Close Range (The Onion Parody)

Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face

The Onion News Network (basically The Onion's video section) released a video, "demo", and poster for its fake video game, Close Range. The game consists of nothing but shooting people point blank in the face, along with some horses and ostriches to mix things up. The video is basically a parody of the gaming industry's typically shallow, awfully-written, super-violent AAA titles.

I was planning on writing an editorial for BlogCritics asking why there aren't really many funny games any more, and the underlying problem there is that no games have good writing. Killzone 2's dialogue is basically a random mixture of "Holy Shit!" "Whoa!" and "What the-!" over and over, with no interesting, well, anything, writing-wise. Yet, it is likely the top-reviewed and purchased game this year. The Grand Theft Auto series is better (I haven't tried Chinatown Wars) but still not up to any real writing standards.

Why do games have awful writing? Because critics don't care and consumers don't care. You will virtually never see a mainstream video game review take points off on a game for having retarded dialogue or scenes or writing. The Metal Gear Solid series is probably the best-written of major game series, and critics are more likely to complain about the story and writing than admire it, because it's not extremely well-executed either (endless information dumped in one monologue over and over, almost pretentiously confusing as Japanese storylines tend to be in my experience, jarring silly moments that also tend to be in Eastern storylines in my experience). Anyway, if we ever want to really claim that games are art, we seriously need to improve the writing. Games can already look amazing, and they are rewarded for doing so by critics, but there is currently no impetus for engaging storylines.