Here you will find the second guest review ever featured on my site. Not so much a review as it is a PSA, please welcome my brother Jamey Scerpella as he delves into the video game series No More Heroes. He was very adamant about editorial control being at a minimum and thusly what he wrote is what you get. Without further adieu then...
No More Heroes 2 is a love letter to guys my age. The kind of love letter that can't help but murder its intended recipient, while thinking up imaginative new shapes for electric guitars. No More Heroes 2 is like if a rock viper wore a leather jacket, and then slept with your girlfriend. No More Heroes 2 is the kind of game that I talk about with my friend Jim and when someone overhears us and asks, "Oh, how is that?", the most cerebral thing we can simultaneously think to respond with is, "::sigh::... it's really fucking cool." If you're reading this right now and are thinking, "I don't know, I need some proof it's that cool", you're in luck, because there's an "x" button in the corner of this browser. This game is so manly that the disc itself wears a muscle shirt, and doesn't care that you can see its back hair.
To start, the basic premise of No More Heroes 1 is that you are Travis Touchdown and you've recently won a beam katana off an internet auction. After receiving the weapon, Travis proceeds to locate and murder the world's top ranked assassins, naturally, at the suggestion of some girl he met in a bar. The combat is, in a word, super fucking violent, otherwise labeled, as most parents know, "cool." You basically run into a crowd of people and start swinging until the game prompts you to finish them off. To do this, you can use a bad-ass wrestling move, or just cut them in half. In battle, in order to charge your weapon, you have to jerk it off. The image of this dude masturbating a lightsaber, is something I never knew I would identify with. In order to facilitate this particular sociopathic neurosis, which I can only assume is called "super-multiple homicide," Travis takes on odd jobs of a suprememly mundane nature (collecting coconuts, filling up gas, picking up garbage). Once Travis has approximately enough money to take on the next assassin, he goes on a killing spree ending with his target, a complete fucking stranger, the goal being that eventually he'll be ranked number 1. The reason this concept is so appealing to me, is because I was raised right.
Travis himself is a narcicist. In fact, one of the (only) distractions from the game's central theme of "work only as hard as you have to until you can buy killing someone" is a dress-up game. You can visit a clothing shop and, granted you've gathered enough coconuts to have some extra spending money after "The Most Dangerous Game" tax, you can buy rather expensive clothes. This may be the only time, outside of selecting which ribbon Chimchar should wear to the Pokemon beauty pagent, that I have ever willfully engaged in a dressup game, and done it with a smile on my face, no less. And the manner of clothes that is available to Travis, is nothing short of breathtaking. Some highlights: a shirt depicting a thonged ass which reads, "Miami Bass"; another shirt sporting a pair of tits, which aptly reads, "Love Tits"; blood-stained pants; assorted jackets, and so on.
The last, and possibly the only logical plot point, is that the girl who recommended going after the assassins in the first place, is a total cock tease. After, dispatching one assassin, Travis meets with the girl (Sylvia Christel) and attempts to bed her. Just as he's about to summon a mushroom, she stops him and barters, the seemingly reasonable deal, that if Travis becomes the number one killer, she will then uncross her legs for him. Slut. Travis tucks his blue, heartless testicles back into his pants, and is reinvigorated on his quest to murder countless innocents standing just in front of paid assassins.
The game itself is peppered with little references that make me feel like I'm not all alone in the universe. There's an unlockable 2-D bullet-hell game called "Glastonbury", that just fucks my shit up, everytime. Travis is an anime otaku, wrestling fanatic, and the proud owner of a cat with a people name (Jeane). I myself (like many my age) have been raised on the trite, ambiguous Japanese insights into humanity's desire to never give up, ever. I own a Macho Man Bash'n'Brawler, as well as a VHS tape of his greatest hits; I'm not gay. And Jeff sits quietly beside me even now, purring; his eyes barely open; mocking me with his coy permanent cat smile.
What really tickles my vas deferens is that this game calls to something (i-n-a-l-l-o-f-u-s) specifically in me. Monotonously working dead end, nowhere jobs until you have enough money to pay someone to tell you where you can kill someone and not rat you out, all in the pale hopes that if you kill enough people, some barfly will have sex with you(ain't that always the case?);meanwhile, in the interim, watching old wrestling tapes and driving around town, with total disregard for traffic law, on your oversized motorcycle "Schpeltiger"? That sounds like it was ripped out of my autobiography, "The Anatomy of Romance: Can Robots Remember?"
Oh, and by the way, this game has the best ending ever conceived by man's lizard brain. I'm convinced that the only way this ending can exist is if it was written by 100 George Washingtons* feverishly typing on 100 Truth Typewriters, which can only print childlike innocence, all while World War 3 wages on, as the world's super-powers ravage the land for the newest fossil fuel: George Washington's fingers. This is how you end a video game (or any fictional work). Not like that pussy Halo 3 ending where Master Chief finds out that from years of using alien technology he's developed a debilitating case of agoraphobia, and as he holds his Commanding Officer for no less than 17 minutes, Chief looks up from under his running mascara, and he wimpers out, "I can never go to space again." Meanwhile Samus Aran's screw attacking from planet to planet getting the upgrades knocked out of her every time she lands, and she just stands up, brushes herself off, and says, "Gonna need a Grappling Hook to get that missile expansion... better go get those upgrades."
The game's plot is so good, that they figured, "If we're gonna make a sequel, we might as well use the same plot." The same God-damn plot. Travis wants to be No. 1. Gotta beat the top ranked. It's the same. And it. Is fucking. sweet.
If you've never played No More Heroes 1, go get educated. If you don't have a Wii, go find the nearest light-socket and marry it in God's eyes, because without the system you're even further from His judgmental stare than an abortion. (God: "Way to live, fetus." Fetus: "I tried my be--" "God: "PURGATORY!")
When I saw the first trailer for No More Heroes 1, I smiled for 3 weeks. After seeing the trailer for No More Heroes 2 I can't stop repainting my bedroom walls any one of 3 colors: semen, nosebleed, or poetry. I hereby bestow the rank of "A+(copyright)" to the game No More Heroes, which is the same rating that, in a double-whammy decision, I've also given to No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, which has the rock solid release date of "TBA 2010."
No More Heroes- A+
No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle - A+
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Trailer 1
Trailer 2
* (George Washington is a time traveling psycho-bandit who repairs tears in space-time, as well as adopting several pseudonyms with which to go back in time and write the most important works of fiction of all time [because if he doesn't write them, how can they exist?]; also, according to conflicting reports, he may or may not have been America's first President. He also invented the peanut.)
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