Month: June 2009

Even if you aren’t a geek you should at least look at these games for the unique and pure humor

The first is called Violence: The RPG of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed (careful, the link goes to a PDF document)

i love that title!

“Violence is ostensibly an RPG about playing thugs, thieves, and serial killers as you break into homes, kill the inhabitants, and take their treasure.”

you see, the game was designed as a parody of “hack and slash” gaming where the players simply wipe out everything they see. or as the back of the book says,

“Excessive is not enough to describe Violence. Bad taste doesn’t even get close. This is role-playing’s answer to the snuff movie.”

bullshit like that is why a lot of people are turned off to RPG’s. they hear some smelly geek shriek with his ear-piercing and jarring falsetto breaking pubescent voice “i slayed an elfin warlord! Excelsior!” and immediately think… lame.

well yes, that is lame in the highest caliber. and this game makes fun of that. only diference really is that in Violence, you play in modern times and choose from gangsters, cops, or psychotic killers as classes. and they are all rolled up the same, so how you turn out is really up to you and your own hidden psychosis’ in how you play the character.

the humor is layed on pretty thick by the game designer, a eurotrash brit who calls himself ‘Designer X’ ooOOoo! sneaky!

for an idea of how this game works…
“Consider Frank Miller’s Sin City and Batman: Year One, or the movies Pulp Fiction, The Big Hit, La Femme Nikita, The Professional, El Mariachi, any movie by Quentin Tarantino or John Woo, and so on. You get criminals, cops, guns, and victims together, and suddenly you have a plot.”

see? you’ve seen those movies… you wondered what it would be like to be that bloodthirsty. don’t deny yourself. embrace your sick imagination.

moving on towards a less violent but equally disturbing game…
the winner of the 2002 Indie RPG Award for Best Free Game…

Nicotine Girls

as the website says,
“nicotine girls is a roleplaying game of teenage, lower-income girls looking for happiness.”

wow.

First off, the game is free. you don’t have to pay for it, you don’t even have to download it. the rules are like 2 pages in length. you can simply cut and paste the text into MS Word.

Second, the point of the game is thus: pretend to be a 16-19 year old girl with the goal of attaining “your dreams.”

whatever that means. i know some dudes who would interpret this into the sickest thing you would ever hear of.

i think the best part is how the characters manipulate the game world, get what they want and attain their dreams…
you use four attributes that they refer to as “Methods”

1) Sex: should be obvious. girls use sex and the promise of sex or the implication of sex in the future to get what they want.

2) Money: this should also be obvious. a girl needs money to get shit, right? and she can simply use her Sex stat to get money in a variety of ways.

3) Cry: i hate it when girls cry. nothing paralyzes me in fear more than some poor chick balling her eyes out.

4) Smoke: i think this is the coolest RPG idea EVER. if you have to make a decision, you can opt for a Smoke Break and ask for advice from other characters as to a course of action.

there is some more to it than that, but not much. and the Fear list is quite humorous. at least to me.

i think Nicotine Girls was made about almost every single girl i went to high school with. and, by extension, every girl in high schools everywhere. well, at least the bad ones.