Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

So the economy is shit, everyone’s broke and miserable. Good times, huh?

When the Greek government announced their austerity measures, the people of Greece with demonstrations and rioting in which at least 100 people were arrested, 12 injured and three killed.

In Ireland, however, we had a national “dirty look” at the Dail day. It’s stuff like this that makes me genuinely proud to be Irish.

Barack and Gary

In the same vein as Selleck Waterfall Sandwich and Nick Cage as Everyone, there’s Barack and Gary, BFFS, “Wherein actor Gary Busey is photoshopped into the official White House Flickr stream”.

When it’s done right, it’s beautiful.

Jersey Shore 2: The Situationing

Filming for the second series of Jersey Shore is currently under way in Miami and, by from everything I’ve read, it’s been a total disaster. MTV made the decision to stick with the cast from the first season whose reputation is preceding them. Which means they’re getting turfed out of the Miami hot-spots because the club owners know exactly what kind of bullshit shenanigans follow these knuckleheads wherever they go.

If you ask me, they should have gone for a whole new cast for the second season. It’s like Borat or Dennis Pennis or whatever - once these characters get a little famous, people stop falling for their pranks and the whole joke is over. It’s the same with Jersey Shore. The first season was a bunch of no-name guidos getting into the kind of trouble you can imagine every guido gets into. Now we’ve got a bunch of people jumped up on the sense of their own fame surrounded by people who know exactly who they are. Everyone is in on the joke. It’s not funny any more.

At the same time though, I can see why they decided to stick with the same cast. This was a perfect storm of ridiculous, over-the-top personalities. With J-WOWW, Snooki, The Situation and Pauly D (and to a lesser extent, Ronnie, Vinnie and Angelina), MTV managed to capture lightning in a bottle. I doubt they could repeat it again if they tried.

Wanna know what I think? Of course you do! I think that if you absolutely had to stick with the original cast, rather than sending them to Miami, a better idea would have been to pack them all up and ship them off to Italy.

Can you imagine how incredible that would be? I’m getting tingly just thinking about it. They’d come face-to-face with real Italians. It’s would be an amazing fish-out-of-water story, as they have their ideas about what it means to be Italian both crushed and affirmed. Possibly at the same time! Not only that, but MTV Italia only started showing Jersey Shore last month, so these kids aren’t nearly as famous in Italy as they are in the States. They could wander around, jumped up on the sense of their own fame, but with near-complete anonymity.

Ah well. Maybe Season 3?

Death of the Game Manual

Ubisoft have announced that they are ditching paper manuals for games in favour of electronic on-disc copies. This is sad news. Not that I was particularly fond of paper manuals - they are now mostly just legal boilerplates more than anything to do with the game - but because this means we’re almost at the end of game pack-ins entirely.

I was a little disappointed when games switched to DVD-style cases. Yes, it’s great that publishers finally settled on a standard shape and size for their boxes and my games collection doesn’t look like a fucking cardboard shanty town, but it also meant that game designers couldn’t pack extra things into the game box. Back in the 80s, Infocom games usually came with “feelies”. These were ostensibly copy protection, but it’s not fair to say that’s all they were. Rather than the usual, bland, hard-to-photocopy sheets of teeny-tiny numbers for the game to ask you “what is the number in row G, column 16?”, the Infocom feelies also gave you something that felt like an artefact from the game world. It was something physical that helped you identify with the game, made the game come alive and feel more realAnd let’s face it, those Infocom text adventures needed all the help they could get to feel more real.

Looking back, I think most of my favourite games had some sort of pack-in to enhance the player’s experience. For example, the graphic adventure of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came with a small, 20 or 30 page replica of the grail diary on top of the usual copy-protection. It wasn’t essential and you didn’t need this grail diary to finish the game, but they gave them out anyway. As an 11-year old who was crazy for that game, this cheap, paper copy broke the game’s fourth wall and made the whole experience more real. It felt like treasure.

More recently, there’s Heavy Rain which has you hunting for a serial killer known as the “Origami Killer”, who gets his name from the fact he leaves a little origami figure in the cold, dead hands of his victims. Origami is used as a visual motif for the entire game, right down to the logo to indicate the game is being saved. Even though creator David Cage has a major boner for movies, he ignored the whole ubiquitous floating head idea for the poster, and stuck stuck with a simple image of the origami crane from the game.

When you’re installing the game, a process that can take a few minutes, a message comes up on the screen to tell you to take out the flat sheet of paper packed into the case and, over the course of 12 steps, you’re taught how to make your own origami crane, just like the one from the cover. Things to keep you distracted while your game loads/installs aren’t anything newYou hearing me, Kojima? Watching an old fart smoking for 10 minutes is not fun, but it’s hard not to be impressed by Heavy Rain’s implementation. It’s different, it’s fun. And how difficult was it? It’s a sheet of paper, yet that one sheet of paper enhanced my experience of the game and my overall impression of the care that went into the game.

So today I’m pouring a 40Not literally, obviously. What a waste of booze for game manuals and pack-in tchotchkes. At least we have special editions, right?