I love swords.  I’ve been a sword geek my whole life, and I collect replica swords and enjoy studying how they were used and by whom.  So of course, I’m familiar with Cold Steel.  They’re a company that makes knives, swords, and other weapons, and by most accounts their stuff is of good quality, if a bit pricey.  I’ve been tempted several times to buy a few of their knives, and I always enjoy looking through their online catalog to see what crazy weapon they’re making now.

In the interweb community, however, Cold Steel’s biggest claim to fame is perhaps their test cutting videos.  They do one for almost every one of their knives and swords, and they show various employees of the company cutting, stabbing and slicing various objects to show the effectiveness of their products.

These videos are, even by product promotion standards, completely over the top.  My favorite of the lot, though, is the one below, for the Chinese War Sword.

It starts off in standard Cold Steel style, with a still picture of the product and a dramatic voice over explaining just how awesome it is.  Note the dude says this sword will “shear through armor as if it were butter, not to mention mere flesh and bone.”  Ok, no it won’t.  Not unless by “armor” you mean “motorcycle jacket”.  It could probably severely wound a man in chain armor, especially if you caught him completely unawares, but it wouldn’t do more than dent plate armor, of that I am certain.  NO sword ever went through armor as if it were butter (no, not even the katana).  Nobody would have worn the stuff if it were that ineffective.  Also, remember that “mere flesh and bone” bit for later.

The video then goes into some rather standard cutting demonstrations.  Bamboo poles, rolled up tatami mats, ropes.  I just love how Lynn Thompson (President of Cold Steel) seems to insist on doing these test cutting videos in a shirt and tie.  It’s surreal.  I imagine him sitting in his corner office doing some paperwork, maybe having a meeting with some supplier or distributor, when he gets buzzed by his secretary.  “Mr Thompson, you’re wanted downstairs.  They’re ready to shoot the Chinese War Sword promotional video.”  So he winds down the meeting, excuses himself, and goes downstairs to hack apart sides of beef in his business wear.

Oh, did I not mention the sides of beef?  Well, if you’ve already watched it, you know the video continues to up the ante, moving on from the more standard test cutting fare to more, shall we say, interesting things.  At about the 2:20 mark, the famous Cold Steel “boot full of meat” makes its appearance.  I love that one.  I wonder whose job it is to stuff the boot full of meat scraps before every video?  I bet they make the rookies do that as a hazing ritual.

At 2:38 they chop apart some kind of freaking skull on a pole.  What is that, a cow skull?  I’m not even sure.  Anyway, remember how the dude earlier in the video made a crack about “mere flesh and bone”?  Note how it does NOT go through that skull.  It makes a nice cut, but it does not “shear through it like butter”.  If it can’t go through flesh and bone (despite what they insinuated earlier), what makes them think it’s going to go through steel?  After the skull, Lynn quickly takes apart a plywood pirate, and then it quickly goes back to what everybody wants to see.  BEEF.  Lynn demolishes a rack of ribs in three powerful chops.  Man, now I’m hungry.  Nothing sells me on a sword more than a beefy man chopping through beef!

At 3:08 we get perhaps the most bizarre bit of test cutting ever.  A vicious basketball is chopped cleanly in half by the impressive Chinese War Sword!  Yeah, a basketball.  Seriously, watch it for yourself, I wouldn’t dream of making this shit up.  I haven’t any idea what this was supposed to prove, but there you go.  If you ever wanted to know what the inside of a basketball looks like, here’s your chance.  After the basketball, there’s some more bamboo, and then another of Cold Steel’s old standbys–at 3:32 they chop through the “trash bag full of meat wearing a denim jacket.”  This one is especially dumb, since even in slow motion it’s not clear the sword did much more than just chop through a denim jacket and a trash bag  and push aside some meat scraps.  All the meat just kind of falls out onto the floor, and it’s rather unimpressive.

There’s a lot more stuff (plastic trash cans full of Gatorade, soda cans, soda bottles, all demolished to a pulse pounding metal beat!) until finally, at around 5:00, we get the pièce de résistance:

Have you watched it yet?  You’re not just reading this in lieu of watching it, are you?  Because seriously, you need to watch the video.  I do my best to entertain, but I know my limits, and I know that just describing the final bit of the video isn’t going to do it justice.  I mean, I’m going to do it anyway.  But I want to make sure you’ve seen it for yourself first.  Because really.  You need to.

Ok, finally, the pièce de résistance.  Two pig carcasses, hung side by side, are methodically chopped in half, then chopped in half again, then beheaded.  I’m sure this is probably illegal in some states.  It also seems like rather a waste of good pork, but I suppose they could have picked the meat up off the floor and hosed it off afterwords.  I was actually sort of impressed with this bit until I realized the carcasses have been gutted and cleaned already.  Still, a clean cut through both pigs with one blow!  Man, if this thing didn’t cost the world, I’d buy one right now!  It’s good to know that I could kill a charging wild pig with one blow, all while wearing a shirt and tie!

So the other day I blogged about some shit having to do with a two year old video game.  Said video game, Fallout 3, had pissed me off with some questionable morals.  Well, I finally finished Fallout 3, and now I’m pissed about something else entirely.  Namely, I’m pissed about the very end of the game.

The entire focus of the game is something called Project Purity.  The main character’s father and several other NPCs in the game worked on the Project for some time back in the day, but failed to get it running and so abandoned it.  The intent of the Project was to mass-purify the irradiated water in the area surrounding the purifier, thus providing clean water to everybody in the area for the first time in over 200 years.

Of course, this being a video game, there are bad guys that want to control the purifier for their own nefarious purposes.  The very end of the game is a fairly cool sequence where you mount an attack on the bad guys who have taken over the purifier, take control of it yourself, and then decide what to do with it.  In order to provide some tension, however, it is revealed that the purifier’s power systems were damaged in the fighting, and it needs to be turned on right the hell now or it will explode (whoever heard of having to turn something ON because it is damaged??)  The problem is, the control room that has the “on” switch is heavily irradiated.  Anybody who goes in there will die.  Ok, I liked Wrath of Khan too, but can we not copy the ending please?

The hell of it is, when Spock sacrifices himself at the end of Wrath of Khan, that’s an actual thing that has to be done or lots of people will die.  And somebody does indeed have to sacrifice himself in order to prevent this.  Spock’s whole ethical belief system basically requires him to make this sacrifice, and he does, and everybody cries, and it’s a great fucking ending.

Now, I bet some of you are bracing yourself, waiting for me to explain why I don’t think “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” and how it’s bullshit that the only “good” way to end the game is to sacrifice yourself.  Well, buck up!  I’m not going to do that.  Sacrificing yourself to directly save countless lives is something I consider noble, and if faced with a clear situation like the one in Wrath of Khan or the (more contrived) one in Fallout 3, I’d like to think I could be the hero.  No, there’s something far more pernicious about the ending that I’m going to bitch about, and it has to do with this guy right here.

Meet Fawkes.  He’s a super mutant.  You meet him earlier in the game (just about one main-quest mission before the endgame, actually) and if you’re playing the hero, you probably freed him from his prison and let him go.  If you did so, you found out something special about Fawkes.  He is highly resistant to radiation.  In fact, part of what he offers you in exchange for freeing him is his services in retrieving the game’s macguffin from where it rests inside a highly irradiated room.  See, he knows you’ll probably die if you go in there to get it yourself, so he offers to retrieve it for you if you let him out.

Furthermore, if you free Fawkes, he returns later in the game to help you out, and offers his services as a follower.  In fact, it’s rather hard not to end up with Fawkes as a follower at that point, since something happens just prior to that point that causes all your other followers to disappear and go back to their home bases, waiting for you to come around again and re-hire them.  So there’s really no reason not to take Fawkes with you at that point, at least for a little bit.  And if, like me, you went right from that point into the endgame, Fawkes is there with you when you must make this awful choice to either sacrifice yourself or let someone else do so in order to save Project Purity.

Now those of you who have been paying attention may have noticed something rather important in what I’ve just written.  It sure didn’t escape me while I was playing!  In case you missed it, though, here it is laid out for you:

1.  There is a control room full of dangerous radiation that somebody must enter in order to save countless lives.

2.  Fawkes is essentially immune to radiation.

Do you see it now?  After briefly mulling over these facts, I came up with what I thought was the correct answer:  Send Fawkes in to press the button!

It seems perfectly logical, doesn’t it?  If you’ve been playing the hero, you saved this guy who would normally be your enemy.  In return, he helped you out a bit, and offered his further services later on.  This is your way out of the dilemma!  This is your reward for playing the hero the whole game–you get to live!  Everybody gets to live!

Not so fast, sunshine.

Here’s what really happens.  You turn to Fawkes.  You ask him to enter the control room and flip the switch for you, since, hey, you’ll goddamn die if you have to do it yourself.  And he refuses.  That’s right.  He says no.  Not because it will hurt him (because it wont).  Not because he thinks it’s a bad idea (he doesn’t, apparently) or for any other reason that makes any kind of fucking sense.  No, he refuses, because it is “your destiny” and he doesn’t want to deny you that.

What?  Fuck you Fawkes!  I’ll decide what my goddamn destiny is!  And I’ve just decided it’s NOT to die here needlessly if there is another, perfectly good option to take!  And hey, look–there is one!  I don’t have to send another fragile human in, either, to die in my place–I can ask the guy who will not be hurt by the radiation to help!

But no, Fawkes knows best.  He knows my destiny, and my destiny is to go in there and get fried.  Thanks a ton, man.

So yes, another hearty FUCK YOU to the designers of Fallout 3, who couldn’t be bothered to come up with a non-shitty reason why Fawkes (or Charon, the ghoul follower you can have, or that robot dude who can become your follower if you’re non-good) can’t go into the chamber for you.  I would have accepted “It’s too much radiation, even for me” or something like that.  But no, he mutters some shit about goddamn destinies, and fuck me anyhow for asking.

Can you imagine how goddamn awful Wrath of Khan would be if there were an established character on the Enterprise who was immune to radiation?  And if this guy had, earlier in the movie, retrieved some important object from a huge room full of radiation so that Kirk wouldn’t have to?  And then at the end,  if Spock turns to him and said “logically, Ensign ImmuneToRadiation should go in there and do the thing with the warp core that needs doing” the guy said “I’m sorry Spock, I can’t do that.  It’s your destiny to go in there and die so we can make Search for Spock.  So go on, get in there bub!”  Would that be a satisfactory ending?

The hell of it is, if you purchased and installed the first downloadable expansion for Fallout 3, you CAN ask Fawkes (or Charon, or the robot) to go into the chamber for you.  Because hey, there wouldn’t be much point to an expansion if you can’t fucking play it because you’re DEAD.