How to make the perfect video game: the manual

There are some things in life that are perfect. A good mojito is pretty damn close; the film Glengarry Glen Ross is about as close as it gets (it’s one hour forty minutes long, has Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, and Kevin Spacey, and in the second scene Alec Baldwin shows up and plays with his big brass balls. Don’t f*ck with me on this one.)

But, and this is coming from someone who is perfectly happy to admit he never leaves his bedroom except to feed on the flesh of slaughtered cattle, I have yet to play the perfect videogame. Some have come close, straddling the line between excellence and perfection like filthy digital prostitutes; probably named Candy or Peppermint or Ginger Crunch or some such thing. Sorry, I got sidetracked. Regroup in the next paragraph.

I decided to make it easier for writers and developers to make the perfect videogame, in these ten steps, not because ten is a nice round number but because I’m pretty sure that’s how many it will take for me to reach my word limit. So shoot me.

Step one: Moustaches

Give every male character a moustache. Moustaches make any lead character more heroic, and therefore more likeable and better tasting. In a recent replay of Final Fantasy VIII, the one thing that became apparent was that none of the playable characters was in fact the main character. The main character was the Jumbo Cactuar, an optional boss you can fight in order to obtain him as a summonable creature.

Admittedly he appears for only a few minutes, and says nothing, but his luxurious moustache tells the real story. The whole game was simply a front in order for him to appear. Plus, the fight took place on Cactuar Island. The guy has a whole island named after him. Do you have an island named after you? No. That’s because you aren’t the protagonist. Jumbo Cactuar is. Moving on.

Step two: Pokemon

Having Pokemon in your game is a winner. Not necessarily the same characters, or the same battle system. I’m not even that fussed about whether or not you use balls to capture them, at a pinch. Just incorporate some sort of pet system where I can capture animals and train them to rip stuff apart and I’m a happy man.

If you can somehow make them ultra-violent, with some sort of fatality-based kill system, I’ll buy the game immediately. Ideally, those monsters could perhaps be equipped with some sort of facial feature to distinguish themselves. A moustache is, perhaps, the ideal choice; it’s either that or some sort of horrendous facial scarring.

Step three: Don’t make the enemies level with me

If I start out the game as a lowly barnacle on the testicles of society, I expect to end it as the Grand High Overlord of the Universe, capable of felling a T-Rex with a single blow and making women all jittery just by breathing in their general direction.

I don’t want to spend hours levelling my character only to realize the T-Rex has scaled up with me making me just as useless as ever, if not slightly worse off because they were already a T-Rex to begin with and were therefore ahead of anything I could ever have to offer. Particularly when it comes to making the ladies jittery. Playing a game needs to yield rewards, which brings us to step four.

Step four: Let me build an empire/legacy/badass dungeon castle

Many Grand Theft Auto traditionalists struggled with GTA IV for a simple reason: you were hardly better off at the end of the game than you were at the start. You had a bit more cash and a few more guns, but when it all came down to it you were just some Eastern European guy.

Compare this to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where you begin the game as some homie from the hood (thankfully I have the street cred to pull these terms off), with no money, no weapons, no property and no social skills. By the end of the game you’re more veiny than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s penis (poor taste? Probably), own the vast majority of San Andreas, have your own airport, flamethrowers, and a jet pack. You also have like six girlfriends, not that I condone that sort of behavior. In short, you are the absolute king.

Would we watch Breaking Bad if we thought Walter White was an average chemistry teacher? Negative. Average is boring. Let me be the boss, and let me own stuff, because in real life I am a loser and I own nothing.

Step five: Violence is interesting, tasteful, necessary, and useful

At this point you might think this list looks like something that would be compiled by a 13-year-old boy who has had too much orange fizzy drink and wants to join the party too. Mum! I’d like to apologies for that, but I can’t because I have too much energy from all the fizzy drink. In any case, the fifth step to making a perfect videogame is violence. And lots of it.

I want blood, heaps of blood, a disgusting hybrid of Tarantino and Saw and that creepy dude who looks like what a shark would look like in human form from the Human Centipede. If I can’t tear off somebody’s skin and stomp around in it like that dude from Silence of the Lambs, I’m not interested. I could do it in Mortal Kombat, I should be able to do it in everything else too. If LittleBigPlanet had involved more skin-wearing, it would have been a much better game. The general rule is if there’s no intestines, it’s not finished yet. Trust me, I’m a doctor*.

* When I say doctor, I mean, I’m not actually a doctor. I’m a doctor in the sense that occasionally I doctor illegal documents to say that I’m Portuguese when in fact I’m Mexican. I mainly do this as a training exercise in case I ever get picked up by the Portuguese police for impersonating a Mexican. It’s complicated stuff, you probably wouldn’t understand it. Only I can understand it, because I’m a doctor.**

**Please refer to *

Step six: Include a loot system

There’s a reason why people go mental for games like Diablo and Borderlands: good loot systems. Being able to blow someone’s face off and then take all their sh*t is like ghetto Christmas, and is both fun and educational.

In the horrible world in which we live, gifts are usually rare and often contain dead cats, feces, and knives. In videogames, they often contain good things, like guns, money, and knives. That’s what’s great about playing games where every sucker you waste (try to keep up with my street lingo) provides you with better equipment. It makes every day Christmas. And Christmas is without a doubt the second best day of the year, losing out only to Pancake Tuesday. Pancake Tuesday is the greatest, because it contains pancakes.

Step seven: Don’t make zombies, vampires, orcs, or goblins the main antagonists

Yeah, I’m aware that all of these supernatural beings each have their own diverse and rich mythological and historical backgrounds. I understand there is a rich tapestry of tradition and fear to be drawn on, a pool of horror so deep it sucks at the very core of your soul like a really mean-spirited vacuum cleaner that’s having problems with its home life. I’m aware of all of these things. I just really don’t care.

Make the enemy a nine-hundred foot penis, or a yak with the ability to see into the future, or a dwarf named Larry who communicates through sneezes. I really don’t care who the bad guy is just don’t make him a god-damn orc. We get it. Tolkien wrote about orcs and goblins, and they were cool in 2003 for about a week, but that’s over now.

The only redeeming feature about any of these creatures is the fact that Dracula, the ultimate vampire, had a gigantic moustache (that is pretty much the only true sentence in this entire article; Google that sh*t. He’s basically Lord Voldemort with a moustache, which is infinitely more badass. “Within, stood a tall old man, clean-shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of color anywhere about him.” See that? Education. You’re welcome.) In fact, this rule can be ignored entirely if the zombie, vampire, orc or goblin in question has a moustache.

Step eight: New Game Plus.

New game plus (also known as replay mode or challenge mode) is the best damn feature ever applied to a videogame in the history of ever. The first time I learned about new game plus was in Ratchet & Clank, because I’m still a fresh hatchling (that’s why I’m so membranous.) I didn’t know it was called new game plus; I didn’t care. What mattered was that I had finished the game and still had loads of stuff to unlock and money to collect and they gave me the whole story all over again to do it in.

It’s the ultimate gift a game developer can give: a game that dwindles away into nothing beneath the flames of time, only to be reborn, levelled up, and membranous like a freshly hatched phoenix. It essentially adds the ability to go back and find anything you’ve missed, explore every opportunity, take every chance. It gives you complete control over how your characters live and what they do, and that’s about as far from real life as it’s possible to get.

Step nine: Include a really, really good mini-game

The greatest mini-game of all time in a game is Blitzball from Final Fantasy X. I would re-purchase that game now just to play that mini-game. If you’ve never played it, I pity you. I pity you the way Mr T used to pity fools: in a deep voice, and in the 80s.

Essentially, you played a Quidditch-esque game underwater, and you could recruit characters all the way through your travels and build up the perfect team. Finally, you would dominate the leagues, the Besaid Aurochs crushing opponents 13-0, the best players swimming circles around opposing athletes like poised porpoises, like modish manatees, like the most stylish of sea-cows. Every player on your team would feature in the top goal scorer rankings, your keeper would never let a goal in; you were invincible, unstoppable, a golden giant of sporting history. Life was never better.

I’m tempted to change the title of this step to “include Blitzball”.

Step ten: Time travel is the only narrative feature worth including

Every story that includes time travel is absolute dynamite. Back to the Future has time travel in it, and I am almost entirely certain The Time Machine features that theme for at least part of the plot.

It’s nice to think that you’re playing a game, you get to the end and suddenly, BOOM, plot twist, YOU ARE YOUR OWN FATHER. NOBODY SAW IT COMING, OR UNDERSTANDS THE LOGISTICS OF IT, BUT THEN BAM, TWIST WITHIN A TWIST, your daughter is your own mother. Cue Japanese outro song a la Kingdom Hearts, and, as the saying I saw in a movie one time goes, that’s the trailer right there. To get your videogame into the annals of history, you need to traverse the annals of history.

Ten steps is all it takes.