Apathy Sketchpad

A fair while ago now, there was a certain dispute between the WWF and the WWF, over which one of them should be allowed to use the initials. I don’t know what kind of a jury anybody thought would rule in favour of a staged fighting event over a nature charity, but it would seem the logical thing to do, since the initials WWF could either stand for “World Wrestling Federation” or “Worldwide Fund for Nature” (the name “World Wildlife Fund” having been dropped some years before). In the event, though, the case was won by the charity, and the WWE was born.

The game Lee and Adam bough last week, though, was released before all this, and is therefore called WWF: No Mercy. It is, at heart, a fighting game, albeit a bad one. Players are invited to choose between a variety of different modes, all of which are totally indistinguishable from each other, and then fight with one of about thirty wrestlers, each equipped with a blurry animation and a stupid name. I now live in hope that soon the day will come when the novelty of this has worn off, and we don’t have to play it anymore. Since the “create a superstar” feature was found a few days ago, they have insisted on creating several new characters a day, and then having something called a Royal Rumble using all the ones we have so far. The last such match lasted fully half an hour, which I find is a long time to play Wetrix, and I like Wetrix. Since I find No Mercy to be a passable game at best, I find ten minutes is a little too long a stretch, but for some reason they don’t seem to understand this. The thinking seems to be that once they have created enough alter-egos for me to play as, based on some throwaway comment or other one of them made eight months ago, I will automatically love the game and want to own a sequel.

Now, I’ve been introduced to a lot of new things since I’ve been at University. Some I’ve liked, such as Scrubs, Jeff Buckley, and Smirnoff. Others, I have disliked, such as Statistical Mechanics, Dick Steele, and that guy at the Bus Station. This game, though, falls neatly into the third category, which is reserved for those things which have been introduced to me as really rather excellent, and I have at best found tolerable, and then grown to passionately hate over time, such as Stavros, Lab, and Guns And Roses. But nobody else sees it. Everybody else is quite content (except obviously in the case of Stavros) to sit in Lab for six hours a day tinkering with some godforsaken glass tube which they know full well isn’t going to work, and if it does is sure to think of some even more ingenious way to irritate them, or listen to Guns And Roses, turn up the volume, and try to explain to me that “this is an excellent song,” but it just doesn’t take. I don’t like them, I’m not going to like them, and any attempt you make to change that will probably involve exposing me to them, and that’s just going to make me hate them even more.

And I’m not normally one to hate things. It takes a lot. Mostly, though, it takes a lot of time. I have almost never seen something or someone and instantly took a strong dislike to it (with an exception for a variety of reasons being the MOBO Awards). But if I’m around something for too long then the familiarity, as is its wont, breeds contempt, and it goes downhill from there. I can usually put up with most things for quite a while these days. Hence it took MTV Base, and a whole horde of idiotic kids to make me hate almost all black music. It took year nine music class to make me hate Indian music. It took a year living away from home to make me hate McDonalds, though I have always had certain moral issues with the RMCC, on what I consider to be the rather reasonable grounds that it claims to be a charity, but instead of being registered as such, it is in fact registered as a private limited company. The sheer amount of money in those things is insane. I mean, I’m all in favour of charities, but Ideally ones like Cancer Research UK, or the NSPCC, which have an actual cause associated with them as opposed to being the “Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities”, whose cause seems to be to help the poor starving children whose last request is to see a poorly paid man in an ill-fitting red clown suit funnelling their money into a huge faceless multinational corporation.

Of course, it would be entirely wrong of me to suggest that McDonalds are actually evil. Certainly they don’t care about the quality of their food, and certainly they will employ people who plainly should be on the streets. Nobody is going to leap to their defence if I say that they have been in the news several times, and never once to congratulate them, and I doubt if I’ll receive angry emails if I say that they make a lot of profit and hold something of a monopoly. In fact, I’m not sure what my point was, now.

But the most amazing thing is the Happy Meal. The Happy Meal is in no way happy. It consists, as far as I can tell, of the smallest possible amount of food, with the cheapest possible toy thrown in at the last minute, loosely connected to whatever promotion is on that week. Last time I was in there, the promotion was based on a TV show called “Clifford The Big Red Dog”.

I have never seen this programme, but I have seen enough stills to know this much: Usually, if you heard the phrase “big red dog”, you would imagine a large dog, say about three, maybe four feet high, in a bright, reddish shade of brown, because that’s what size and colour dogs are. Clifford, though, is rather bigger and redder than he is dog, and in fact is blood red and the size of a house. The effect given is rather like that which the inhabitants of the tiny green houses in a Monopoly set must experience, but without the knowledge that once the last tycoon has been bankrupted their entire city will be swept up and put in a cheap plastic box.