I first heard the name of Earnest Cavalli when he beat me for that staff position at Game|Life. Sure, I was a little bitter at first, but I got over that when I found out just how awesome he is. Since then, I’ve really dug his work on both Game|Life and The Escapist.

Earnest recently turned in a review for King of Fighters XII, only to have it rejected as “awesome but too batshit insane to publish.” Which I do understand, The Escapist is a quality site, and they maintain some pretty rigorous style standards. I read over the article and thought that it was both awesome and fit right in on our little site, so I offered to publish it as a guest review.

This review was too insane for The Escapist. Read on and find out if it is too insane for you.

You can write a game review in a lot of different ways, but one thing you can’t do is turn a game review into a novel. Anything else, from stories tapped out by the avian fingers of Japanese commuters to screeds penned by erudite, more-ivory-than-thou Manhattanites for initial publication in the WASP rag du millennium The New Yorker can be segued into at least a paperback deal and a choice spot at Borders, but gaming reviews simply do not function as novels. Too bad too, as I already had a title picked out for my entry into the nascent genre: “The King of Fighters XII is …”

Since I’ve already shared my title, I’m going to ask you all to indulge me a bit as I lay out my grand scheme for this masterwork. See, much like SNK Playmore’s plans for King of Fighters XII, I see this novel as introducing my worldly, hyper-urbane, oft-post-humanist insights to a wide audience who have, for so long, suffered unduly under the asinine, childish reviewsmithing of such men as INSERT WHOEVER I CAN GET TO AGREE TO THIS GAG HERE and that fast talking English guy. Where KoFXII plants fertile seeds in fields once owned solely by the Capcoms of the world, I too will sprout new buds of literary insight into what makes this game tick, how fast it ticks, whether it ticks with a danceable rhythm, and if said ticking ever begins to lag due to poor network code.

Now that you’ve all forcibly assumed the role of my erstwhile literary agent, I can start dropping some cold, hard science. The first page — and this is incredibly important — the first page will include the words “The King of Fighters XII is …” in striking, bold letters. The more striking the better. We really want this thing to stand out. And don’t get all twee on me and try to Helvetica the whole thing all to hell, alright? This book is going to be held up against such classics of American word-wizardry as Huxley’s Brave New World and that book Nabokov wrote about touching little girls! I want to see Times New … no wait …. Times OLD Roman! Yeah! Times ARAMAIC! Got that?

Alright. So we’ve restated the title, and right after the ellipsis I want — are you ready for this? — absolutely nothing. What? I’m totally serious! Yes, there’s going to be more words later, but for the first 16 or 17 pages I want blank white emptiness.

Look, you wouldn’t understand it, alright? It’s a technique I learned while smoking hash with Twiggy and Leonard Bernstein in Venice in ‘67. Lenny — that’s what I called him — he’d use these vast empty spaces to convey a true lack of content, that in and of itself would reflect back on the reader and make them wonder at the emptiness of their own lives. Twiggy just thought they made nice spaces to color on. She was a little dense. But pretty. Oh yes. Very pretty.

But dense.

Alright, so you have all that? “The King of Fighters is …” and then 16 pages of nothing. Yeah. Exactly. Have you even actually played this game? It’s a perfect metaphor! Picture this: kid walks into a game store, plops down $60 that he stole form the local ROTC recruitment center — Yes, I think these kids WOULD want to show solidarity with the efforts of the Argentine Marxists! Have you not read anything I’ve written?!

Anyway, this kid, let’s call him Jacob (after my father, the Rabbi) — Jacob buys his copy of KoFXII, runs home and jams it into his Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. It doesn’t matter which. He watches the opening cinematic, is wowed by the gorgeous high-definition graphics — themselves a subtle nod to the Times Aramaic opening line from the novel (I think) — and settles back for what he thinks is going to be a weekend of beating the hell out of the legions of characters SNK has created for the King of Fighters games over the years. He’s smiling, the sun is shining, everything is happiness, rainbows and whatever else that hack Kincade fills his incessantly idiotic paintings with.

That’s when he — mirroring our dear reader — hits a wall of nothingness. The latter sees a bundle of blank pages and the former, sees 22 characters and 5 stages. Don’t get me wrong Phil — I can call you Phil, right? — the pages are going to be fantastic, thick card stock, and those 22 characters and 5 stages are all gorgeously animated, rendered and seem to represent the most beloved characters from throughout the series’ 15 years in existence, but that’s still gonna sting. Suddenly Jacob is wondering how much of his life is going to be filled with this kind of bait n’ switch, shell game tactics. He wonders if maybe his parents are really his parents or if mommy really did fall down the stairs that night that daddy was shouting.

But his spirits aren’t quite crushed just yet, and our readers are hoping this boy — and their faith in humanity (and myself as an author) isn’t entirely misplaced.

The reader finally gets past that initial block of nothing metaphorically just as Jacob finds the “Online” gameplay option mode. Can you see where this is going Phil? No, of course you can’t. You don’t have a beret. I’ll explain: Jacob attempts to play a few matches over the Xbox Live network or the PlayStation Network and every single match is riddled with lag.

Here in the novel, around page 34, I think we should figure out a way to include those scratch and sniff stickers. You know the kind. Yeah. With soothing scents. Maybe oranges and cinammon and matzoh. Something like that. The idea here is that not everything in the online component is terrible. Much as we’ve thrown the reader a bone — can we get bone-scented stickers? Check on that Phil — SNK Playmore decided to throw those who purchased KoFXII a bone in the form of a patch which they released on launch day. In theory the patch was supposed to fix all those lag issues poor Jacob ran into, but like our stickers — make sure we get them on the cheap — the patch is only effective about half the time.

Now you have our metaphorical protagonist — who may or may not actually exist as a character within the novel, and may even be a thinly veiled allusion to Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch” ideal (only we need to be sure to distance ourselves from all the latter-day Nazi subtext — make a note of that too) — enjoying maybe one in every three matches. For those few moments the game, despite its lack of characters, lack of backgrounds and lack of gameplay options really lives up to its promise as a quality new-generation 2-D fighter. Then, like the cheap stickers (again Phil, I can’t stress this enough, we need CHEAP stickers), the smell fades and you’re left wading through fights that feel as if they were played over cheap Radio Shack-brand 56K modems circa 1999.

Oh! And your nebbish moneygrubbing pals in the back will love this bit: We’ll also include an order form where readers can buy more stickers (to be delivered at some unknown date). This, of course, will mirror SNK Playmore’s promise of further patches to amend the lag issues that weren’t quite fixed by that first patch.

Alright, now where are we? Around page 50 or so? Good. This is where the review novel (Rovel? Reviel? Let’s work on that.) really gets good. Once you actually get past all the tricks and gimmicks that the game and its corresponding review novelization (Reviewilization? No, that’s gauche.) you’re just left with the actual fighting game engine. That part of the game is actually pretty solid. I like the characters included, I like how each of them handles, and the new techniques are pretty solid.

The Critical Counter system, for instance, is a pretty novel idea. The game’s manual — which I’m almost convinced was ghostwritten by Walt Whitman — explains it thusly: “a Critical Counter can occur if you counterattack with a strong punch or kick at close range.” If you manage to pull it off, and it’s almost as easy as it sounds, you get a satisfying green explosion, your opponent is stunned for almost a full second, and you can launch into a brutal combo attack that does very significant damage. Landing a full Critical Counter into a combo is even more satisfying than Street Fighter IV’s Ultra Combo system, if only by virtue of its increased difficulty.

I’d like to fill these pages of the review book with intricate drawings of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon as a not-so-subtle paralell to the glories of what could have been, but the Baylonians are notoriously litigious where their copyrights are concerned. Instead, we’ll just swipe some leftover pages from Atlas’ The Monkey And The Bear and call it good.

So that’s it Phil. The whole novel. Well, the whole review laid out as a novel which is itself a working simulacrum representation of the (many) flaws and (few) triumphs of King of Fighters XII. Did you want to pay me by check or can you just give me the bones of Joseph Pulitzer right now?

Earnest Cavalli’s first novel “The King of Fighters XII is…” will be appearing in fine fictional bookstores throughout the United States and Europe in the Spring of 2010.