Shutdown

Posted on 25 Jul 2003 at 11:08

 

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Once upon a time (and what a time it was), I had a mild obsession with shoot 'em up computer games. To be precise, with first-person POV digital ultra-violence.

Well, it wasn't so much a mild obsession as a full-on obsessive-compulsive disorder. Way into the small hours, night after night, fuelled on vodka, I'd fire up Doom II and set off into the game's menacing labyrinths, with only reflexes and whatever weaponry I could find en route to protect me from the numerous vile beasties and mutant enemies who lurked in my path. (I lived alone at the time, which helped.)

For a while, I got stuck in a particular room in Doom's spectacularly nasty Level 8. Whatever I did there, whatever tactics I adopted, I ended up blown to pieces. In fact, 'Level 8' became my metaphor for the Bad Place where, despite your best efforts, you always got shot down. Eventually, with the strategic aid of the wonderful woman who is still, despite her better judgement, my Best Beloved (and a highly useful hint book I managed to lose in Dublin after a demented night of armagnac, Guinness and weed with the late, much-missed Joe Strummer), I finished the game.

Doom done and dusted, we moved on to Duke Nukem 3D. Better graphics, more fully-realised settings, better sound - including elephantine sub-Ah-nuld wisecracks sampled from Bruce Campbell's dialogue in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead III: Army Of Darkness - more sophisticated controls and even more ingeniously gruesome unpleasantness. Two things remained constant, though: you still saw the world from over the barrel of a gun, and you could be certain that every living thing you saw, even the undulating go-go dancers in the bar-room settings, was a deadly enemy out to destroy you. Your only hope of survival lay in blowing the muhfuhs away and generally kicking alien butt. ('I'm here to kick ass and chew gum,' growls Bruce Campbell, 'and I'm all out of gum.' Or words to that effect.)

It may not be true that within every peace-loving green socialist lies a demented misanthropic gun nut just itching to grab a rocket launcher or a pipe bomb and blast the crap out of everything, but for a while it certainly seemed the case with us. Every few nights, we'd huddle and cuddle around the Mac, tool up and get (virtually) homicidal. Not to mention zombiecidal, aliencidal, demoncidal and every other kind of -cidal the Duke designers could dream up.

Then came summer 1999 and the Kosovo war. Real people were getting shot, bombed, blown up and generally dismembered by other real people. Duke Nukem and its ilk just didn't seem like fun any more. Or rather, it seemed like the wrong kind of fun to be having. Overnight, we quit our addiction and found some new hobbies, ending up completely in thrall to Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel, but that's another story.

It still seems highly inappropriate to return to Planet Shoot 'Em Up, even though I have pleasant memories of time spent there in happier, more innocent days. I mean, just take a look around. Open up your paper, flip on the TV news, hit the Net. There's mayhem everywhere and pools of non-virtual gore to wade through on every page (except the ones devoted to happy stuff like the Beckham shenanigans or Big bleedin' Brother). Bruce Campbell's grating, mock-ironic bellicosity ain't funny no more, especially when the US has a real Duke Nukem in the White House: a president you could imagine saying that stuff for real, and an army occupying Iraq behaving as if they've used POV shoot 'em ups as training manuals. Remember: you see the world from over the barrel of a gun, every living thing is a deadly enemy out to destroy you and your only hope of survival lies in blowing the muhfuhs away.