GreyPawn.com

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

Collect Cash, Hire Team, Insert into Dumpster

Tomorrow, a game published by THQ and crafted by Swordfish Studios will come out for the Xbox 360 and Playstaion 3.  The name of the game is “50 Cent, Blood on the Sand”.  I’m not lying, I wouldn’t do that to you, gentle reader.  For confirmation, please visit the following link. http://www.50bloodonthesand.com/us/  Please do not visit that link while you are eating - it may induce projectile vomiting.

First off.  Let’s get the obvious out of the way.  There are no strip clubs in the Middle East.  Second, we have seen these graphics and gameplay before.  It is called Call of Duty.  Third, Saints Row does gang-related action far better.  Fourth, it usually takes a great deal to offend my sensibilities, I’m made of tough stuff, I have to be.  But the towel-head slaughterfest that this game is really doesn’t sit well with me.  No one is a bigger critic of “my own people”, with half my lineage in the country we’ll likely be invading under Palin/Wurzelbacher 2012.  There is literally a screenshot on the site of a guy with his face and head covered in a burka type thing, but he isn’t wearing a shirt.  Rather, he is wearing a crossed “X” strap of bullets on his naked chest.

If you have the stomache to endure the trailer videos, you see “Fitty” is attempting to get his prized diamond encrusted pimp skull back from the towelheads that stole it.  In Grand Theft Auto fashion, he interacts in cut scenes with unscrupulous semi-urban towelheads to find out which towelheads took it, and where they are so he can go blast a cap in their sandy asses.  And blast a cap he does.  In effects stolen wholesale from practically every other FPS since Counterstrike, Fifty Cent goes on a rampage piling up a body count of Middle-Easterners that would make General Petreaus blush.  It is interspersed with random lines of dialogue like “I wants mah skull back!” and “You have whats mine!”.

The levels, if they can be called that, are revisits to the classic “Middle Eastern war-torn village” that you’ve already explored nine THOUSAND FREAKING TIMES in every other FPS set in the mideast.  You know that biege building with the rocket launcher in it?  Yeah, that’s there.  And the cart with the baskets and rolled up persian carpets?  Yup, it makes a guest appearance.  And the bombed out mosque - all of our old favorites!  Oh gosh, I hope the marine helicopter can show up, that way they won’t have to waste any polygons or storyboarding from pointless frikken game to pointless frikken game.

Rest assured there are towelheads that run at your character screaming “FALAFEL!” and “Halamachhgahaghgaaa!” weilding both rocks and fully automatic weapons invariably.

I think the thing that quite possibly burns the most is that the development studio actually got millions of dollars to serve up this steaming pile of cliche’-ridden excrement.  Someone actually went to a pitch meeting, saw the design for this thing and gave it the green light.  They said, “YES, ABSOLUTELY.  I will give you freaks millions of dollars, probably more than 10, to fashion this abortion of a game from the ether.”  Millions of dollars, an entire development team, with hundreds of man hours invested to power the machine that would give birth to this abomination.  Someone tell me, is Paris Hilton in need of a Real-Time Strategy game with her name on it?  Because if this is the sort of tripe that gets studios going, I’m completely willing to sell my soul to the lords of mediocrity that give these things a solid thumbs up.

Shadowrun Online remains to be made.  There are no plans for a Harry Potter MMO.  Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines isn’t likely to see a sequel, ever.