Working Title 11.06.09: Working Appreciation - Badasses

Posted by Jordan Williams on 11.06.2009

It's simple. Everyone loves a badass. Although they are far too many of them who act exactly the same, there are some lesser known ones that people might not know of. So who makes the list? Read...or I'll shoot you.

Welcome back to the #1 Column to think that the new Prince of Persia movie might break the cycle in the long line of video game movies that suck. I have never been a big fan of the Prince of Persia games; it's not that I think they were bad it's just that I never really got into them. But I do think that the movie has the best shot of getting the "Good video game movie" tag out of the recent ones we have seen. Of course the fans are already bitching and moaning about inaccuracies and what not between the games, but that is to be expected. I'm not a giant fan of PoP like I have said but Disney knows how to do these big action-adventure movies and if the trailer can get me pretty interested (it looks a lot like The Mummy (the remake) which is a good thing in my book) then I am willing to give it a bit of a pass.


Speaking of giving things a pass, my obligations during October (working a Halloween event, filming a movie, doing voice work for a cartoon pilot) are all finally over! Well...sort of. I still have to fill in the last blank this week which means that this should be the LAST time you get a fluff/filler column in a while. I actually do have an idea for the next series already down, so this will probably be the last "Working Appreciation" in a long time. With that being said, how about we end Working Appreciation with the exact opposite of the last one.

The Badasses

We've looked at the sidekicks, the wussies, and the douches. But we all know when it comes to games everyone loves a good badass. Overly cliché and full of one liners and explosions these guys are obviously the go to guys and gals you hit up when you want shit to get done right way. But since this is Working Title, you know that there will be curveballs to the term of 'badass'. Let's just see if you can pick out which one...


Kim Kaphwan


You've probably have seen me refer to Kim as Kim MOTHERFUCKING Kaphwan before, and there's a good reason. He is a fucking badass. Not only does this guy do Tae Kwon Do (which many might consider the most-un-badass of Martial Arts) and make it look good. He actually does it for the sole reason of kicking the ever loving SHIT out of evil. The dude somehow can like smell evil in the air and when that happens he will be the first one to say "FUCK YOU, EVIL. IMA BREAK MAH FOOT OFF IN YA ASS" and get to fighting.

Of course he doesn't say that really, but I mean it pretty much is the same thing but just with a few more colorful words. Perhaps another reason Kim is a badass is because in the game series he is a part of, it deals a lot with people who have special powers or abilities that otherwise are beyond the usual scope of a human being, Kim seems to not possess any of those powers. In fact, the only power Kim seems to own is the power to make his foot ignite into holy flame before breaking it off in some orochi's ass.

He's really soft spoken for a badass, and actually doesn't do too much to progress the story...besides kick the shit out of villains so bad that they actually fucking cross the line and become good. Kim beat Choi and Chang so much that they decided to take on his good ways and managed to covert to the side of good. In a way Kim is like an angel. He swoops in, smites the wicked and lets others repent.

He just does it by shoving his foot so far up your ass that his toes brush the back of your teeth.


Most Badass Moment : Pretty much anytime he fights against someone who is evil. He points at them and tells them in no kind words that he is about to unleash the beast. Also he managed to have two kids, both of them just as awesome or in Dong Hwan's case more awesome than his father.

Badass-O-Meter Rating : 8.5


Bass/Forte


Forte (I am going to refer to him as Forte because it sounds so much cooler than Bass) is one of the main reasons I wish Capcom would get up off of it's ass and actually finish a goddamn Megaman series for once. Introduced late in the series Forte was the robot Dr. Wily built to finally take down Megaman and up until the final parts of the game he was actually pretty damn successful in kicking Megaman's punk blue ass.

But this isn't why he is a badass; he is a badass because he proved to be so popular that he landed a role in the Rockman and Forte (later released as Megaman and Bass here) which many saw as the unofficial Megaman 9. It was the first time in a Megaman game that you could play as two different characters with a mostly different storyline, but as soon as you played with Forte for the first time you knew this game really should've been called "Forte and The Other Guy" because he outshined Megaman in pretty much every single way.

Forte could double jump, shoot continuously in all directions, dash (and later air dash) and had Treble (ironically, Gospel doesn't sound cooler than Treble). The only limitations were that Forte couldn't run while he shot, and he couldn't charge a shot. But when it came to bosses like Dynamo Man I would rather be able to shoot directly up at him and double jump vs. having to charge a shot and jump up at him. Forte outshined Megaman in every single way in that game.

Even in spinoffs like Megaman Battle Network, they usually reserve the 'badass anti hero' slot for Forte, and he isn't even bound by the three laws of robotics, so if he wanted to he could even shoot Dr. Wily's face off (something he has tried to do many times)


Most Badass Moment : The entirety of his role in Megaman and Bass/Rockman and Forte

Like I said before, Forte pretty owned the fuck out of that game. There are some purists there who love Megaman so much that they would only play with him, but the game was obviously built from the ground up to be considered a Forte game and I still think to this day the only reason Capcom slapped Megaman on it is because they knew that no one was going to buy a game with just Forte in it. Now if only those bastards can finish a series without letting it die with tons of useless sequels we would be somewhere by now.

Badass-O-Meter Rating : 7



E102 (Gamma)


He might've been part of the downfall of the Sonic series (needless characters being added in every game that are rarely ever heard from again), but Gamma was a badass. Why was he a badass? Because you can pretty much boil everyone's game play to one line.

Sonic - Run from Point A to Point B really fast.
Tails - Run from Point A to Point B faster than Sonic.
Knuckles - Stop the fucking beeping
Big - FIND FWOGGIE!!
Amy - RUN, BITCH, RUN!
Gamma - SHOOT. EVERYTHING. PERIOD.

If you can't see what makes Gamma badass just from that list I will make it even clearer. Gamma's job was to simply shoot everything until it died. Even the stuff that was never alive like lawn furniture and trees were fair game. Gamma ran on scorched earth tactics and he liked it that way. Of course with this being a Sonic game, everything is usually all colorful and full of happy go lucky bullshit. But not Gamma...he might be the wussiest of the robots in the game, but the fucker can lay complete waste to everything around him. Not even Super Sonic unleashes the pure havoc Gamma does.

Gamma, however, isn't so much of a badass by virtue more so than he is just simply a badass due to who he is surrounded by, I mean when you think Sonic you don't exactly think guns and destruction on a mass scale.

Well, you do if you are thinking about Shadow, but if you are thinking about Shadow the Hedgehog as a good game by any means then you deserve to get stabbed in the face with a syringe full of botfly larvae.

Most Badass Moment : Anytime you play as him and realize he is not Sonic

It might sound like a bit of a broken record, but it's pretty friggin obvious that the only reason he is a true badass because he is one of the few things in the Sonic Universe that broke the conventions of what many would see as a normal Sonic game. Sonic Adventure did a lot of things different but at the base of it was still a Sonic game until you played with Big or Gamma. Obviously one of those was a bit more badass than the other.

Badass-O-Meter Rating: 8



Ultros


You know what? I could type some long winded segment about how why Ultros is on the list. But I'll just boil it down to this.

HE'S FUCKING ULTROS

He is a tentacle monster who wants to do nothing but beat the fuck up out of adventurers.

SOLD.


Most Badass Moment: Existing.

Badass-O-Meter Rating: IV

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Working Question

Seeing as the newest gaming controversy seems to be the Airport Scene in Modern Warfare 2, how do you weigh in on the whole ordeal? Personally I can see both sides of the argument, but I do have my own views on them too.

On one side I do see how the Airport Scene can be used as something that can (and already has) illicit a reaction from people. Seeing something as horrible (and hitting as close to home) as a terror attack on an Airport as well as seeing it from a first hand perspective might give you the idea that yes, these bastards need to die NOW. But on the other hand I think that it lessens the impact by having YOU play it. What is stopping you from just not shooting any civilians and just moving on? More so the option to actually skip the scene altogether softens the blow I think.

You can tell they are going for the same heart tugging moment like in the original Modern Warfare in which you actually watched yourself die after a nuke exploded on your face. Even though it sounds like you would be using the same idea over again I think they should've kept that route in which you were a civilian running away from the terrorists but ultimately you couldn't escape. I just think that letting you play AS the terrorist doesn't necessarily get the point across that THEY are the bad guys, if anything it makes YOU the bad guy because you were controlling/playing that segment and you shot those people.

But still, we don't know the context of the situation outside of the scene that has been leaked so for all we know this could be some sort of Double Agent scenario where this person HAD to do this in order not to be outed or something. I guess we will know in a few days but I am still pretty interested to see what everyone else thinks.


Until next time, I'm Jordan Williams...and Borderlands is fun, but it definitely has it's fair share of problems. Maybe because I decided to play as Brick...