I watched the Duke Nukem PR controversy come and go with the passivity of one of those mountaintop gurus you see in New Yorker cartoons. It’s a story as old as time itself: Videogame company writes game, reviewers pan game, PR flacks get pissy. OK, maybe not as old as time itself, but at least as old as Nolan Bushnell.

Then the PR guy behind the vague threats of withheld freebies offered to explain his “brain fart” on Wired.com, and I read the article. I found myself making the same face I do when the cat shoves her ass in my face because I won’t get up to feed her at 5:30 a.m.

I want to make it clear, I had nothing to do with Wired.com’s review of Duke Nukem Forever or the guest column. And, when you get down to it, I think the videogame press as a whole needs fewer perks from deep-pocketed publishers, not more.

Having said that, here’s the long and short of it: A PR flack complaining about unfair representation of a videogame is like a mugger complaining about unsafe working conditions.

They say advertisers sell the sizzle, not the steak. Videogame companies regularly sell not the steak, not the sizzle, but a recording of the sizzle of aged Wagy? steak, the audio captured under ideal acoustic conditions and sweetened with frequencies proven to make people hungry. Then, often as not, they present you with a microwaved hamburger and a promise to remove the bugs — which in this metaphor are actual insects — just as soon as they can.

I don’t write many reviews these days, but as far as I’m concerned, eviscerating shitty games with snappy sarcasm is a public service. If 500 words of my resentment are more entertaining than 10 hours of your game, then you wrote a crappy game.

Nobody enjoys feeling like they’re being paid to tie ribbons on manure.

And let’s get this out of the way: Don’t come crying to me about the hard work of the developers and how they’re being abused by reviewers. You know what developers really hate? Working on crappy games. Nobody enjoys feeling like they’re being paid to tie ribbons on manure. You want happy developers? Let them make the best games they can and present them honestly.

So here’s the deal. I’m all for civility. In any future game reviews, I will completely do away with venom and mockery, but only if the ad agencies do away with exaggeration and hype. If you start lying, I start making vicious, spiteful fun of you.

For example, say your game — I’m not talking about Duke Nukem here, this is a theoretical game — is merely dull. If your ads and press releases are completely honest, I will merely say, “This game is dull. I played it for hours, and it bored me. I would not recommend this game for purchase.”

Now, let’s say you claim your game has 16 hours of gameplay, when any moderately skilled gamer could get through it in, at most, eight hours. You doubled your actual gameplay, I’ll double my invective: “This game bored me to tears. My couch pillows still have gnaw marks. Save your 60 bucks for a complete DVD set of Small Wonder.”

Oh, but those screenshots. Man, those look about twice as nice as the game does actually playing on any reasonable hardware setup. Guess I’ll double down on the derision again. “This game put me to sleep. I had to hire my brother to punch me in the arm every 15 minutes just to keep me from dozing off. Your money would be better spent on a 20-year-old VHS tape of some random kid’s soccer game.”

Oh, yeah, but there are also the features you displayed at E3 that somehow never made it into the final game. And the misleading minimum specs on the side of the box. And the TV campaign that guaranteed the game would remove pain and loneliness from your life. Let’s just call it an even 10x multiplier. You made your game sound 10 times better than it is, so I get to make it sound 10 times worse.

“This game was so bad it put me in the hospital. I’m in the Crappy Game Ward right now with 500cc of Ocarina of Time being pumped into me as an antidote. Don’t buy this game under any circumstance. If you do buy it, don’t play it with small pets in the room — this game is bad enough to kill cockatiels and put gerbils into a coma. You may want to consider destroying any computers or game consoles in the house, just to make sure you don’t ever, even accidentally, play this game for one second.”

Deal?

Photo: Russell Bernice/Flickr