Grasshopper Manufacture’s No More Heroes is one of those rare Wii titles that transcends the shovelware stereotype and delivers something fresh, challenging and down-right weird.

Carving out a niche as something of a Quentin Tarantino of game development, Suda 51 is no stranger to pushing the boundaries of mature gaming, creating games full of violence, expletives and sexual suggestion. His latest, No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle blurs the lines of bad taste even further according to age-classification body ESRB. Read on to find out why…

The report can be found on the ESRB website and gives a brief insight into the warped madness gamers can expect from Travis, Shinobu and company when the game lands January 28th.

But to save you time I’ve also posted the full assessment below, as first reported by the great team at VG247.

Here’s a snippet. Try to read on and keep a straight face. Go on, I dare you!

“Cutscenes depict more dismemberment: assassins slicing each other into several pieces in slow-motion, enemies pulling their own heads off, characters displaying trophy-heads on silver platters. These over-the-top depictions of violence account for the Mature rating; they also account for the Intense Violence and Blood and Gore descriptors. The language is strong, too, as characters sometimes use the phrases “f**king a*shole,” “f**khead,” and “You gotta be sh**tin’ me!”

Wow…

Also, here’s a game trailer in case you haven’t seen it yet. Be warned, it’s rather awesome!

The ESRB report:

Players assume the role of Travis, an anime-watching assassin who fights his way through the ranks to become the number-one assassin. Being an assassin means using a retractable katana blade (i.e., a laser sword); it means slicing, chopping, and dismembering human enemies to death in this highly-stylized (somewhat “cartoony”), cell-shaded action game. The depictions of violence in the game are intense, yet somewhat exaggerated: men in black suits are sliced in-half as blood and money flow from their bodies; an assassin with a boombox does not recover after his lower torso has been chopped off—after blood shoots from his empty waist like a geyser; and two women (clad in bikinis) get suspended in mid-air, get caught between the flashing lights, lasers, and frenetic sword swipes of an assassins’ duel—the women’s heads slide across the floor once the men stop fighting. Cutscenes depict more dismemberment: assassins slicing each other into several pieces in slow-motion, enemies pulling their own heads off, characters displaying trophy-heads on silver platters. These over-the-top depictions of violence account for the Mature rating; they also account for the Intense Violence and Blood and Gore descriptors. The language is strong, too, as characters sometimes use the phrases “f**king a*shole,” “f**khead,” and “You gotta be sh**tin’ me!”

The game contains sexual overtones and partial nudity. Players can watch portions of an anime show called Bizarre Jelly; the opening credits depict a female character whose clothes suddenly disappear, revealing her bare buttocks (one-to-two seconds). Game dialogue contains sexual references, including the phrases “dirty nympho,” “the one that’s throbbing,” and “I feel like that pervy teacher in a porn.” Female assassins are depicted in low-cut tops, thongs, short schoolgirl uniforms, and fishnet bondage-style outfits; breasts and buttocks jiggle, and the camera often lingers (there is no equivalent physics applied to male body parts). A couple of cutscenes contain strong sexual innuendo: when characters enter a store, a surprised clerk struggles with his belt buckle and zips up his pants (e.g., “I was just. Uh, doing inventory.”); a woman moves a katana blade in front of a man’s groin, kneels down, and kisses it (the blade), causing the retractable laser to extend. The battery meter for Travis’s sword is always represented by a cartoon-like penis icon in the upper-right corner of the screen: as battery power runs out, the icon starts to shrink—a sad face appears.

contrast by form and materiality

Kingdom of NORWAY

stamp: 3,80 kronor

year: 1998

insect: grasshopper

“When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.”

“Grasshopper! Get your butt back here with my pebble!!”

If you’ve lived in D.C. long enough, you’ve heard of the Chapulines Tacos at Oyamel in Penn Quarter.  It’s an Oaxacan specialty–warm, soft corn tortillas filled with sautéed shallots, garlic, tequila and grasshoppers.

That’s right, grasshoppers.  Like the ones that chirp in your backyard at night.

Low in fat and with up to twice as much protein as beef, insects such as white worms, locusts, and caterpillars have been a part of the regular Oaxacan diet since Aztec times.

Roasted grasshoppers are a popular snack sold at baseball games, like kettle corn.

Did I also mention that I am deeply, irrationally afraid of insects? Ladybugs send me screaming in terror. If I found an ant in my kitchen, I would flee to a friend’s house.  For two days.

So what was I thinking as I headed over to Oyamel? Not much.  I was pretty petrified, but determined for the sake of my craft.

When the little buggers arrived, I have to admit I felt nauseous.  They weren’t gigantic as I expected.  Roasted to a dark brown, they looked little more than shredded meat. Sure they sat atop some tasty-looking guacamole, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that they were looking back at me with those beady little eyes.  All two-hundred of them.

I took a bite and chewed.  The taste was very salty, followed by the tang of tequila and vinegar, perhaps?  The texture was chewy and crunchy.  What I imagined an insect would feel like.  I bit into an upper thigh, and I could hear a pop, like biting into a fennel seed.  Very disturbing, indeed.

Despite the delicious guacamole, sauce, and everything else, I don’t think I’ll be doing that again.  I’ll just stick to other dishes that don’t bug me.

Daylight Simulations were pre-processed and fed into a simple 2-dimensional array. These could then be analysed in real time to study the effects of incoming daylight into space by altering the width and height of apertures on the exterior. Daylight availability is computed on radiance with the geometry being fed in from grasshopper. Results are compiled using VVVV (an extremely rudimentary 2-dimensional array constructed to locate and load images..)

Animation in right corner indicates the scaling of apertures on the North facade of a hypothetical building in New York while the one in center displays the incoming daylight at a height 1m above ground. Radiance rendered interior shots (pseudo-real time ) to follow soon.

Republic of IVORY COAST

stamp: 65 fransc

year: 1979

insect: grasshopper

At least, I’m pretty sure it was dead and not playing possum.

The Dead Grasshopper
02 September 2009
Tiana Beach (bay side), East Quogue, NY

Dominion of NEW ZEALAND

stamp: 40 cents

year: 1997

insect: grasshopper / weta

Does the following joke ring any bells? It should in today’s world!

The Squirrel and The Grasshopper

The Rest of the World Version.

The squirrel works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building and improving his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool, and laughs, dances, and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the squirrel is warm and well fed. The shivering grasshopper has no food or shelter and dies out in the cold.

The End

The Australian Version.

The squirrel works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building and improving his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool, and laughs, dances, and plays the summer away. Come winter, the squirrel is warm and well fed.

A social worker finds the shivering grasshopper, calls a press conference and demands to know why the squirrel should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others less fortunate, like the grasshopper, are cold and starving.

ABC News shows up to provide live coverage of the shivering grasshopper; with cuts to a video of the squirrel in his comfortable warm home with a table laden with food.

The Australian press informs people they should be ashamed that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer, while others have plenty.

The Labour Party, Greenpeace, Animal Rights, and The Grasshopper Housing Commission of Australia demonstrate in front of the squirrel’s house. The ABC, interrupting a cultural festival special from St Kilda with breaking news, broadcasts a multi cultural choir singing ‘We Shall Overcome’.

Bill Shorten rants in an interview with Laurie Oakes that the squirrel got rich off the backs of grasshoppers, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the squirrel to make him pay his ‘fair share’ and increases the charge for squirrels to enter Melbourne city centre.

In response to pressure from the media, the Government drafts the Economic Equity and Grasshopper Anti Discrimination Act, retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The squirrel’s taxes are reassessed. He is taken to court, and fined for failing to hire grasshoppers as builders for the work he was doing on his home, and an additional fine for contempt when he told the court the grasshopper did not want to work.

The grasshopper is provided with a Housing Commission house, financial aid to furnish it, and an account with a local taxi firm to ensure he can be socially mobile. The squirrel’s food is seized and re-distributed to the more needy members of society – in this case the grasshopper.

Without enough money to buy more food, to pay the fine and his newly imposed retroactive taxes, the squirrel has to downsize and start building a new home. The local authority takes over his old home and utilise it as a temporary home for asylum seeking cats who had hijacked a plane to get to Australia as they had to share their country of origin with mice. On arrival they tried to blow up the airport because of Australians’ apparent love of dogs.

The cats had been arrested for the international offence of hijacking and  attempted bombing, but were immediately released because the police fed them pilchards instead of salmon whilst in custody. Initial moves to make them return to their own country were abandoned because it was feared they would face death by the mice. The cats devise and start a scam to obtain money from people’s credit cards.

A 60 Minutes special shows the grasshopper finishing up the last of the squirrel’s food, though spring is still months away, while the Housing Commission house he is in, crumbles around him because he hasn’t bothered to maintain it. He is shown to be taking drugs. Inadequate government funding is blamed for the grasshopper’s drug ’Illness’.

The cats seek recompense in the Australian courts for their treatment since arriving in Australia.

The grasshopper gets arrested for stabbing an old dog during a burglary to get money for his drugs habit. He is imprisoned but released immediately because he has been in custody for a few weeks. He is placed in the care of the probation service to monitor and supervise him. Within a few weeks he has killed a guinea pig in a botched robbery.

A commission of enquiry, that will eventually cost $10 million and state the obvious, is set up.

Additional money is put into funding a drug rehabilitation scheme for grasshoppers.

Legal aid for lawyers representing asylum seekers is increased.

The asylum seeking cats are praised by the government for enriching Australia’s multicultural diversity, and dogs are criticised by the government for failing to befriend the cats.

The grasshopper dies of a drug overdose. The usual sections of the press blame it on the obvious failure of government to address the root causes of despair arising from social inequity and his traumatic experience of prison. They call for the resignation of a minister.

The cats are paid $1 million each because their rights were infringed when the government failed to inform them there were mice in Australia.

The squirrel, the dogs and the victims of the hijacking, the bombing, the burglaries and robberies have to pay an additional percentage on their credit cards to cover losses, their taxes are increased to pay for law and order, and they are told that they will have to work beyond 65 because of a shortfall in government funds.

The End

Like the old cowboy said: “Thur’s truth in them thur wurds!!!!!”

It doesn’t take a dimwit to see the comparison between this tale and the current way of things in many ‘liberalised’ countries with their excess of ‘human rights’ and ‘politically correct’ ideas.

The ways of the modern world are myriad – mostly insane!

Roy.

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I’m intrigued by the possibility of automated morphogenesis in Grasshopper. I imagine the possibility of amassing a set of custom operations that can be strung together in an arbitrary order – a sort of dictionary of formal moves from which to draw. The influence of random inputs to these operations offers the possibility of calculating a wide range of variations from which to select the most appealing or best-performing.

The following represent various results of the same set of formal processes, with different seeds to the random inputs. A fairly wide range of forms is possible from the sequencing of relatively few operations: in this case, the process takes an initial form (a simple box), divides it into a few parallel slices along a random axis, and then rotates those slices independently, before rejoining them into a single form, to be passed through the process again several times.

Habe mich am Wochenende das erstemal mit dem Programm Grasshopper beschäftigt und hier sind die ersten Ergebnisse einer “Turm”-Genese…nach einem Tutorial das ich im Netz gefunden habe

On the Grasshopper and the Cricket

By John Keats

The poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,

And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;

That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead

In summer luxury,—he has never done

With his delights; for when tired out with fun

He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills

The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,

And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,

The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

Republic of CHINA (TAIWAN)

stamp: 7,00 $

year: 1997

insect: grasshopper - Phyllophorina kotoshoensis