GAMES

Project: Snowblind
Genre: Future War Shooter
Platform: PS2
Developer: Crystal Dynamics
Published by: Eidos

This is much like every other first person war shooter to ever exist except in this one they've come up with all these NEW! FUTURISTIC! ways to kill your enemies. KAZOOOWY!

Eschewing the too-serious vibe of games like Killzone, PS has a half-human, half-Robocop hero called Nathan Frost who has X-ray vision, a tight-fitting blue PVC suit and a device that makes everything slow right down so you can shoot it easier. You also get these great "Flechette" guns that can possess your enemies with an alien lifeform that tortures their souls to a slow, choking death.

So the game's fun, but absolutely nothing like I thought it was going to be after being told I was being chosen to review a game called Snowblind by my editor i.e., something to do with sniffing and smoking so much cocaine that you end up like the Black Sabbath song "Snowblind", i.e., with a frozen throat and fire in the heart and evil in the soul. There are similarities though, because just like cocaine, these shoot-'em-ups provide pretty much exactly the same experience right down to the nail every time but still people gobble them up.

Maybe it's the comfort of predictability that makes people go crazy by being addicted to things like first-player shoot-'em-ups or things like cocaine, booze and all the bad stuff that follow when you're totally enslaved by them. Things like financial hardship, physical injury, the inability to hold down relationships, crushing depression, paranoia, self-harm and becoming obsessed with suicidal tendencies—the feelings AND the band. It's like if you get a couple of grammes in one night then it's nine times out of ten likely that three days later you'll be picking up the pieces of some relationship thing turned sour because of a cocaine bad decision. Usually the easiest way to rid yourself of the troublesome guilt these problems bring you is to climb on top of the white pony again and take it for a ride round town, thereby further injuring your relationship and deepening your paranoia, and money problems. Another thing. Why does the name ‘Nathan' always come up when there's things about cocaine on discussion. Do you know what I mean? How many times have you done cocaine with somebody called Nathan? Loads. Do you think it's a coincidence that the main character of Snowblind is called Nathan? The other Nathan you can associate with coke is the protagonist of that new Nathan Barley programme made by Chris Morris and Charlie Booker who did Brass Eye and Tvgohome.com respectively. The problem with that show is there isn't ENOUGH cocaine in Nathan's life to make it funny. All those magazine / media / internet people that the programme purports to satirise, take cocaine literally every day of their lives. The bottom rung of the media ladder is made out of cocaine. And that's why so many people stay stuck at the bottom for their whole lives, because they like rubbing their noses against it and licking it. Climbing up to the next rung is hard because they can't get out of bed till 2 P.M.

Really, all the sad little sordid bullshit that cocaine makes them do is far funnier than all the stuff they put in that programme. Why, for example, wasn't there a character who's in his late-20s but can only get an erection ten seconds before he cums and then only after whacking off to choking porn while one of his stable of female coke whores licks his ass five times a week while his BOYfriend stays at home smoking weed (true story).

What about somebody who's so into coke that at weekends he does things like taking his fancy camera to flea-ridden crackdens where he lays down £200 he doesn't have on rocks and ends up trying to bribe the 45-year-old crackhead couple who own the flat into having sex so he can film it and maybe put it online (true story). And how about filming those 45 seconds when they're all exhaling crack and actually thinking about the group sex internet thing being a good idea because they're all so totally crazy and fucked by crack? On TV, that'd actually be a lot funnier than all the stuff in that wasted-opportunity programme about webcams and guerrilla flyposting, and bad music jokes.

So the the other link I managed to come up with was that this game is over waay too soon and leaves you wanting more and feeling kind of silly for having wasted a day engrossed in it to the exlusion of everything else.

SOMEBODY WHO DID TOO MUCH COKE AND WENT CRAZY

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