Hello Wargamer folks,

I was referred here yesterday and it looks like a pretty cool site. I enjoy writing and I think I'm just going to jump right in with something I finished now. 

I wasn't sure exactly where to post something like this, so I'm just putting it here in General. It's sort of half character narrative, half AAR (mostly narrative in this first part, will get get AAR in subsequent updates though). This is the story of the worst game reviewer in the world and his review/horrifically incompetent playthrough of Hearts of Iron III. This is a work of comedy and "The Wargamer" as it appears here is a fictional depiction which (I hope!) bears very little resemblance to the real version. If you've read the columnists' work at Cracked.com, the style should be familiar.

Also, I have done a bit of reading around to try to find the general atmosphere on here, but if I need to tone this down at all just let me know. Hope you enjoy!

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Dawn broke upon me like a half-empty bottle of vodka as I awoke in my usual place on the floor underneath a desk at the Wargamer office. I rolled onto my back, moaning and clawing at the light. My skull throbbed with the mother of all hangovers, as if she and her two morbidly obese stepsons were having a cage match inside, and then a glass bottle had fallen onto the cage.

The tremors set in hard, coinciding curiously with the shaking being administered by one of my co-workers. "Jenkins," I spat, clutching at the hem of his shirt and lurching up into a sitting position with all the grace and poise of a Parkinson's patient's marionette show. Then I spat at Jenkins some more. He backed off and pushed my clawing hands away with well-practiced ease and the usual sounds of disgust.

I collapsed to the floor in yet another of my long line of spats with Newtonian physics, hitting the ground like a double amputee on a unicycle. "Why, why, why have you you disturbed me in my hour of rest?" I slurred (just sheer habit by now). "I used to be taking a nap until I..."

"Please, just...just stop," interrupted Jenkins fatly with his lard-inflected voice. I glared from the floor at his overweight ankles, rolls of fat muffin-topping over his shoes. "I am only here to deliver a message from Ed. and I intend to have no further interaction with you than is strictly necessary to do that," he went on, in between garglings of chicken, grease dripping down his face in a Kentucky Fried Fu Manchu. The rebuke stung like stale vodka on freshly-made cuts from broken glass. "Your Hearts of Iron review is three days past due and you either deliver it by the end of the day or you lose your job."

"First of all, I will be not be addressed as 'you,' but by my proper title," I said, rising to my feet and indicating the regalia safety-pinned to my lapel.

"Secondly," I said secondly, after pausing for a second to ponder which number came second, "My review can't possibly be that late as three days have not even eloped since I was given this task."

Jenkins' fleshy, bloated eyelids jiggled and quaked with the rolling of the eyes within. "I don't respect titles of nobility that you find for yourself on the Internet. In fact, I don't think I respect anything about you. Literally everything that's happened up to now has been a waste of my time and everyone else's," he hammed, growing a little bit fatter in my eyes with every piggishly-spoken word. "And that article was due Monday."

"Today is Monday."

"No, it is not. It's 4:00 and it's Thursday," said the hambeast.

I seamlessly transitioned to Plan B. "I couldn't review the game, I was given a faulty disc - someone else's fault!" I said, waving the CD in front of the blob's face.

"Your disk is all scratched up," said Jenkins the Hutt. "Have you made any attempt at cleaning it?"

"All my cleaning fluid is gone," I said, plucking the empty bottle from the strategically positioned clutter of beer cans on my desk.

"...And whose fault is that?"

"Probably some asshole's," I said, staring daggers into Jenkins' stupid eyes.

"I agree. But for the love of God, stop pointing those dirks at my face!" blubbered the land whale, backed up to a wall. 

I sheathed the blades within my sleeves again, pondering the thief's modus operandi and absentmindedly scratching at the shiny plastic. I choked back a noxious alcohol burp with a bizarrely detergent-tinged aftertaste. "So Ed., out of his extensiveness of his generosity, has extended me the courtesy of an extension," I said after an extended pause.

A vein bulged in Fat Jenkins' temple. "If this keeps coming up as a running joke, I'm going to take my own life," he sighed, too fat for the fourth wall. "Get it in by tomorrow."

"That's what she..."

"That's not even the Hearts of Iron CD!" said Jenkins, cutting me off. I made a mental note to return him the favor one day. With dirks. "That game is direct download. You're just a slothful idiot."

"Classic red herring," I said, having finally learned the correct use of term (i.e. not dyeing someone's hair with Kool-Aid in their sleep).

"Just get it done."

"No worries," I said, pointing to my badge. "The Duke abid..."

"You're an asshole," said Jenkins, storming off like the world's fattest hurricane (Andrew? Floyd?). I tossed Braveheart 2 - Brave Hearter aside and sat down, quietly fuming as I started dusting the crust off of my keyboard. Jenkins, there's always a Jenkins. A stupid incompetent useless Jenkins. And Ed, that son of a bitch Ed with his red pen. I can't wait for the day I actually find that cretin named Ed in person...

I  poured a shot of A&W into my sawn-off sippie cup. Nothing more calming than absinthe and whiskey at work. I opened up the game, my resolution restored. I was going to review the pants off this game or drink myself to death trying. Or...at least make it past the loading screen or die trying. 

"Who's the corpse responsible for this?" I moaned five minutes and five shots later, still staring at a 'Creating The World' screen. I didn't time to wait for a creation with a biblical timescale. Curse Ed! Curse Jenkins! May they writhe forever in a Hell of Snakes!

Finally! I celebrated my conquest of the loading screen by blowing an air horn until it was just an empty can and triple-chugging A&W. I took note of the onscreen options, rejecting the tutorial on principle. I had just moved up from travel chess to Hungry Hungry Hippos: Chosin Reservoir Edition in my last review, and I'd be damned if I wasted my time with a learning mode for the gaming world's McClellans. "Nazi time," I said, choosing Germany....

To Be Continued

Still around. You should take a look at some of the Cracked.com columnists' works, Brockway and DOB and Seanbaby. They are the great gods of metaphorical clusterbombing. It might kill you. This is an experiment in combining that style of drunken insanity with an AAR...and I'm liking what I've done so far.

Here's an excerpt from Brockway:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/a-detective-yarn-so-clever-it-makes-angela-lansbury-look-like-a-god-damn-mongoloid/

The Boss and his boy sat down across from me on the scarred vinyl of the dive's age-beaten booth. A patina of scratches cut through the cheap Diner plastic like craggy canyons on some desolate, empty desert. Plus when you moved on them, sometimes it made a fart sound.

"Who's the muscle?" I asked The Boss, downing my drink in one go. I flagged the waitress for another. The headaches were killing me; I should cut back on this crap.

"This is Harold Muntz. He's with Human Resources. Normally in a situation like this, he would explain the complaints against you and what company policies they violate, but I think he's pretty much going to start from the ground up and explain the basic concept of morality and what Deadly Sins you violate."

"We've actually met before, Mr. Brockway. Every single day since we hired you, actually," Muntz's dim stare glimmered with potential violence.

"Man like that," I said, taking in an eyeful of Muntz the Mook, "seems like you only bring him around when you want to make a point."

"Why does he keep talking like that?" Muntz asked The Boss, his thick, idiot lips coating each word with stupidity before spitting them out into the air, "does think he's in a detective movie or something?"

"Ha! Yeah, really. It's like he's Sam Spade or...wait. Good god, is that it?! You think you're in a detective movie?" The Boss started yapping on about Christ knows what. Sure, I saw his mouth moving, but the words were lost - carried away as if on an ocean breeze.

Something Muntz had said had got me thinking, and now all the pieces were falling into place.

"You are not in a detective movie! You are in a Dairy Queen," The Boss seemed to be screaming about something, but I couldn't focus; my head was spinning. Everything was starting to make sense.

"You just got thrown out of the ballpit in the children's play area for fighting! You are eating a Thin Mints Blizzard with sprinkles!"

Somebody was playing me for a sucker here, and I had a pretty good idea who.

"You could not be any further, atmospherically, from a Film Noir movie! You are wearing swim-trunks and combat boots!"

What's your point?