Monthly Archives: July 2006

I thought everything was on the internets???

The tubes, the tubes, won’t someone think of the tubes?
Back in 2001-2002 TBS used to show a latenight block of programming from the Burly Bear network that was apparently shown on college campuses. On that late night block there was a lot of crap, but there was also one of the best videogame-related shows I’ve seen: Dave and Steve’s Video Game Explosion.

Well, Burly Bear died (apparently it got acquired by National Lampoon) and Dave and Steve was lost to the sands of time.

I can’t believe that in this era of youtube and google video that I can’t find any episodes of this show online somewhere. All I can find is archive.org’s cache of the tbs page and two lonely images:
daveandsteve.jpgdavestevepic2.jpg

How am I supposed to satisy my lame urge to college every videogame related program I can find, if I can’t find it?

Realistically, however, it does illistrate the difficulties of being interested in studying this kind of ephemera. If you don’t record it and keep a copy of it when you see it, it might be gone. Recently, I was able to contact MSNBC and get a copy of the episode of when Henry Jenkins was on Donahue’s MSNBC show but in a case like Burly Bear where it has gone out of business, how likely is it that National Lampoon will even know what I’m talking about, let alone be willing to help me?

The moral of the story is, RECORD EVERYTHING!!!!

I’m starting to get

I’m starting to get worried that something might have happened to Jack Thompson.
First, in Louisiana a judge, refused to permit controversial Miami attorney Jack Thompson to file an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in the case over the legality over the anti-violent videogame law Thompson co-authored. We all assumed that Jack would immediately respond with his normal flurry of press released claiming that the videogame industry was so afraid of him that they had to bribe the judge to keep him off the case.
Now, an Indiana teenager has shot at people and killed one person. A teenager kills someone? If anything calls out for Jack’s attention it is that. And still nothing!
Maybe he’s too busy working on that fancy new website to notice these events. If Jack won’t think of the children by sending out inflammatory press releases who will?

Duke Nukem to Use PhysX card?

Here’s my first ever bit of rumor mongering!
It has previously been reported that Duke Nukem Forever is going to use the Meqon physics engine. Well, last year, Meqon was purchased by AGEIA. Now AGEIA is the maker of the PhysX physics accelerator card. So putting 2 and 2 together seems to me to lead to the conclusion that Duke Nukem Forever will use the PhysX card.
Of course that all depends on whether or not Duke Nukem ever comes out and if AGEIA is still around when Duke Nukem Forever finally comes out…

Again I ask, “What does ‘Cinematic’ mean???”

With Valve’s supercargo announcement of Teem Fortress 2 not only still existing but coming out fairly soon, and with the rebirth and release of Prey, it seems that all we need to bring on the End Times is the release of Duke Nukem Forever.
One other thing was mentioned along with the Valve announcement that confused me. As is usually, Valve bragged about graphic upgrades for Episode 2, something I’ve previously speculated about. One of those features was “cinematic physics.” So what is so “cinematic” about explosions? People always say such and such is a very cinematic game and I have yet to know what they are talking about except when they are talking about a cut scene or lens flare. Especially since Half-life never breaks from the First-Person I don’t know what “cinematic explosions” could mean unless they are just talking about, “over the top.”
I’ve discussed my confusion over “cinematic” before and I”m still not clear on what people mean when they say that. THe only thing I’ve seen is this very interesting article about some of the explicitly cinematic effects in the Source engine which use things such as motion blur, film grain, and color correction. But I don’t think that is what people are thinking about when they normally say something is “cinematic” is it? Just like the answer to that eternal question, “Just how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” the answer to “What does ‘Cinematic’ mean?” may very well be, “The world may never know.”

Samouraïs Movie Review

Several months ago I was home at my parent’s home and on Showtime Beyond and I caught the end of a weird kung fu movie with some videogame elements. Curious I bought the dvd. Now, after sitting on my pile of films to watch I have finally watched that dvd. That movie is the French produced Samouraïs (i’m trying some fancy and yet shameless Amazon affiliate link thingy here. If you click on there and buy it I”ll get 8¢!).
Basically, like most French produced kung fu movies, of which this is the only one I’m aware, it is pretty weird. The reviews are not kind. Basically, there is a demon who was brought to Earth 500 years ago, which gives us a chance for some samurai action — hense the title — and then we go to the present day where the demon is going to be reborn into the ancestor of the person that brought the demon to Earth in the first place. That woman happens to be in France where she runs into our generic hero and his highly irritating sidekick. I’m sure that said sidekick will soo bee sued by Dustin Diamond for stealing his Screech character and demeaning it of all self-respect.
The videogame part comes in when the generic hero’s little brother plays a game based on the demon and takes control of the generic hero so that he can beat the demon. The game looks like original PlayStation-era graphics but, for once, videogames aren’t shown as evil or negative. In fact they are the only way that the demon is beaten.
Without the videogame content, the film is very forgettable. With it, it is only interesting as a footnote. I give it three thumbs up.
And now, my trademarked review haiku:
Samouraïs is bad
and it made me want to screech
poor Dustin Diamond

Lo Wang meet Tommy Hawk

LIke lots of people, I’ve recently played the Prey demo. Coincidentally, just a couple days before the Prey demo came out, I also started playing Shadow Warrior. While Shadow Warrior came out in the late 90s and Prey hasn’t came out yet (although it has quite a long history and was originally conceived around the same time as Shadow Warrior), there are a lot of interesting similarities besides the obvious fact that they were both spearheaded by 3D Realms (although Prey was produced by Human Head, it was 3D Realms that originated the project).
While going from the venerable Build Engine to the currently state-of-the-art Doom 3 Engine was quite a jolt, and Prey’s portals and gravity-flipping were quite fun, beyond the visuals, the other details haven’t changed that much. Shadow Warrior is over-the-top and full of intentionally stereotypical depictions of Asians. To give an indication of the humor included in the game, the main character’s name is Lo Wang and like his spiritual predecessor, Duke Nukem, he has lots of witty phrases. On some level it is pretty offensive, and mixes Japanese elements such as ninjas with Chinese elements, but it is so over the top and cartoony it is hard to get worked up about it. I mean it’s no Showdown in LIttle Tokyo or anything.
Prey stars a Cherokee man by the name of Tommy Hawk, which, not as bad as Lo Wang, is still a lame pun, who gets sucked up into a UFO along with his grandfather and girlfriend (who spends the whole demo screaming “Help me! Help me!” in a way that would make Princess Peach embarrassed. Although the elements in the demo try to play the Cherokee heritage straight and respectfully, they end up with something that has a lot more in common with Shadow Warrior’s level of accuracy than it has different from it. Metafuture has already covered it in their article, “Your Guide To The Cherokee People” so the only thing I will add is this: When Tommy dies he goes to his ancestral homeland. Who knew that The US South was a dessert full of buttes?