer skill to program the twitch of a picture-perfect

latissimus dorsi

contracting from a kidney punch, but who gives a shit? You could put together the most realistic game of all time, featuring characters with completely plausible muscle structures and streetfighting styles but at the end of the day, all anybody really wants to see when they turn on their Xbox is a blue-furred Sasquatch scissor-kicking the head off a Japanese schoolgirl because she’s trying to conquer his forest.

Virtua Fighter 5

, like all the previous VFs, is set at some sort of tournament of ultimate champions and is supposed to be a video-game showcase of real-world martial arts. We’ll pause here for a second so you can yawn a few times.

To their credit, they’ve cooked up an elaborate background story for the whole deal involving an evil corporation or whatever, but it’s the kind of thing you only know about if you don’t click through all the cut-scenes at the beginning, so it doesn’t count. There are no fireballs, no lazer eyes, no magic lightning, no helper animals, no stretchy-arms, no blade-arms, no tentacle-arms, no retractable cannon-arms, no hammer-arms—nothing. These guys are so hemmed in by their own dedication to realism that now that they’ve finally decided to introduce a zany new character, the best they could come up with is a Mexican wrestler. A Mexican wrestler. That’s them “cutting loose.”

Maybe this kind of thing appeals to those pudgy former frat types you always see tucking in their shirts on the train platform in the morning. Maybe it gives them a chance to let out all the frustration built up from being forced to live such a shitty, unimaginative life on whichever character looks most like their supervisor at Makovsky & Cooper or whatever consulting/investment firm they work for. But for those of us who appreciate the finer things in life, this kind of boring, by-the-book game is murder.

I’d like to believe little creative quibbles like these could be overcome by solid gameplay or good controls, or one of those other meaningless features video game reviewers like to throw into the mix, but you know what? It just ain’t happening. This otherwise enjoyable game is completely ruined because I can’t play it as a giant bat that traps his opponent in a sticky guano-net fired out of his butt. Sorry.

PRESTLER BOYD