The Angry Video Nerd steps downstairs into his gaming domain basement. "What should I play?" he says, rubbing his lightly stubbled chin in one hand and holding a Rolling Rock in his other. "I feel like I've somehow managed to play every one of these plastic abominations already". He walks over to his shelf of neatly organized SNES cartridges, shaking his head as he runs his finger over all of them, grabbing one at various points, but then muttering "no" under his breath as he struggles with his own indecisiveness. He draws a gasp in an almost-Eureka moment, before ultimately deciding against his previous decision.
After several minutes, he lets himself fall back into his deep gaming sofa and plunges himself into thought. He cups his head in his free hand, staring up at the ceiling with an exaggerated grimace on his face. He looks at the camera. "I don't have a clue what I wanna play. Truth is, I don't want to play any of these games. I mean, think about it. I sit down here and subject myself to the torment of some of these games that are honestly so bad they could be considered a form of capital punishment, all so that I could tackle some sort of childhood trauma, but the thing is, these games are all fucking old as dirt! How can I continue to bully these 8,16, 32 or 64-bit bitches and justify doing so when I'm probably the only asshole that's played these things in decades? What am I thinking?!"
"I should play something newer, something the modern man struggles with, a real 21st-century game, no more boops, and bops and 2D JPEG characters or low-poly PS1 polygonal poops, but honest to God, real, modern 21st century 3D games. I keep taking you back to the past to play these shitty games that suck ass, but really, can't the past be considered as recent as the last 5 seconds ago? I mean, I walked down the stairs into my basement not even a minute ago and that's considered the past so why not?
"Okay, I know I'm jumping through hoops to justify playing a modern game, but fuck it, I don't need an excuse to play a modern game, I could just do it. So let's fire up a modern game. Today, I'm gonna play something on the XBOX Series X! Yeah, I'm going REAL modern with this motherfucker!"
The Nerd looks at his XBOX Series X with an expression of pleasure, situated awkwardly between a bunch of significantly older systems, like little Billy visiting his grandparents at the senior's home. It looks ridiculously out of place.
"Just look at this thing, it looks like a skyscraper or a fucking cinder block! I've played some big motherfucking behemoths before, but this thing has to be the girthiest console I've ever owned! It looks like a computer tower! Okay, I've fucked around and beat around the bush long enough. Today, I'm gonna be playing this free game called Warframe.
"What's this, a free game? Hell yeah, I'd love to play a free game, especially after I went through HELL trying to get this BRAND NEW CONSOLE, that for some reason, the DICKWEEDS at these major outlets aren't carrying because Microsoft-cock and Sony-va-bitch couldn't MAKE SURE THEY HAVE ENOUGH FUCKIN' CONSOLES FOR EVERYBODY! You have any idea how much I paid for this shit?"
The camera zooms in to a full-screen view of The Nerd's face.
"Seven Hundred-Fifty fuckin' dollars! And I'm dead fuckin' serious. I had to get it from some scalper because I couldn't find it ANYWHERE for a reasonable price! What a shitload of ass! Say what you want about Nintendo and Sega, but at least they knew how to keep their FUCKING CONSOLES IN STOCK!"
He takes a long swig of his rolling rock.
"Scalpers, I wish someone out there would SCALP the fucking scalpers, like Brad Pitt and his band of Basterds in 'Inglorious Basterds', that movie rules."
He goes over to his little portable fridge and pops open a nice, cold beer, and sits back down on the couch.
"So, I fire up the Xbox Series X and load up to the main menu. Now, in order for me to play this free game, I still need to have an Xbox Live account, thankfully, I do. So let's rock."
The Nerd clicks the game icon, and a prompt to update pops up.
"Oh yeah, that's right, looks like the game has an update. Update, you ask? Yeah, an update. Nowadays, games get regular updates, and that can be anywhere from yearly, to monthly, to even weekly, with some games, and that's really impressive. PC games have been getting updates for a while now, but console games? That's something that only started with the last couple of generations of gaming. Imagine if some of the old diarrhea dookie games I've been playing got updates. Imagine if someone took the festering carcass that is Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, and updated the game, fixed the fuckin' broken hitbox with Jeckyl's cane, reduced the enemy count by a lot, and, you know, made it halfway to at least tolerable.
"Yeah there's that Castlevania: Simon's Quest Redaction, which is a home-brew that updates the day/night cycle and adds hints, and that makes the game far more palatable, but up to this point, I've never covered games that have had updates before. You used to get DLC, downloadable content, and expansion packs. Yeah, remember expansion packs, like Final Doom that had Plutonia and TNT Evilution? Expansion packs were pretty cool, but now, like, everything has them.
"This update is called 'The Angels of Zariman', and for those that have never played Warframe before, they're not gonna have any idea what that means. Angels? Zariman? I thought this was a game about space ninjas! Okay, so the update finally finishes and we go through all the bullshit menus and stuff, and I finally load onto my ship."
The camera zooms into the daily login screen to show that The Nerd has clocked in 2148 days. He looks at the camera, then back at the TV, back and forth, sighing and trying to cover his embarrassment.
"Alright, looks like I have a bit of a confession to make. One of the reasons it's taken me so long to come up with reviews, between all this and that and real life, is that I have a bit of an addiction, and no, not an alcohol addiction, so you can pry your eyes away from my Rolling Rock! I mean that I have a Warframe addiction. You're not gonna believe this, but the total amount of time that I've put into this thing is THREE THOUSAND, FIVE HUNDRED, AND SEVENTY-TWO HOURS!
"That's right, 214,320 minutes, 12,589,200 seconds, or roughly 148.83 straight days! Wow, that must mean it's a great game, right? RIGHT? Honestly, it's okay."
The Nerd runs around on his Orbiter, exploring his bright purple and pink ship that has decoration diarrhea all over the place.
"This... is my Orbiter, it's the first thing that a modern player sees after the login screen. So how does this game start anyway? It starts out with a cutscene of Earth, these weird, old-looking dudes, called the Grineer, pull up to some ancient, dilapidated, moss-covered temple. This one guy, who looks just as old as the other guys, except he's brown and for some reason has robotic chicken feet, he's pissed because the Queens demoted him.
"This purple chick called The Lotus starts talking to you and wakes you up. and you have to go fight the Grineer and escape the planet aboard your Liset, which is this ship that looks like a giant sperm. You pick a couple of weapons, it doesn't matter which, because they're all shitty early-game weapons, and you escape. Now that you're on your ship, you gotta take this thing called the Ascaris Negator off, or else you keep seeing this old guy's ugly face until the end of time, and sorry, I don't want to keep looking at this wrinkly old fuck so I get that thing off, ASAP!
"You do a couple of missions, and install all your ship components: your arsenal, which will allow you to change Warframes and weapons and set their builds and appearances, your foundry for building stuff, your mod station, which will allow you to rank up mods, your relic station, which will allow you to view and modify relics, and your companion station, which will allow you to incubate a living companion. That's right, you can get pets in this, and they're pretty weird-looking, but I'll get back to that later."
The Nerd accesses his navigation and starts up a mission.
"Now for the sake of just showing you guys what kind of game this is, I'm just gonna fire up a random Exterminate mission, nothing too complex, just kill a bunch of guys, so I'm gonna go to Mercury and fire up M Prime, this is one of the earliest, and easiest missions in the game, and it's nice and short, just a handful of some guys to kill and then leave and that's it, nothing too fancy.
"So it starts the mission and I get to watch my semen ship fly in the direction of Mercury, and it's so cool, I can just move the ship around and bob it in all different directions and make it dance, so even the loading screens are fun. The first thing you'll notice when popping into the mission is just how pretty everything looks, you got these rusty-looking old floors, the cave walls, and rocks everywhere, I know it's not that much, but it really fits with the vibe. The controls, actually, they're pretty cool. I love how this game controls. At first, I didn't know you could move all that fast until I started playing with other players and I saw them flipping and flopping all over the place like Daffy Duck on coke!
"Ever since then, I started learning how to move like that, and I learned you can do this thing called bullet-jumping, where if you hold the crouch button while jumping, you hurtle yourself through the air like a cannonball! You can do all sorts of cool stuff with moving, like double-tapping the roll button mid-air to send yourself flying even further, aim-gliding, which is kinda like Max Payne's bullet-time, to get even MORE airtime, and even melee-attacking to get even more distance. It's awesome. The movement is super buttery smooth and responsive, but be careful or you could get stuck behind stuff. It's cool though because the developers thought ahead about people getting stuck in stuff and programmed an escape command.
"What you do is pull up the chat menu and type '/unstuck' and the game will respawn you outside of the stuck object. Man isn't that convenient. I can't tell you how many times I could have used that in other games. Attacking stuff feels just as satisfying. Using my hyper-upgraded weapons, I slice through these guys like it's nothing. To be fair, I'm a rank 'Legendary 2' and these guys are single-digit levels, which means I could fart on them and kill them. So I do so, killing all 69 guys, and I head to extraction, which automatically sends me back to my ship.
"I've talked a lot about the enemies so far, but I haven't elaborated on them too much. Who are they? Well, the Grineer are actually clones, not necessarily old, but made to look old because of their increasingly-degenerative DNA as a result of centuries of copying their genes across generations with inferior technology to that of what they used to use. As a result, they've started to develop physical, and even mental disorders. Think, like, the Stormtroopers from Star Wars, except they're all fucked up because Kamino lost the cloning tech so they had to outsource to some shittier cloning equipment.
"They're led by these two queens. The eldest one is this ugly bitch that looks like the villain from Earthworm Jim, The evil Queen Bloated, Festering, Pulsating, Sweaty, Puss-Filled, Malformed Slug-For-A-Butt, and the younger one, called 'The Worm', she looks like weird, messed up Angelica Pickles from Rugrats, and acts like it too. The older one gets killed off at the end of this one quest, leaving the younger one in charge of the whole Grineer army.
"Besides the general overall mooks with guns, you got these annoying ass ladies, called Scorpions, which, get this, use hooks to pull you closer to them."
The Nerd inserts Scorpion's "Get over here!" from Mortal Kombat.
"These Scorpions can suck the farts out of my asshole! Beyond that are Heavy Gunners and Bombards, pretty tanky, but not too bad. These flying guys are called Hellions, they're real bastards, but the worst is probably the Nox, who has the distinction of being the ugliest motherfucker I've ever seen in any video game, and he just eats ammo like nobody's business, and when he finally dies, he lets out a horrifying scream and bursts into some fart cloud that poisons you. What an asshole! There are far too many Grineer and other factions to talk about at length, so I'll only go over a few of each faction. Yup, you're gonna be dealing with much more than just the Grineer."
"Next, you got the Corpus, which are significantly more advanced and less blunt than the Grineer. The Corpus is this mega-corporation that's more like a cult that worships money, led by this conman named Nef Anyo, who's managed to trick everyone into thinking he's this 'prophet' of the Void that's managed to bring back some technology from long ago and who scams people by selling them augmentations they can't afford, thrusting them into a crippling debt that they can never pay off. Nef Anyo sounds like a real dickhead. Never buy a house from some guy named Nef. Remember that.
"The Corpus faction is mostly comprised of these guys, yes, mostly guys, hardly any women in the Corpus, and they all have these boxy helmets and spandex-looking suits that make them look like something out of a 50s space b movie. And they have these robots that are both somehow ridiculous, but kind of adorable. They have these robots called MOAs, which look like a pair of robotic chicken legs with a gun on top, they even make chicken noises, it's ridiculous. You also got these flying ones called Ospreys, they can be pretty shitty to try and shoot because they're small and like to zip around a lot.
"You find out later that the founder of the Corpus, this guy named Parvos Granum, was more honest in his endeavors and promoted hard work and strong work ethic for profit, so more in line with today's form of capitalism, where you sell goods and accrue your own success, the American Dream. So he doesn't seem like that bad of a guy at first... at first. But enough about them, there's one more major faction, at least until later, and that's The Infested."
The camera pans away from the gameplay to show The Nerd sitting there.
"Infested, you say? What are they, like, zombies? Well, kinda. It's more like a parasitic hive-mind of zombies. The Infested are comprised of horrible, tumor-filled, twisted, abominable versions of the Corpus and Grineer units. It's kinda like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but much more gross-looking. They are mostly a pushover. You can very easily just mow them down because they walk right into your line of fire or your melee swings.
"Just like the Grineer, the Infested have their own kind of Scorpion, because for some reason we needed another, called the Ancient. These things don't look anything like Corpus or Grineer, more like giant versions of The Squidbillies. At least they're pretty big, so you shoot those bastards every time they pop up before they grab your leg, FUCK! It keeps grabbing me and knocking me to the ground!"
"Time to move on."
