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Top 10 Daily Victims
They came, they saw, they victimized.
By - Dave "Fargo" Kosak

7. Tribes 2 Suicide Pilot Meets His Arch Nemesis


People seem to respond better when I trigger in on games they know and love, so I've written a lot of Tribes 2 victims. Mind you, I like Tribes 2 but I don't play it that often. In fact ... I suck. I'd rather fire up Codename Eagle, where I am a small well-dressed God. But occasionally I'll fire up the game and dream about what it would be like if I was the Mastah. The Tribes 2 Suicide Pilot was just such a character.

I always think it's funny to mix real-life with game-conventions in order to show why the game conventions are ludicrous. For instance, in a real war, you don't respawn. So making a "suicide run" has a lot of heavy connotations -- like the infamous Kamakazi pilots of World War II. But in the game-world, being a suicider can be a career decision.

Take that same character to the extreme and you get victim number 7 here. The best line is "I was gonna kill that bastard even if I lived trying!" Another thing I love to do is mix dumb-ass jokes with highbrow humor, like they used to do with Mystery Science Theatre 3000. "I realized that I was just the Salieri of suicide ... and I had just met my Mozart." How many people are actually gonna get that!? Who cares? Anyways, this is the most recent victim to enter the top 10, which made me happy, since readers have had a lot more discriminating tastes recently.

6. Kid Who Got a Puppy for Christmas ... Instead of Quake 3


This Victim generated a lot of email from us, including a bunch from girls. That's good advice, folks: You want to get chicks? Write about kids and puppies. Anyways, occasionally I write a Victim that's a funny (or even serious) story instead of just "a gag." This victim wasn't laugh-out-loud funny but it was a cool story. I channeled every childhood Christmas I ever had along with fond memories of our family dog, Charlie Brown, into this story and I think people could relate. This Victim stayed in the top five for quite a while.

Puppy-kid has a sequel that's kinda cute, but didn't quite have the same oomph.

5. The Frozen Air-Conditioning Guy


Now we're busting into the top five with the air conditioning guy. It's based off the idea that someone in his office would crank up the air conditioning in order to freeze his deathmatch opponents. (I came up with the idea trying to play Half-Life while freezing my butt off.) Now, in real life, the joke would end there: he'd be found out. But in the world of the Victims, nothing ends until it ends funny. So our victim tries to turn the tables using (I love this phrase) "a complex network of hamster-tubing."

What really makes this victim stand out is that he's one of the many to feature one of the best cameo characters of the bunch: Crenshaw. We've never actually seen Crenshaw. We know he's the type of guy to use other peoples' computers for gaming when they're out of the office, or to tell his son that the gaze of a piggy-bank could turn a man to stone. He's a troublemaker, Crenshaw. And along with The Hippie Gamer Ed he's one of those characters who's totally fleshed out even though he never appears.

Trivia: My absolute favorite Crenshaw cameo was the Salmon Jerky Episode. He appears near the end in a brief scene that, even today, makes me laugh out loud when I get to it. I wish the Salmon Jerky guy had scored higher.

Next: A Very Victim Christmas and Others

   


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