Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By Alec Meer on December 6th, 2007 at 2:02 pm.

There’s a theme in RPS’ posts today:
(Technical) controversy - people unhappy :(
Elves - people happy :)
(Aggressively subjective) controversy - people unhappy :(

My purpose is clear. I can fulfill my destiny. I must bring the people – more elves!

Here you are. Some elves. Well, a gnome. But similar. Is that racist? God, I hope not.

Brought to my destiny-seeking attention by the ever-excellent The Independent Gaming Source (thanks, TIGSource. ThIGanks) is Garden Gnome Carnage. It’s one of many entries to YoYo Games’ Winter Competition. It’s throwaway and silly and cutesy, and really everything you’d expect from a home-made game about Christmas. But it’s also about murdering Santases in their thousands, which speaks to me on a profound level. Christmas. Fuggit.

(Random anecdotal aside: my fellow RPSesers will ask me “What do you people do at Christmas?” at least 38 times during the course of any year. When I first joined Future Publishing, the magazine house that grew us all into the fine freelancers of controversy and word-wank we are today, another games journalist, who shall remain nameless, took one look at the length and width of my nose, presumed I was a practising Jew, and so offered the above query as an attempt at polite conversation. It took a while to establish that “you people” wasn’t simply a particularly offensive way of saying “The Meer Family”. Laughter ensued. Eventually.)

Anyway, Garden Gnome Carnage. Features a gnome on a rope, the carpet bombing of Father Christmas and an interfering cat. And it’s enormously entertaining.