No Fragments Archive 10: Diskmags/nf_archive_10.iso/MAGS/ST_PLUS/STP18.MSA/STP_EX_VIOLE.STP

Text File | 1997-06-30 | 19KB | 419 lines

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        On days when the news happenings  of  the  world  are a bit thin on the
ground, when airlines are staying rather predictably  in the air, when cows are
sensible, dogs aren't out savaging young  children and even Fergie's decided to
stay in with a video and pizza or  two, trashy tabloid journo scum like nothing
better than dreaming up a  few  scare  stories, convincing ill-informed parents
that their kids are  being  turned  into  a  generation of morally-bankrupt MTV
zombies, who would have  sold  their  grandparents  for  alcohol  money if they
hadn't been so busy killing them in the first place.
        How long must this ridiculous  scare-mongering go on?  'Nintendo Killed
My Son'?  Nintendo kept your son from vandalising the bus shelter, more like.
        There have been concerns that  if  you  can  manage  to play your video
games, without them triggering a bout of  epilepsy first, you're still going to
be spending your weekends running  around  the  streets, practicing your Dragon
Punches on old folk.

        Enough to all this.  It is about time that the needlessly and hideously
violent games of the world had a voice  of their own.  A spokesperson.  And the
rest of the team here at ST+ feel it should be me.
        Apparently, I have all the correct  qualities,  being the only one here
who can re-assemble a Kalashnikov  Assault  Rifle  blindfolded  in no more than
eight seconds and also acting as the  only  person here who knows all 58 verses
of that catchy military  marching  tune  'One,  two,  three,  four, we love the
Marine corps.'
        Before we get on to the  head  cracking, blood spilling, bone crunching
antics of violent gaming, let's first  define  exactly  what we mean by 'gaming
violence'.  Space Invaders, it could be said, is pretty damn nasty, as it deals
with the mass invasion  of  our  planet  by  alien  space craft packing heinous
weaponry against a  lone  battle  tank,  with  no  final end-of-game conclusion
leading to the  impending  destruction  of  Earth  and  the  entire human race,
forever.
        Nasty it may be, but where is the bloodshed?  What about the plummeting
alien space craft, as they fall  to  the ground, flaming and smoking, exploding
into ashes as they hit the  dirt,  spewing  green, mushy alien remains all over
the homes of young children and their tiny animal friends?
        This isn't violence, it's sissy fodder.  What we want are bruised, limp
and broken forms, of the vanquished enemy  kind.  What we are dealing with here
is the kind of game where you  see  the  knives  go in, the chunky boots decend
onto the faces of the fallen and the  bullets burst out of the backs of fragile
human forms.
        So, my fellow warriors, let's get right down to business.

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SPEEDBALL 2, Renegade.
Once described as  'a  subtle  blend  of  extreme  violence  and really extreme
violence', Speedball 2 has it's roots  in  rugby,  but it's heart firmly set in
kicking the hell out of  the  other  team  for  all  it's  worth and it is most
definitely worth a lot by anyone's standards.   Okay, so you may get points for
scoring goals, but a healthy score  can  be  massed by constantly pummeling the
other team until the little robot nurses come out, carry them away and probably
incinerate the remains, or something.

FOUL! - (Or, how they hurt you)  On  the downside, you get thoroughly abused by
the whole of the opposing team, whether or not you're the one holding the ball.

HUT, HUT! - (Or, how you hurt them  back)  But  you give as good as you get and
can even buy Bitmap Shade brain implants  in the robo-gym, to boost your team's
violence and aggression points up to a new degree of fatality.

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DOUBLE DRAGON, Melbourne House.
A few years ago, a Professor Eugene F  Provenvo  wrote a book on the dangers of
computer games, titled 'Video Kids'.  At the same time, he was doing the rounds
in all the tabloids and even The Guardian  for that matter, where he stated how
Double Dragon stimulated violence,  sexism  and  racist  attitudes.  I am sorry
Prof, but the comic book violence that Double Dragon portrays does not, in real
life, make me, or anyone else,  kick  innocent citizens, grapple women in short
skirts, or throw rocks at black people in the  hope that by the end of it all I
may get the chance to kiss some skinny girl, who's all tied up and hanging from
a pike in  a  castle  somewhere,  surrounded  by  'Machine  Gun  Willy' and his
hencemen.  Well, the second one comes close sometimes...

THERE MUST 'AVE BEEN TEN OF 'EM  -  A bus-load of thugs constantly take delight
in smacking you about with baseball bats, whips, barrels, crates, rocks, knives
and even dynamite.  Oh yeah, and Big  Ron  from  off of East Enders comes along
occassionally to slap your head.

YOU'RE ALL GOING HOME IN AN AMBULANCE -  And  you can use all the weapons back,
to one distinct advantage - You're not thick and walk into holes.

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CANNON FODDER, Virgin Interactive.
Voted by ST+ readers as the best ST  game  of all time, oooh, about a couple of
months back now, Cannon Fodder  throws  a  platoon  of  your men into a jungle,
desert, or artic situation and says "Hey, you,  soldier boy, come and have a go
if you think your hard enough."  War really has never been so much fun.

GOING HOME IN A BODYBAG - Tiny soldier men shoot you, grenade you and blast you
into the dirt with  rocket  launchers,  while  enemy  tanks, jeeps, skidoos and
helicopters do much the same.  Oh, and  watch out for booby traps and quicksand
- They're killers.

YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!  -  Take  out  enemy  bunkers  with  grenades, mow lone
soldiers down in a  skidoo  and  race  along  the  battle  field, guns blazing,
causing the wounded enemy soldier men  to  bound  and bounce along your line of
fire, leaping around, squirting blood in  agony until you finally releases that
trigger.
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POPULOUS TWO - TRIALS OF THE OLYMPIAN GODS,  Bullfrog.
One kills a man, one is a  murderer.   One  kills hundreds, one is a conquerer.
One kills everybody, one is a  God.   Play  God  in  Populous Two and, er, kill
everybody.

WHAT GOD IS THIS THAT CAN'ST DEFINE A SIMPLE NAME - You'll be happily beavering
away, raising land, lowering land and  planting  trees  in a bid to expand your
empire and make plenty more room for  your happy little followers to build more
houses on, when suddenly - and  without  warning  -  a volcano grows out of the
centre of your town.  As  your  tiny  followers  run  for  their lives, a freak
hurrican blows most of them back  and  into  the  mass lava flow the volcano is
spewing out everywhere,  reducing  them  to  Twiglet-fodder,  before a fearsome
thunder storm looms over the horizon,  sparking off lightning bolts, frying any
men attempting escape.   But  what  of  the  tiny  villagers,  living in pretty
cottages on the hills, they'll be alright  won't they?  No, because they're all
far too busy having their houses ripped  up by earthquakes, before falling into
freshly placed swamps, smouldering as fire  rain downs on them, fungus clinging
to their faces, watching as their friends  get beaten up by Hercules, Adonis or
some other guy with a stick, as  tornados  swish their bittie remains about the
landscape, before tidal waves sink your now  pitiful relic of a settlement into
the ocean.  Oh yes, Zeus hates you and no mistake.

I AM THE LORD OF HELLFIRE AND  I  BRING  YOU... - Being the God-like deity that
you are, you can do all of the above to  your opponent - the God of all that is
red.  Forgetting all what you may  have  learnt in the Terminator films, humans
are endlessly more sadistic than computer  opponents, so if a particular little
person on the opposing side is not quite to your liking, you can select him for
punishment, zapping the little fella  with  thunderbolts, singing him with fire
columns and even giving him the bubonic  plague, causing vultures to follow him
about wherever he goes, waiting for  the  moment  he  finally pops his clogs so
that they can feast on his remains.  Try not to cook him too heavily with those
fire columns - you don't want him charred, do you?

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TEAM YANKEE TWO - PACIFIC ISLANDS, Empire.
Or War In The Gulf, or even the first  one if you like, they were all the same,
weren't they?  Just that one is in a  battle  field, one is in the gulf and the
other is on some silly islands.   No,  not Cilly islands.  Anyway, control four
teams of four tanks and drive  about  the  landscape,  blasting the hell out of
anything that moves and  anything  that  doesn't  move,  as  well.  Anything in
between you might as well cannon to death too, for the hell of it.

INCOMING! - You thunder over  (totally  invisable)  land mines, get your armour
rattled by anti-tank missiles, only to be  plucked off the map entirely by tiny
tank snipers.  True, there is  a  severe  lack  of  gore, as Empire avoided the
grisley nature of  war,  when  tank  shells  are  split  open, throwing malled,
burning human remains out of the  debris,  exploding with bloody juices as they
hit the dirt, leaving the enemy  tank  boy  racer  to come back again later and
wheelspin on their squishy heads.

ENEMY, NINE  O'CLOCK  -  Burst  out  of  jungle  cover,  machine  guns blazing,
rocketing the enemy like  you  really  mean  it, destroying tanks, helicopters,
bunkers and even trees and statues if you don't care about ammo loss.  And take
a look at those deserted  buildings  -  Well,  they look pretty deserted, don't
they?  But there might just be some kids playing inside.  Boom!


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DYNABALSTER, Ubi Soft / Hudson.
Not in the slightest bit gore-filled  or gruesome, but DynaBlaster will forever
be the greatest game ever for me,  so  I'm including it.  You and four friends,
can run around a single-screen maze,  collecting power-ups and blowing the hell
out of each other with those black 'n'  round  bombs that you always see in Tom
and Jerry cartoons.  See, it is violent.

DOOOOMED - You get blown up, shake your  arms  about and disappear in a puff of
smoke.

DIE HORRIBLY - You blow them up, they shake their arms about and then disappear
in a puff of smoke.  In the real  world,  they  then hit you and swear never to
play again.


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ROBOCOP 3, DID / Ocean.
Prime objective 1: Kill.  Prime  objective  2:  Kill.  Prime objective 3: Kill.
As Robocop, a mobile chunk  of  shiny  steel,  you  walk,  drive and fly about,
obeying  your  prime  objectives.   Including  the  hidden  fourth  one,  Prime
objective 4: Kill.

OPEN THE GOD DAMN SAFE, POPS - Splatterpunks (yeah, bad name, I know) shoot you
when you are out of your car, ram you in a big van when you are in your car and
when it all goes Pete Tong half way  through the game and you join the opposing
side, the cops do exactly the same  back  to  you.   When one too many ED 209's
gets the better of you, OCP says they  can't afford to fund the RoboCop project
anymore and sells you off for  scrap.   Charming.  And a Japanese ninja android
comes along and kicks your arse, at one point, too.

DEAD OR ALIVE, YOU'RE COMING WITH ME - Pixel perfect collision detection allows
Robo to zap folk on any point of  their polygonal body, machine gunning them to
dust as they fall to  the  floor,  while  ram-raiding innocent civilian cars to
destruction is an accute past-time when travelling to a new location.  And that
ninja android?  Pull out your gun when  he's  not looking and rapid fire him to
melt-down city.  And don't forget to shoot women with babies.

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SMASH TV, Ocean.
'Bingo!' cries the nauseatingly slick host  to  Smash TV, the most gratuitously
sickly, offal filled gameshow of  the  future  that  even makes The Running Man
look a little bit tame and silly.  As  a contestant, enter the arena and pummel
the hell out of anything with  a  heartbeat,  remembering to scoop up microwave
ovens, televisions and toasters on the way.   Okay, so the ST version did 'suck
the big one', but the arcade game was fantastic.

WIPE OUT - Being clubbed to death as the  audience cheers is a bit of a downer,
as is being pumped full of  cannon  fodder  by  a half-man half-tank outfit and
while the notorious end-of-level giants  cause  much  grief,  none can be worse
than when you accidentally fox-trot over  a  mine,  reducing  you to a cloud of
mushy red, tossing a shoe and sticky eyeball into the camera's view.

OH, DIDN'T THEY DO WELL -  A  huge  selection of weaponary scattered around the
stadium leaves you in another one  of  those  'should  I get the LAW Cybernated
Projectile Launcher, or the thick and  thin toaster' dilemas, though helps ease
the stress, as you not only see  your  bullets  enter the thugs, but also spray
out the other side of them in a bloody haze.  You can even gleefully mush waves
of maurading opponents into bolognese, with surround-cell rotary knives.

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LEMMINGS 2, Psygnosis.
Thousands of tiny, green-haired creatures in never-ending supply keep on coming
and it's your  job  to  totally  annihilate  the  buggers,  by  whichever means
possible.

OH NO! - From the moment they  step  out of that trap-door, the little critters
are prone to high falls,  deep  water  and  the ever-non-merciful, 'edge of the
screen'.  When you get bored  of  leading  them  into the paths of flesh-hungry
dinosaurs, frogs that whip them  about  with  their  tongues, giant machine gun
toting space-walkers and pillars that crush  them  into sushi, you can use your
diverse arsenal of explosives to throw  the  tiny rodents around the landscape,
skidding on ice and forcing them to walk up walls using Magno-Boots to later be
shot down with mortar bombs.  Of  course,  if  you  tire of the sights, a quick
click on the 'nuke' button will  help  re-shape the landscape, as death becomes
to all of Lemming-kind.

EEEEERRYUCHK! - Er, hang on... You're meant to be saving them, aren't you?

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FIREFORCE, Ice.
Travel the world, meet new  and  interesting  foreign  people  - and kill them.
Fireforce has you as a lone  US  soldier,  set  out  to teach those nasty Iraqi
people a lesson, in true Rambo fashion.  I've lost my copy of the game - anyone
want to sell me one?

I'M TO YOUNG TO DIEEEEEE! -  A  constant  flurry  of bullets, grenades and land
mines all make you fall over and say 'Uuugh' too soon.

EAT HEAVY CALIBRE DEATH, DICK WEED -  Rocket  launchers are good for taking out
enemy buildings, but really come  into  their  own  for zapping lone, wandering
soldiers, throwing their remains off  the  scream  so  fast  you can hardly see
them.  Knives are fun too, when  you're  hiding  in  the bushes, waiting for an
unsuspecting person to walk by so that you can jump out, grab them from behind,
slitting their  throats  as  blood  drenches  their  clothing.   And  don't  go
forgetting the pleasures of machine guns -  little can be better than pumping a
tent so full of lead that it  rips  to  shreads, throwing human remains out the
holes being shot through the other  side.   Oh,  and the grenades, grenades are
great too - predicting the exact distance needed so that the small, hand-thrown
explosive bounces cleanly onto the Iraqi's beret is great fun, blowing his face
clean off.  And timed  explosives.   Timed  explosives  are brilliant.  They're
meant for blowing up buildings really,  but  leaving them on look-out posts and
luring soldiers onto standing on  them,  throwing their screaming corpses clean
off the top of the screen to  later  plummet  down  all burnt up and flaming is
excellent.  And pistols.  Pistols can  be  fun  too, pistols were never boring,
you can hide beneath the water with  a  pistol and when a soldier wades through
up to his waist, you can blast  his  knee-caps  off.  Or even better, if you've
got a knife you can slit their  shins  open.   Or you can lay explosives in the
water and sit on them, letting them  detonate  to throw you and any surrounding
soldiers clean out of the water and into the air, to land on some land mines in
the jungle and explode all over again, or something like that.  And metal pikes
- you can scewer people on them,  you  know.  And what about booby traps, booby
traps are wonderful, really they are.....


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        By now, readers of a parental  inclination will be screaming, "Hang on,
he's missed the chance to discuss the  political issues of the whole debate, by
instead gratuitously swimming in the glammerisd  blood bath of these despicable
gaming horror stories.  This Mr  Jody  Smith  should  be discussing whether the
content of such games is suitable for young, impressionable minds."
        Hmm, well, you've got me on that one,  for sure.  But we can have a go.
Let us look at the two main issues:

GAMES CORRUPT - Stories have emerged that  children playing Doom on their dad's
PC's later rush off into the  play  ground  to  reinact  the game by beating up
class mates, while a newspaper report a while ago detailed one man's mission to
ban DynaBlaster, as he feared it  glammourised terrorist bombings, leaving kids
one step away from plugging their  alarm  clocks  into a stash of baking powder
and doing away with the neighbours.  Are these reports accurate?  Christ knows.

GAMES ARE HARMLESS FUN - We live in ever-increasingly violent times?  Tell that
to your average  8th  century  Anglo  Saxon,  although  I  doubt  he'll  be too
interested.  Especially if a Viking's banging his head against a tree.
        Does seeing a few tiny soldiers  spurt  scarlet pixels all over your TV
screen make photo journalism pictures of war seem any less horrible?  Of course
it doesn't.  Computer games aren't real and  if  you're so determined to go off
on one, with a shotgun, after seeing  the  little  men in Smash TV hit you with
their sticks, then you're obviously so  determined  that watching Tom and Jerry
sock it to each other with wooden planks, while you sit and eat you're Kellog's
Frosted Mega Bombs in the morning,  that  you  are  going  to go off and do it,
anyway.
        Games corrupt the nation's children, do they?  Well I had an Atari 2600
games console from the age of five and look at me.
        No, actually, perhaps that's not such a good example.



        (c)'97 Jody Smith