Julian Dibbell
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Battlezone 2 

StC: 119 seconds

Notes: Follow Lt. Shabayev. She will take you to the crates.

Comments:

Chet: I didn’t think we’d ever find the crates.

erik: I knew we would because I believe in myself. I’m high on life. I’m so high on life, I shouldn’t be allowed to drive, if I wasn’t already not allowed to drive for other reasons.

Chet: Me too. What about you Kevin?

Kevin: I’m high on heroin.

erik: Is that like hugs?

Kevin: Kind of, but you’re being hugged from the inside. Imagine being high on life, except you’re actually high. And unlike life, you don’t die at the end. Usually.

From Old Man Murray’s Crate Review System, which introduced the world’s first and last 100% scientific video-game reviewing system, the infallible “Start to Crate” (StC) metric: count the seconds from start of game till appearance of the first obligatory crate. The lower the StC, the shittier the game. (OMM’s Chet and erik, I am told, went on to work at Valve, where they wrote much of the dialogue for Portal. If there is some kind of lifetime-achievement award for the games industry, these guys got it coming. If there is not, I hereby invent it and declare it shall be called the Old Man Murray.)