Jacob Swanson, Matthew Marrange and Steve Hoffenbachall’s plans to have a World of Warcraft LAN party were spoiled today by the unwanted appearance of Raphael Miller.

Raphael, who according to Jacob’s description was “sipping a PBR and wearing weird Grandma glasses that definitely weren’t prescription,” made little effort to make the LAN party a success.

“He just kept saying things like: ‘All good games are either vintage or those independently-made games you can download for Wii and the PS3.’  And that the only game with any ‘artistic merit’ that came out recently was Fallout 3 – ‘it was most definitely inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.”

Matthew recounted other “diatribes this shit-eater went on” like:

“The most recent game I liked was Shadow of the Colossus, obvi.  It’s the only one with any artistic value.  It toys with a narrative form that is rarely explored in video games.  By the end, you become the very monster you set out to destroy.  It’s reminiscent of Cloud’s unreliable narration in Final Fantasy 7.  He’s actually a clone of Sephiroth!  Could you guys believe that? That’s deeper than anything else going on in WoW.”

“When we asked him to name a game that was just fun to play instead of artsy, he got really excited” grumbles Jacob, “his response was something like ‘Of course, dude!  The original Donkey Kong is one of the hardest yet simplest games ever.  You can’t get better than that!  Or Pitfall…Pitfall was the Shizz-nit.’”

“When I asked why he didn’t like any Mario games” said Steve, “he yelled ‘LAMESAUCE!’ and then he pulled out a Believer Magazine with a bunch of visual art that the editors picked and said that Mario Art would be featured in a lot of conceptual studio pieces this coming year in New York.  Then he spent a really long time explaining that he couldn’t really articulate it quite right, but German Expressionism had a heavy influence on some ‘art games’ that were coming out this season.  He said: ‘Like that Wii game Sadness…Some of it looks like those wood cuts by Mengele.’”

“When we told him that Joseph Mengele was the famous Nazi doctor, and NOT a profound expressionist painter, he claimed that there was a different artist whose name sounded like Mengele, and if we would stop playing for one minute he could find the article on Wikipedia that he had read about it.  When we refused to do so, he sulked, and buttoned up his flannel shirt over another shirt that he designed himself but failed to sell at a block-long yard sale in front of his apartment building.

“It was like an Atari logo, but retarded,” said Jacob.

“You’d think that would have embarrassed him enough,” said Matt, “but he just kept going on and on saying things like: ‘Did you guys hear that Steven Spiellberg wanted to do much more with Boom Blox as a game?  See, originally he wanted a hand in Minority Report the game, and Activision put him on the backburner, so he made that extremely shitty Boom Blox game out of spite.  Did you guys hear about that?’ and ‘I read that the Fleet Foxes might write all the music for the next Zelda game.’  Then when we asked who the Fleet Foxes were he laughed in our faces!”

“After he talked for awhile about how WoW was ‘derivative of nearly every game that came before it’ Raphael claimed (genuinely, I think), ‘I’m getting a tattoo of Echo the Dolphin!’”

“When we asked why the fuck he would do that, he claimed ‘Because it’s one of the greatest games ever!  For serious!  Echo the Dolphin: it’s like so over-produced, it’s not.’”

Additional reporting from Hardcasual’s own Daniel Wilbur.