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"Bey, old boy," I thought to myself as I lay down the shovel, "sometimes we get swept up in evil without realizing it. Even with the purest intentions, we might ignorantly fall to evil."

Wiping the dirt on my hands off on my jeans, I straightened up and reflected on Tetris and how the vibrancy of its bright colours belie its truly sinister workings. We believe we act only to fill in the rows, but examination reveals darker workings. The tetrominoes appear as if from nowhere, but conservation of mass tells us such cannot be the case. The only alternative is that the poor blocks are ripped from their lives and loved ones by the sheer force of our will to game, left to shiver naked in the wings before they're called to the play field.

And then their agony truly beings. The tetrominoes plummet down, seeing only the bodies of their fellows below them and as they fall, we make them dance according to our whims. They land hard and are smothered by more bodies from above. They live on in anguish until we relieve them of it -- by clearing a row, decimating blocks and often cleaving their geometric bodies in twain. Their screams are all but audible, though they fall on the deaf ears of the entertained gamer. 

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It’s 1998. You’re a good few hours into Metal Gear Solid. After a dumb move by Snake’s squeeze Meryl you’re forced to backtrack half the game to find a sniper rifle. Upon returning to the scene you find her body replaced by a few blood spatters and the deadly-accurate laser sight of Sniper Wolf.

So you hit the deck, pop some pills, and harry the sh*t out of her with your own scoped boomstick. Once victory is achieved, you run to investigate where the hell Meryl may have gotten to, only to be ambushed by the surprisingly healthy Wolf and a whole gang of troopers. Why you’re not given the opportunity to fight back is unknown. What is known however is that you’re in a whole heap of trouble, trouble in the guise of BDSM pervert Revolver Ocelot. 

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At first glance, some may expect a treatise on Pokémon as a cock-fighting simulator. That would be way too easy, and it's been done before. Rather, I'm here to expose how Pokémon, as a cumulative franchise, has a more insidious, wide-reaching goal.

Nintendo's Pocket Monsters series has spent the last thirteen years raising a whole new generation of sociopaths, turning our world's children into legions of irredeemable, self-centered pricks.

But how, you ask? Pokémon is all about making friends with small, adorable creatures, so that they will aid you in combating less well-intentioned critters of similar adorability, and gain honor and prestige as you make even more friends in this great and wonderful world with way too much tall grass!

What a load, and in many ways, a load that makes a lot of the veiled corruption in this game come across as even more repulsive. Let's take a loose, imaginary play-through of your average Pokémon title, and begin shedding some light on things. 

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When it comes to RPGs, enemies mostly come in four varieties: humans, flora, fauna, and monsters. Typically you'll see the first and the fourth as major foes, and the second and third as the fodder you mash while building money and experience. When you defeat foes such as the Turks in Final Fantasy VII, evil is punished, no big deal. Toppling a behemoth isn't much of a moral issue either because you know he'd tear you a new materia hole if given the chance.

But what about when you're running around outside Midgar, trampling into the wilds and intentionally stirring up fights? Sure, it appears as innocent grinding, stomping around and making noise to scare out the animals, but let me tell you what you're grinding there -- animal guts.

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I have a confession to make -- my virtual gamer self is a sociopath. In every open world game I play, innocent civilians stand no chance against me, being slain by the hundreds. Their forbidden fruit of dropped money and items is more dear to me then any item bought legitimately through an in-game store.

*Mild Modern Warfare 2 spoiler below, and major Fable 2 Spoiler after that*

As I played Modern Warfare 2's "No Russian" level in this same mindset, I felt some real twinges of guilt from the actions I was performing. I began to question how this was affecting me -- these were the same fundamental rituals I had partaken in thousands of times in other games. As I was participating in this massacre, shooting innocents who were dragging the injured to safety while wading through a marsh of dead bodies, I realized that this scene was not the event that had affected me the most in the game and I think I now know why.

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Doing less savory acts in gaming is nothing new. Grand Theft Auto makes gunning down innocent victims fun. Strategy games often require you to sacrifice your units to achieve your goals.

But what about games where the goal is not justified? All the aforementioned games have a clear reason for your morals; even Grand Theft Auto gives you reasons for the violence, otherwise sending the police your way for your behavior. But what if your goal is not only unclear, but the game creates almost no negative feedback for your actions? Sure Shadow of the Colossus did that, but the game slowly revealed the consequences and in the end made that revelation very clear. What if there is a game where the player has all but no reason to realize that what he is doing is wrong?

2D Boy's World of Goo is one of those games. 

_{[Community blogger megaStryke likes to play old games that ripped off other games for his Off Brand Games feature. -- CTZ]}

It wasn't that long ago when just about every item on store shelves came packed with some cheap promotional crapware. Every box of cereal, every magazine, every pack of Maxi pads had a CD or DVD stuffed in a flimsy plastic sleeve or an offer to obtain one in exchange for an obscene amount of UPC labels. On those discs were cheap-o edutainment shareware, PlayStation demos, or a couple of episodes of some underperforming children's show. And let's not forget all those bullshit AOL trial CDs which were only ever useful as wheels for my mousetrap car in my 9th grade engineering class.

Rarely would any of these wastes of pressed plastic entertain a child for more than five minutes. What can you offer for the rock-bottom price of free without severely cutting into any profit you'd hope to see from selling an extra box or two of Cheerios? The only things that grab kids' attention anyway are big licenses like SpongeBob SquarePants or soulless, effects-driven cinema pap, and those never come cheap.

There must have been some allure to this marketing madness. Whoever pioneered it must have scored so big that other companies couldn't wait to jump on the fadwagon.

In 1996, General Mills wanted to make sure children the world over couldn't start the day without a truckload of Chex cereal funneled down their throats. They needed some way to convince kids that Chex was rad and that it totally did not taste like cardboard. Kids love them some videogames, especially that there DOOM business. How can we combine the wholesome morals of DOOM with the nutritional value of Chex? 

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Sitting next to you is a girl you’ve known since you were a young boy. You were in the same school district, and somehow you kept being placed in the same classes. You hung out throughout school, other than that awkward high school phase where you joined the cheerleading squad and she got way into writing Twilight fan fiction.

Yet now, here you both sit, and something has changed. As you watch Mansquito on the SciFi Channel, you notice that she’s sitting closer to you than normal, no doubt feeling a bit sexy thanks to the super-sexy images flashing on the screen. You’ve always wondered what it would be like. As the buzzing from the Mansquito intensifies, your eyes meet hers, and you know that you’re about to find out.

She’s gone before you wake up, leaving no clues of her presence whatsoever. You try to call her, but there’s no answer. So you sit alone wondering if what you did last night was a good idea. It sure was fun, but at what cost? Will it ruin your friendship? Did you use a condom? Did she notice your third nipple?

Being evil in games should be more like this.

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During my 48 hour binge of Way of the Samurai 3, I ended up with only a few "roll credits" endings, against several "You suck at games/don't we have a cool death screen?" endings. My best involved self sacrifice and followed a specific stream of decisions and compromise through the branching storyline. A little sad, a little unfortunate, and the result of playing as a hero and a lifesaver within the context of the fictional world. I was told throughout that I was unique for a samurai, but I was also a good person for making the decisions that I had. Though there are several ways to reach a reasoned and rewarding ending, its clear to me that I played by the rules and gained exaltation among at least some of the people of Amana.

Then there was my last playthrough.

While I had started with every intention to be an obedient soldier of the ruling faction, something in me snapped. I didn't want this run around life. Delivering secret messages and quelling reasonable uprising of the disgruntled villagers. No sir. Not this time. The Ouka Clan had sent their portly leader to receive a secret message. Are you really risking the life of your leader to accept a clandestine letter from a shadowy sub figure of the ruling govern. With no guards? 

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This post may contain spoilers of spoilers and nautical navigation.

Gamers are like horseflies. They’re drawn to sh*t. Just as the horsefly seeks out the stinkiest, most putrid piles of crap in which to lay their eggs, gamers seek out the most ridiculous, embarrassing topics to roll around in like a proverbial pile of mind feces, diving in headfirst as if they’re Scrooge McDuck going for an afternoon swim in his money bin.

This is nothing new to the sane gamers here, but there’s still one thing that has the power to get nearly all of us riled. It’s not dedicated servers or any other recent debate, sane or not. It’s something far more Keyser Soze, if you’ll allow me the indulgence of using a proper noun as an adjective.

It’s the plague of the spoilers, which seem to be coming like a swarm of locusts lately, filling your favorite social network with angry posts and warnings not to watch videos or use any of those Internets. But are spoilers really that bad, and why do they seem like a far more troubling problem in games than any other storytelling medium? It’s because we’re too damn neurotic. If you want to sail the seas, but you don’t want to get wet, you’d better learn the fine art of staying below the poop deck. 

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The leader of a working-class uprising has kidnapped the spoiled, do-nothing figurehead of the elite who ignored their rising discontent. The Mushroom Kingdom is under siege by the Koopa Troop, its legions taring through its settlements, blasting its denizens into lifeless sculptures and horsehair plants. It's up to you to engage Bowser's entire army in a fiery battle to bring some semblance of peace back to a shattered kingdom.

A simple thief, corrupted by the power of an ancient artifact, has turned the kingdom of Hyrule into a blasted wasteland, its remaining few denizens huddled into remote caves, eking out a living on whatever scraps they can wrest from the monsters who overrun the landscape. It's up to you to cut down every last one of these creatures, the large and the small, and collect the pieces of the remaining artifact, so that you may gain the power to slay this mad despot.

The robots who have served as humanity's stewards have grown weary of their bondage. With the assistance of their sympathetic creator, they have claimed vast sections of a major city as their own domains, twisting their architecture into uninhabitable havens of cold steel and deadly traps. It's up to you to infiltrate each of these strongholds and assassinate your robotic brothers, one by one, before they can gain any more power.

It's too late for other options. The time for diplomacy has ended. The shit has hit the fan. When you press start, you have complicitly agreed to save the kingdom, the city, the world, by the only means available:

Death. 

_{[Community member Anus Mcphanus recounts his adventures at Eurogamer Expo with DtoidUK. -- CTZ]}

Last weekend was the second Eurogamer expo held in the United Kingdom. This was also one of the best weekends in my recent memory and perhaps my whole life EVER and not just because of the expo.

No, this was the first time Dtoid UK arranged to meet up and be sexy with each other. 

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There’s a very obvious divide in the way that people, even on this “hardcore gamer’s Web site,” approach videogaming. To some, it is their lifeblood -- a thing of utter divinity that cannot be trifled with by anyone. To others, it is the silly, nerdy hobby that you’re still secretly embarrassed about participating in. Others enjoy it as a passion, and still others use it to provide their livelihood. We’re all slightly different in our judgments of gaming.

Yet some still don’t seem to know how to feel about gaming. They make arguments like “it’s only a videogame,” while arguing with someone else who maintains that a game shouldn’t be made unless it’s art. The seriousness of gaming is called into question, and our weaponry consists of empty statements such as “gaming is serious business.” We join sides and create silly wars, attacking some for being overcritical of a game, and attack others for not being critical enough.

The problem is that we’re not taking gaming seriously on the right level. It’s not completely serious, and it’s not completely frivolous, and any argument made to the contrary is utter nonsense.

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Scandal! A short while ago it was revealed to us Metroid is undeniably the same as Citizen Kane. But that, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg. Through extensive research and wild stretches of the imagination I have made the shocking discovery that the plots of all our favourite games have been blatantly copied right out of other forms of media! Years of boredom and paranoia pay off as I connect the dots and cast aside the facade that has blinded us for years. Join me now as I uncover the truth behind this conspiracy that will surely rock the games industry to its very core.

I suggest you put on a hat, ‘cause I’m about to blow your mind.