Fan art?

In a previous post, I may have mentioned that my reviews are inspired by the stylings of one Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame. In the forums for his website, I stumbled across a couple of pictures of what people think would happen if Yahtzee ever met some of his fans, and this is what I came up with. (Then someone shouted at me and told me to change one of the fans to a woman).

I'd also like to take this time to make a few observations into the gaming world. Actually, I want to talk about the Weighted Companion Cube and I was hoping some more coherent stuff would come to me, but ideas have decided to become about as illusive as a decent pair of shoes in this day and age (in the UK, pretty much every shape of male shoe has been banned, aside from something called a plimsoll, that looks like something you'd find on a beach that hasn't been used since 1950). I don't know much about those shoes either, so go look at Topman or something, I still disagree with them.

So, the companion cube then? Yes. It seems that after all the work Peter Molyneux put into the dog in Fable 2, then proudly announced that he guarantees it will make you feel love for the first time when playing a game (and you can probably see where I'm going with this), you can imagine he felt really quite silly after Valve created a cult, emotional following with a grey cube with a love heart on the side. And all they had to do was have a computer assure you it wouldn't talk, then tell you to kill it anyway. And personally, I wish Portal had come out about a year earlier, so Peter Molyneux wouldn't bother working so hard on a dog in Fable 2 and therefore we'd probably be playing it already and well on our way towards complaining that it hasn't brought us to a new promised land.

I wouldn't call myself a PC gamer, and most PC gamers I know would shout at me if I did, because the only PC game I own is SimCity 4 - and even that's been sitting on my shelf long enough to learn a language. But, even I want a solid model of a companion cube, and I don't know why. Yeah, I played Portal on my 360 (and loved it), but collecting stuff from games is usually restricted to PCs and crap like Warhammer (watch my readership plummet for that remark). How the hell did Valve get such a cult following from a frigging cube?!

What? Why don't I game on a PC? Well, aside from the fact it typically involves building a PC from scratch in order to do so - which is bad news for me, if any of my Lego "masterpieces" were anything to go by, poor things - there's the controls. When it comes to typing stuff and using the internet, I don't think there's any substitution for a good old keyboard and mouse. Thing is, that's what they're made to do, that's why keyboards are covered in letters. They're bit designed to work for games, and as such, there is no PC game I can realistically keep up with controls-wise.

RTSs; I spend all my time using the mouse, occasionally using the keyboard to move the screen around a little and then for grouping troops together. Then all my carefully thought out battalions of troops are wiped out before my eyes, leaving me with a crater in my soul that can only be filled with the comedy stylings of a good Red Dwarf marathon. And being sparse on Red Dwarf dvds, I've given up on all RTS games. I also have a problem with shooters on PCs too.

It's all very well and all being incredibly accurate with the help of a mouse, but I have two bones to pick with that. First, when you think about it, you've spent £400+ on a gaming PC and another £30+ for a modern shooter for it, only to have it reduced to the same level as any point and click game, typically used in flash adverts and for that I laugh at you mockingly, ha ha ha (whimper). Feel free to throw that out the window as bile (but remember not to throw your entire computer, or even monitor, otherwise you may be very cross with me), but I do have a better point. Shooting by dragging a mouse around for pinpoint accuracy may give you appearance of some sort of demi-god of shooters, but I prefer a more honest kind of aiming. Like in reality, while aiming with any form of real gun, you're let down by the lovely mechanics of your own arms and the 3D world, and so in a game, you could do with being let down by something else, say a pair of analogue sticks.

Now you see my point, or at least that I will forever suck at PC games. This is exactly why I think the Wii is a great little thing for shooter games, the motion sensor means you can actually let yourself down and consequently suck ass! The problem I had last time I played a shooter on the Wii was touching the edges of the screens, leading me to spin around uncontrollably. There's also the fact that I was playing Red Steel, which as you may know, was a piece of complete ass.

I'm sure at some point I had an idea of how to link back to the PC gaming and weighted companion cube thing, but screw it, it's gone forever. Enjoy my first ever attempt at fan art, though.