The Gay Games of Warcraft 3: Part I

It's a laudable concept that game designers would make their creation totally and easily modifiable. The ability to create new games from current or older ones not only increases the game's value thereby making your dollar go further, it also turns a good game legendary, keeping it on peoples' hard drives long after its release date. For a good example, look at Half-Life, a game that came out a full decade ago, yet is so easily modded that you can still find a hundred online servers hosting Counter Strike or Team Fortress Classic or Day of Defeat to this day.

The crack peddlers at Blizzard know a thing or two about making a game that people willingly will play for the rest of their natural lives...see Starcraft or World of Warcraft and the ill effects they've had on the Asian economy for an example. Therefore, they made Warcraft 3 incredibly easy to fiddle around with. Literally anyone with some time on their hands and a somewhat feasible idea can cobble together a mod, which is easily downloaded through Battle-Net from the custom games menu and can be played by anyone within minutes. Unfortunately, there is a price to be paid by the intuitiveness and ease of modification in Warcraft 3. While in the hands of an inventive person, they have the potential to be both interesting and innovative, in the hands of your average Warcraft 3 player they can also be incredibly stupid wastes of time.

Hence: "Gay Games." Thank (satsux) Balls for that little gem.

But he's right, some of these games are incredibly gay, mostly the Anime themed ones, some of these games were made by people with just an immensely bad sense of what is fun.

Here's a list of the Gay Games I've played so far, and a relative ranking of how fun they are to play. Since my copy of WC3 is hacked and won't run online and I end up just playing them on Balls' computer anyway, I have no screenshots so I will just use random pictures as placeholders.



Defense of the Ancients (DOTA)

So popular, even has its own professional-grade art. This should scare you.

This one shouldn't even be considered a custom game anymore, but it technically is. The sheer overwhelming popularity of this mod probably surpasses even that of the game it's modifying. The setup is simple: You have two bases that automatically send AI soldiers after each other at regular intervals. This creates a total standstill, were it not for player-controlled heroes that use Warcraft unit models and have special abilities that can be used to give an advantage to your side. If you manage to consistently outwit the enemy-controlled heroes, the enemy will find you in their base, killin' their doodz. Whut r they gonna do? Nothing. The game is over and the bitch session begins about who was maphacking, who's a noob, who was secretly working with the enemy and who should uninstall the game entirely.

Balls contends that this is a game played by Brain Surgeons, CEO's and Harvard/MIT grad students, and that the game is a cranial masterpiece. I myself liken the game to CounterStrike in body, form and deed (switching realtime strategy for first-person shooter) and leave it at that. The game is good. The community is gay.

Rating: 4.5/5 starz: Awesome concept, but lends itself to the obsessive type of player.



Pokemon Challenge!

Welcome back to the '90's.

This game has a good concept, although there are those who would definitely argue with me on this. I never played Pokemon as a kid, nor have I ever watched the show. I know the difference between Pikachu and Koffing, and I know that chucking pokeballs in Smash Brothers is fun as hell. In this game, however, a simple pokeball costs you THREE HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE U.S. DOLLARS and the only way you can get money is by killing Pokemans. You savagely order your own Pokemon to attack other Pokemans and beat them to death so you have enough scrap to buy yourself a pokeball so you can capture OTHER Pokemans and repeat the whole process over again.

Fleshing this out is a duel system that doesn't quite work, which means you can challenge random NPC's and your own fellow players to duels in a mini arena, which supposedly earns you more XP and money and whatnot. The game ends with an epic duel that determines the game's final winner. The game is pretty unfinished, and the duels sometimes freeze, causing the game to repeat music from the TV show forever while anyone else in the room loses their goddamn mind listening to you play. I figure one day they'll fix it, but there are a lot of people who would wonder, why bother?

Rating: 3/5 stars: Not enough Pokemans.



Naruto Challenge (or something)

Wait what?

Like DOTA, but each Warcraft hero is supposed to represent a character from an Anime series. I have no clue who these people are, and it seems incredibly pointless. This is what 9/10ths of these Gay Games are about.

1.5/5 stars: Needs moar ramen.



Slide, Ninja, Slide!

Come get some.

This one is stupid, but different. You're a ninja in an ice world and you have to slide around with hardly any control over your character at all, avoiding snow monsters and rezzing your friends when they fuck up. The best part? Linkin Park plays at 3X speed on repeat in the background. SWEET.

2/5 stars: Good if you're on meth.



Warhammer 40,000 Defense

Where do you think you're going.

Gee mom, why can't I just play Dawn of War? No, Billy, that game is violent and is full of conflicting religious messages, I'd rather have you playing a nice game about elves and magic faeries.

Well, you'll show her! After downloading this mod, you can now be an awesome Ork chieftan slaughtering countless defenders of...what? It's just a really bad tower defense game? Shit.

0.5/5 stars: Makes it suck to be alive.




Porn Maps

Paper raper.

Umm, I don't know for sure if there's any actual porn in these maps, but I figure somehow they managed to get a porn slideshow into the WC3 engine and it's not just sorceresses making "pain" noises on repeat while demons bump against them. The only porn map I did see was actually a screamer where a huge demon pops out at you after about a minute, which was hilarious enough to earn extra stars.

2/5 stars: This is generous.




Revenge of the Niggers (yes, Niggers)

You bitch.

Ok, here we go. This mod actually deserves its own post, but in short, half of the players play the part of the "Niggers" and the other half play the cops. You run around town, past Mickey D's and KFC's and Ghettos and Banks either performing criminal acts as a Nigger or preventing them as a Cop. Sadly, this game is actually pretty well done which indicates a lot of time and loving effort was poured into it. People who like this mod are very sick in the head (or they're just having a Nigger moment, know what I'm sayin?)

3.5/5 stars: Gratuitous racism? In MY warcraft? It's more likely than you think.




Wilderness Survival

Um, will this be on the test?

Personal bias puts this one over DOTA in terms of quality, but I have my reasons. This game is a lot shorter, slightly easier to understand and definitely more creative than DOTA, and when played right, is a lot more enjoyable. You and your fellow players are survivors trapped in a snowy wilderness, desperately trying to stave off the cold and wild animals in an attempt to outlast the others. As you wander through the snow, your body heat level drops and kills you if it reaches zero. To prevent this, you must find items such as wood, vines, moss, ice, animals bones and other items, hit "E" for "make," and see if the combination of items you have creates a useful item...such as a campfire, a tent or a fur jacket.

You basically have to figure out recipes by trial and error, the help of other humans or useful survival guides that you can find lying around. For example, stick plus stick = big stick. Big stick plus animal horn plus vine equals spear! Mushroom when cooked in your campfire can produce poison paste, which when added to your spear equals poison spear. It's basically impossible to find any of these recipes online, and in a way you kind of don't want to tell anyone the recipes you know. It gives you a bit of an advantage that they don't know how to create a loaded shotgun which they can use to blow you away while you chop wood for your fire.

This game is fun as hell and has an element which you don't find in many other games: the element of creation. Taking the time to find all the materials to make your own brewery (which takes about a day of game time) and being able to create a nice, frosty beer for your efforts (and get drunk, which keeps you warmer) is satisfying and rewarding.

5/5 stars: Will make you confident enough to crash your plane in the frozen tundra.



Parasite

OH SHI-

This game is wayyyy too complicated. You can tell that its creator really cared a lot about the gameplay, but as a result it becomes so overly complex that only the most dedicated player will even bother to try to figure it out. You're a space marine (or the station computer) on a space station, and one of your fellow space marines is infected with a parasite. Only he knows that he's secretly an alien saboteur bent on killing everyone, and everyone else has to figure it out before it's too late. Suspicious behavior has to be observed, and there is serious punishment for killing the wrong guy because you thought he was a BRAIN SUCKING INSECTIOD CEREBRATE FROM DEEPEST SPACE, so you have to be careful.

However, there are so many abilities, machines that can be fucked with, ways to die and other factors (the guy who plays the station computer, for example, is in charge of so much crap it's hard to understand what the fuck is going on before it happens) that the game is extremely confusing. I won a game totally by accident because the parasite accidentally blew himself up because he didn't know what the hell he was doing. This was after I had turned off the oxygen machine a few times and got my allies wondering whether I myself was the parasite (which was technically impossible since I was playing the station computer.) Given more time to play, I'm sure it could become really fun.

4/5 stars: Get your "The Thing" kicks here.



300 Spartans

Gay Games personified.

You're a scantily-clad beefed up warrior dude fighting waves upon waves of AI-controlled Persian invaders. Basically you spear your way through tons of guys, and eventually you all get killed...just like in the movie! Not very rewarding, and there are only about 10 of you anyway instead of the advertised 300, so you will have to take what you can get.

3/5 stars: This is blasphemy.



More Gay Games await, if I have the strength and fortitude to try them all. Balls really should be helping me with this since he has the copy of WC3 that actually works, but until then, enjoy finding the games that are less gay on your own.