Monthly Archives: March 2006

Battlefield 2142 — Africa is for Europeans???

I’ve never really played the Battlefield games. I’ve got the original Battlefield 1942 around soemwhere and I played Desert Combat at an IU Lanwar a couple years ago, but that is about it.
The new issue of PC Gamer has a cover story about the new Battlefield 2142. It looks fun and all with mechs and stuff. However, I noticed one thing in the article that I found kind of disturbing. The article states:

War will take place over who gets the best of what’s left after a new ice age. While most of the fighting will take place in northern Africa (as only a quarter of the Earth’s surface is still livable under these dire circumstances, mostly centered around the equator), it’s certainly possible that Far East countries might join in the fun in future expansions. The two factions involved are “the American-European Alliance, made up of the American continents and most of Europe,” and the “Pan Asian Coalition, a combination of Russia, the Middle East, and India.”

So the equator is the only place habitable because of the ice age and the Western countries and the Far Eastern countries are fighting it out over the remaining land. Well, that sounds cool and all but last time I looked at a map the equator ran through South American and Africa. Isn’t it odd that there isn’t any mention of THE PEOPLE THAT ALREADY LIVE THERE???? One would think that a game set in Africa would feature, you know, Africans.

Of course this is just a preview and there is very little actual information out about the game, so who knows, maybe EA will suprise me and there actually might be some people from the place where the game actually takes place. Yeah, right. And maybe hell will freeze over too…

Oh snap! PC Gamer just got served!

A few months ago the US version of PC Gamer magazine changed their format. Now they have seperated their previews, reviews, and columns into sections based on genre. It’s interesting, but it raises questions of whether or not they might be throwing junk in just to make sure they have something to fill out that section that month. Apparently not all of the other gaming magazines are impressed with PC Gamer’s new format.
In Computer Gaming World, there is a feature called “5, 10, 15” in which they have little summaries from the magazine 5, 10, and 15 years ago. In the April 2006 issue CGW writes:

1996 – We had a wacky idea to break the entire magazine into sections by game genre. It was like a collection of minimagazines, each kicked off by a columnist followed by news, previews, and reviews. It was a bold, original idea with one problem: where to put the games that defy simple categorization? You could just cram them all into one section that runs the gamut. Or trash the idea altogether… just like we did by 1998.

What I’m playing…

I’m getting ready to write a paper about depictions of race — and in this case distinct species — in the Aliens vs. Predator videogames, so I’m replaying those. (except for the Jaguar version since I donn’t have an Atari Jaguar). I still think the first one is much better than the second one.

I also picked up Quake 4. I liked it. It was better than Doom 3. However, as lotsof others have pointed out, it is really linear with lots of locked doors that you have to unlock. Still, I liked it.

I got the dvd version of Quake 4 because it was the same price as the regualr version. It came with Quake 2 and the expansion packs for it. I’ve never played the the expansion packs, so I might install Quake 2 and find one of the source code mods and play through the expansion pack.

Back from Vancouver… again…

So I got back from presenting at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Vancouver. I had a pretty good time in Vancouver. However, the conference itself wasn’t all that usefull. Suprisingly, there aren’t that many people at a conference primarilly about film that are interested in videogames. Although the society changed its name a few years ago from teh Society for Cinema Studies to the current appellation, I think I heard people at teh conference say “SCS” more than “SCMS” by a factor of two to one. Sure, SCS is easier to say, but one can’t help but feel marginalized when someone says something to the effect that, “We shouldn’t forget television people. They get overlooked to often.” If television people get overlooked at SCMS, then one can only imagine what it is like to primarilly interested in a medium other than film or television!

However, take heart, because all but one of the graduate students from IU presented papers on topics other than film. The conference is going to be in CHicago next year, so I’ll probably go ahead and submit something again. If it was farther away than that, I might not bother. However, the more nonfilm or tv people go, the better. Anyone want to put together a panel for next year?

Also, I’ve added a couple more links to the blogroll on the main page, so be sure to take a look at them. I’ve got the links set for random since I don’t want to be responsible for prioritizing them. However, they are all nice blogs, so check them all out.