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“Johnson, what’s your status?”
“I think I’m an underground… SPACE MONKEY?”
The trailer for The Undergarden, Atari’s whimsical game now in release on several platforms, takes a satirical approach to the dominance of the first-person shooter. the trailer’s thrash metal and testosterone-raked barking gives way to twee chimes and laughter as, one by one, grunts pop out of their gritty world of corridors and trashed streets and find themselves morphed into bouncy gremlins contentedly pollinating luminous flowers. I haven’t played Undergarden, so I can’t attest to the game itself (although advance word is good). But their light take on the grim world of the shooters is welcome. (Of course the new advertisement for Call of Duty: Black Ops, in which Kobe Bryant, Jimmy Kimmel, and a mob of working stiffs “relax” by gleefully going postal, may offer the more biting satire of its own genre.)
