By Michelle Perez
I’d given too many damn cigarettes out to dudes at work who’d never return the favor in kind. These swine have no common decency to reciprocate favors. Except Ruiz. Ruiz is 11 feet tall, weighs 250 pounds and has probably killed four men in his lifetime. He has a tattoo of Jesus on his left breast and a detailed El Camino on his back. Every day he places tiny disk batteries in the LED implants in his back, so it looks like the car has ‘neons’. He says this is for sexual appeal, and that he is “doin’ big things’.
One day I save an especially juicy idea for Ruiz. See if he can chew it down and swallow it. It’s a multiplayer game with a hard backbone in single player storytelling. He doesn’t bat an eyelash. He’s seen the ‘Nam, he’s been to the pen, and he voted Ralph Nader against his better judgement a few times.
“GO ON,” he says, the muscles in his neck tensing.
I explain that it’s multi-platform and cross-platform across every actual platform. The java-script dumb phone users make up the majority of the low-tier player characters, the smart-phone and tablet users exist as a training method for the PC users and upon successful completion of the first four tiers of training the PC users unlock a custom steampunk AK-47 emblazed with a tribal black and white color scheme. The smart phone users can only have access to Death-Streaks. Throughout the duration of the match, the Wii users can watch the events therein atop a roller coaster, never actually participating. Instead, they take artifact ridden images of the battle below with a few million less polygons and a severely reduced draw distance. It makes the largely censored images of violence below look like something between a screen saver and sub-par fireworks display through foggy glasses.
The Xbox guys make up the bulk of the regular ground forces, often doing their damndest to make sure everyone is quite aware of the fact they’re 12, have an intricate knowledge of the Halo Lore and that at some point you’ll feel like the victim of a hate crime should you dare to speak in their vicinity using the new Kinect headset. In no uncertain terms, this game will be a bloodbath at every hour of the game. To ensure immersion within the game’s immense storyline based in real-world events, we’ve made sure that there will always be about 1300 PS3 users blaring Slipknot into their headsets in RP-Enforced Zones. Should you feel the need to switch your PS2 save onto the Linux platform (as is often the case for our Premium Users) you’ll do it with ease due to our new cloud computing software. I told Ruiz it was important to me to really have a user invested in a 652-player Open World Role-Based Capture the Flag round which would determine which faction would receive a 24 hour Double XP boost brought to you by MTN Dew. He nodded in sad acknowledgement that people can forget that sometimes.
I wanted him to imagine a future military platformer with moral consequences and choices that’d affect the randomly generated dungeons where you could share your achievements with friends on Facebook! No playthrough is the same unless after you prestige, you choose Elite Access for only fifteen dollars a month. The usual froth of my litany didn’t escape Ruiz’s attention for a single moment. “Well, what about the paywalls? If you don’t enforce the gated community mentality of microtransactions supporting the platforms, you’ll lose them, you’ll lose them all to Kingdom Hearts 4 online!”
“You save your prattling for some plebeian with too few synaptic fibers, Ruiz. I’m talking about the revolution! The Ron Paul Revolution. This game will cut the Department of Education, the Department of Homeland Security and a provision of our mandatory Three Year Subscription includes Goofy and Donald Duck as NPC companionship unless EA has the stones to buy the license out from under us!”
“What do you mean, companionship?” asked Ruiz.
“I mean once you’ve established a relationship and you’ve invested three months of time in our new post-cataclysm zones you can engage in sexual relations with a primarily family-friendly digital likeness of a beloved Disney character; but not before you’ve talked to your squadmates about the validity of inter-species polyamorous relationships.”
The supervisor came around the corner and said it was time to clock out. We gathered our things and met outside for a final cigarette.
“I ain’t never made love to no duck before,” he began. “But let’s say we get past that. What the hell would I be doing to Goofy? Is he… you know, strictly speaking here, an animal?”
“The hell if I know!” I told him. “As long they pay their 300 dollars, I don’t have to know.”
