This week's episode of House M.D. features a game developer who succumbs to a mysterious disease, natch. In the episode's opening scene, he's in crunch mode, just three months before his game is supposed to ship. His team consists of two dudes playtesting the game, one of whom observes "the code is a little janky". It's akin to "tightening up the graphics on level three".

The episode sports typically implausible footage of the game itself, created for an audience who wouldn't know a videogame from a cutscene. This game is about a monkey, a lizard, and a catman fighting swarms of bats, ideally with a megablaster (pictured). It's played using a VR visor, a rifle peripheral, and some sort of Natal-style body sensor. Dig it:

Two random people can walk in off the street and start playing three months before it ships. The developer is also apparently an animator. At one point, he explains that he dissected (!) birds to get the animation right. During a scene in which he has fevered hallucinations, he imagines the real world is the game world. He wields a 32 ounce soda as a grenade, managing a direct hit on Omar Epps that would have gibbed him.

During the episode's weekly diagnosis puzzle, the afflicted game developer references his penis, calling it a joystick. For the record, TV people, no one has used a joystick since the 90s.

The last instance of gamespotting on House was accidentally a good one. This instance has no such luck. It's just another embarrassing example of how videogaming looks to the staff of a TV show who doesn't know any better, glibly delivered to viewers who don't know any better either. The name of the episode is fitting: "Epic Fail".

(Thanks Cornbread!)