Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Christmas is a time for giving. In 2004 SL chose to give offence, and culinary tips.

What with all the piratical news sloshing around RPS this week, I thought now would be a good time to blow the dust off the following. Done in March 2004 to tie in with a preview PC Gamer UK were running, it was the first of many two SL musical spectaculars. Best read with a mouth full of Captain Morgan and an ear full of this, obviously.

Every time I encounter a chainsaw in an FPS, the pedantic ex-forestry worker part of me sighs. Toothy STIHLs and Husqvarnas might be great for chewing through trees, but in a fight you’d really be far better off with an old-fashioned pig sticker or iron bar. Something wieldy and long. Something that didn’t blunt the instant it touched metal, or clog when plunged through anything more fibrous than an Aran sweater.

And don’t get me started on the Doom specimen. That black plastic thing between your knuckles and the business end? That’s a safety device designed to stop the chain dead the second the saw bucks or kicks. Any self-respecting chainsaw warrior would have whipped that off straight away.

None of which relates to the above cartoon which appeared in PC Gamer UK around Christmas 2003.

Summer 2003. SL celebrates the release of the second best Tron-inspired game of all time. A cartoon based on the ultimate Tron game would require set squares and protractors and stuff, so probably won’t happen anytime soon.

Money-grubbing heritage thieves Northrop Grumman did their best to scupper the excellent (but not quite as excellent as Microprose’s 1942: Pacific Air War) Pacific Fighters. Naturally, SL also had a bash. From December 2004′s PC Gamer (UK):

Any similarities between the beast in this Black & White 2 cartoon (PC Gamer UK, Oct. 2005) and the bucktoothed buddy of a certain Czech mole are totally intentional. All hail Zdeněk Miler!

In the summer of 2004 PC Gamer UK underwent a radical redesign. Out went the 5-point Baskerville, the lithographs, and the scores in Roman numerals, in came Extra Life, giant screenshots, and colour photos of the reviewers. It was a scary time. I dealt with my anxiety by picking on Thief: Deadly Shadows.

Ask a reader of the British version of PC GAMER what their favourite part of the magazine is and chances are they’ll reply “The incisive, witty, reviews.”. Ask them again in a slow, deliberate, Christopher Walken kind of voice, and they usually respond with a squeaky “The features? The g-g-g-games culture section?”. Ask them a third time while frothing at the mouth and repeatedly stabbing a large hunting knife into a copy of the mag open at page 21, and they almost always answer “The cartoon! Strafe Left! Yes. That is my favourite part of the magazine.”.

Some fascinating Strafe Left facts…

*SL has been running for over four years.
*SL is always delivered long before deadline.
*The creator’s tool of choice is a rod of kiln-fired graphite sheathed in a sleeve of sun-ripened cedar.
*In June of 2004 an SL depicting Jesus and Mohammed as vortigaunts caused riots in parts of Xen.
*One old and cruelly-resized SL will be appearing on RPS every weekend from now on.