Reviews// The Club

Mindless violence and video games, they go together like love and marriage apparently did in the days when Frank Sinatra was singing about such things. Unfortunately, video games are predominantly played by adolescent and post-adolescent males. Due to an over-abundance of testosterone and an under-abundance of impulse control, this demographic already has a predisposition for mindless violence.

As a result, certain observers have suggested that video games should contain less violence, if you doubt me, search SPOnG for "Jack Thompson". Now, some people think that video games without the violence is like... like what? I would say coffee without the caffeine, but some of you sick puppies actually drink that for fun; or it could be likened to sex without the penis, but I have no wish to alienate our lesbian readership so, while I struggle for a simile, you get my drift.

I SO hope we have a lesbian readership.

So, in an attempt to retain all that makes video games good and holy, and simultaneously keep the religious nut-jobs at bay, developers and publishers have come up with a series of spurious pretexts to make the violence seem harmless. These include, but are not limited to, making the characters appear cartoonish, setting the game in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, or making the enemies (and subjects upon whom said mindless violence is visited) into hideous alien creatures; forgetting, of course, that hideous (to our eyes) alien creatures have mothers and tiny cute hideous alien pupae too.

Of course, many of these pretexts are becoming over-used now. Developers are now having to look for new and more exciting pretexts on which to hang their cookie-cutter, third-person shooter games. For this reason, Bizarre Creations has come up with "The Club", a game which combines the tired conventions of first-person shooters with the combo-linking gameplay of... oh, let's say Tony Hawk's.

The pretext for The Club is that you are a member of some sort of club, the members of which compare their figurative penis lengths by how good they are at shooting people in the head with a range of weapons. OK, member is possibly the wrong way to describe your relationship with the shady organisation that is The Club.

The actual members are "Drug lords. Dotcom billionaires. International arms dealers. Dictators. Media Tycoons. Hollywood superstars. Third World warlords. Aristocrats and royalty." That's a direct quote from the Bizarre creations website, so ignore the interesting capitalisation, it's probably bizarre on purpose.

Now, earlier I described people who drink decaf lattés as sick puppies. But the members of the club are far, far sicker… by far. Their idea of fun is putting a man in a room full of guns and other men (with guns), and making each of them kill to save their own lives. You've probably seen many, many films that use a similar premise. You play one of these men.