Reliable Source: Sex, Drugs and PETA

What games are you playing these days?
–Monshroud

I won’t lie, last week I spent a great deal of time playing Dragon Age; maybe too much time, in fact. Originally, I was going to write about how I escaped from a terrorist training camp on the border of Afghanistan by teaching the terrorists how to love America and Scribblenauts. But you won’t be reading any of that adventure-filled tale thanks to a friend who, knowing my weakness for multiple choice dialog trees, bought me BioWare’s RPG Dragon Age. So I blame him for getting me addicted to this game, and for making me fall in love.

Let me explain: If you’re man, you’re probably like me and have a habit of picking a female character without giving too much consideration to the consequences. General consensus amongst men is that if you’re staring at someone’s backside for 90 percent of the game, it might as well be a sexy back. (You may thank me for not making a Justin Timberlake reference here.) Even inferring that sex was a big part of Dragon Age from watching the commercials, I continued down this disastrous path. If press releases were to be believed, I suspected that I would eventually be able to “get it on” in a ménage-a-trois with the game’s two female leads, and perhaps a goat, all while listening to Marilyn Manson. But the truth became much more apparent as I played the game.

This is no sex simulator disguised as an RPG! And even though I was suitably outraged, I started to find myself more and more enraptured with the interactions between my buxom elfin archer and Alistair, the goofy cornball knight. He is one of those characters that it’s hard not to like, and I started to find myself hoping that he would get the girl. Woe unto me when I realized that the girl was me! And, even though I was aware of this, I found myself hoping that he’d pull me close and make me forget all about the Darkspawn, the regular betrayals and endless collection quests. Oh, Alistair! I know it’s not meant to be, but don’t leave me; tell me everything is going to be alright!

But not everything is alright. The game is nearly over, and I’ve been so enraptured by my relationship with Alistair that I’ve somehow overlooked my main mission to convince my female traveling companions to have a lesbian three-way. I take solace in knowing that BioWare has just released a toolset, and I expect it’ll be a week before someone creates a Dragon Age orgy mod. God bless you, good sirs.

I feel funny, like that time when Logan Westbrook got drunk and massaged my thigh, telling me what a good friend I was before passing out on the barroom floor. Therefore, I will balance these strange feelings by spending the entirety of next week on Xbox Live, reaffirming my masculinity in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 through the creative use of pejoratives and questioning of the sexual orientation of particularly terrible players.

Read on for news about Peter Molyneux’s new job, 8-bit bankruptcy, and PETA’s potential push into gaming.

The world’s largest 8-bit merchandise retailer filed for bankruptcy last Thursday. The move comes shortly after the company posted massive losses due to slow sales. Some analysts suggest that the closing may be at least partially due to nation-wide nostalgia malaise.

The nostalgia buying demographic breaks down into four distinctive groups. Around 40 percent of retro-merchandise buyers are 30-somethings misremembering how great their childhoods were. 20 percent are teenagers who have appropriated Japanese culture in hopes of fitting in. The remaining percent are grandmothers who thought those Space Invaders socks would be the perfect gift for a grandchild who love games.

Significant losses in the first two demographics would mean that retro-stores have to tailor advertisement campaigns largely to the uninformed grandparent demographic. Already, online stores are starting to see knitted Mario iBook covers and Halo 3 key rings and an assortment of other stuff that no one really wants.

What is even worse is that nostalgia markets are closely linked to the multi-billion dollar U.S. irony industry. This leads to another crisis: what exactly do you do with a warehouse full of T-shirts featuring Mickey Mouse flipping the bird?

Things may not be going so well for Microsoft’s creative director, Peter Molyneux. It seems that the once-lauded creator of Fable has taken a second job as a group marriage counselor for newlyweds and engaged couples.

Footage of a counseling session that showed up on YouTube this week shows Molyneux bursting out of a wedding cake and then giving a lecture, including lessons in courtship through dancing dogs, farting and pies, as well as maintaining a healthy marriage by paying blackmailers to keep your spouse from hearing about that whore you married in another town.

“In my game, Fable, you could plant a tiny acorn and return years later to see it grow into a tree,” Molyneux mused. “Marriage is like that tiny acorn. If you plant that seed, someday your relationship will bloom into a sturdy oak.” One participant at the seminar was quick to point out that Molyneux had promised an acorn in Fable, but never actually delivered. At that point, Molyneux suddenly ran out of the convention center weeping, blubbering something about suddenly realizing why his first marriage failed.

A PETA representative has revealed that the oft-controversial animal rights group is rethinking its strategy for a game they had been working on as its answer to animal hunting games such as Cabela’s Big Game Hunter.

Richard Ding, lead producer on the project, told Reliable Source, “We wanted to create a game where people are the ones being hunted and gamers are exposed to the plight of animals. During playtesting, however, we quickly learned that testers actually had less compunction killing people than animals.”

Mr.Ding continued, “This is problematic because we gave players the choice between cutting a nun in half with a bonesaw and shooting an endangered manatee, and nearly all players chose the former. This leads us to believe that our time would have been better spent simply making a game where players are forced to shoot unrealistically cute animals, in hopes that they will feel guilty and change their perceptions on how they treat animals.”

An updated, version of Bunny Genocide will be available soon for the Wii and Xbox360. Sorry, PS3 owners; if you want to be lectured by sophistic game designers, you will have to turn on Metal Gear Solid 4 instead.

Marion Cox is a weekly contributor, and you can follow his adventures in Dragon Age here.