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Tuesday, September 17, 2013

GTA-Free Is The Way To Be

By RAWKHAWK2010 - (Not to be confused with "GTA: Free", the Zynga spinoff.)

As many of you lads may already know, I'm a drug-and-alcohol-free individual. This means I have no interest in stealing cars, robbing banks, or killing people. This also means I have no interest in playing Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto V

"But Rawk!", you may internally exclaim. "This gives you an opportunity to do all those uncouth things virtually that you can't do in real life!"

That's a compelling argument, and has been the major selling point of this series since its conception. Just like sniffing a cousin's perfume gives a hopeless Alabamian his fill of sexy female pheromones that he may never otherwise get (but nothing further because KoopaTV doesn't condone cousin-fucking), playing Grand Theft Auto gives a law-abiding citizen his or her fix of unscrupulous criminal violence. However, it's not that I can't do the aforementioned series' featured activities in real life. It's just that I'm...highly encouraged to refrain from doing so.

And that's the thing. I want to do things in video games that I literally can't do. Not things that I can do but would just go to jail for. The only reason even robbing banks or killing people seems appealing in the real world is because of the real-life "risk" associated with it. When I extracted an Elemental HERO Absolute Zero from its manga bindings at Barnes & Noble, I didn't do it for the card (I wasn't even running an Elemental HERO deck -- I was still trying to be the first duelist to ever do something viable with Vehicroids!). I did it for the act itself, knowing full well the operation could go pear-shaped any second and that the resulting consequences could be dire (even if I was a minor at the time...if only by days). So what does it mean in Grand Theft Auto when the biggest "consequence" of, say...investing in V's new stock market is that you might have to go rob a bank to compensate for poorly-placed funds? When there's nothing at stake and no risk to be had, an otherwise high-energy experience just becomes unauthentic and mundane.

To keep the experience "real", Rockstar thought they'd hire actual real gang members to do voice-acting for the game.
(We at KoopaTV would never do that. We prefer to voice our own thugs.)

Now let me be clear; I'm not a biased man. I don't think there's anything inherently more fun about saving a video game city than fucking one up. Beaming your consciousness into a hero (a real hero) can be just as boring as when done for one of GTA's barbaric heathens, especially if the hero limits his repertoire to what's compatible with our world and our world only. But what if this hero isn't like that? What if playing the role of this hero (or...heroes!) allows you to look beyond your trivial real-life whimsies so that new, fantastical desires can be born within you for the first time? Desires you never even knew could exist?

Enter Platinum Games' The Wonderful 101, the game that allows you to unite
your various dudes to save humanity in the most wonzafully wonzaful of ways.

(...like deflecting giant alien robot ammunition with a well-timed manifestation of GELATIN MOLD.)

See, deflecting giant alien robot ammunition with a well-timed manifestation of gelatin mold is a prime example of something I can't do in real life, and I honestly can't think of any way I could kill a dude in a Grand Theft Auto game that would come even close to being as interesting or fun. What am I gonna do, shoot him? Careen into him with a greyhound bus? Yeah, booooring. To give one of many examples, The Wonderful 101 (in stores now!) allows you to Unite Morph your entire Mass-Hero Action Unit into a giant whip that a pink-haired kawaii desu ne Russian dominatrix will then haul ass with — a scenario hot enough to give even Mother Teresa an erection. (On that note, too bad Grand Theft Auto V is a total sausage-fest.)

With you now aware that this game will satisfy fetishes you never even knew you had (jello and human whips being only two of them), you should also know that 101 has the most badass seven-minute trailer of all times and that it's designed by Hideki Kamiya, the dude responsible for franchises like Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, Bayonetta, and pretty much every other 3D action game worth playing. (His Twitter alone is more entertaining than anything that could possibly happen in a Grand Theft Auto game and you should totally follow it.)

If a gang member approached Kamiya for a voice-acting gig, he'd tell them the same thing.

Final word: There's a world of fantastical possibilities being ignored because of the industry's fixation with sterile-y replicating reality. Don't demand sterile replications of reality! Demand anything but that and give your true cravings an opportunity to be revealed! (Revealed to...yourself, of course. ...And then others if you're comfortable with that!)


Some people just want to watch a real-life world burn (boring!), but buying The Wonderful 101 can ensure you don't become one of them. Share your own thoughts (righteous or not) with RawkHawk2010 on Miiverse or Twitter!


For a more industry-oriented perspective of why GTAV isn't good, have fun with this article.
Rawk isn't actually a drug-and-alcohol-free individual.

2 comments :

  1. Missed opportunity: Make a direct comparison between "Rockstar Games" and "Platinum Games".

    ReplyDelete
  2. By the way, I see a contradiction between your liking of Activision's Tony Hawk series and the message of this article.

    ReplyDelete

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