Monthly Archives: October 2006

Seriously Odd Videogame commercial.

As nearly anyone who cares about gaming is no doubt aware, Gods of War is coming out for the XBox 360 fairly soon. It isn’t Halo 3 coming out the same day as the PS3, but it is pretty good in terms of marketing.

When it come to the advertising, I’m a bit stumped. The latest commercial really has me confused as to what it is that they are trying to get across with this ad:
The music is Gary Jules’ Mad World which is probably most familiar to those who have seen Donnie Darko (of course I’m l33t and heard it on WOXY back in the day).

Are they trying to be arty? Are they trying to show some sort of gravitas? Or are they just trying to be emo? Hopefully, someone can clue me in, because I’m just confused. …And now I want to buy an xbox360.

A close call…

As is appropriate during this Halloween season, I had a very scary gaming-related experience lately. For the past couple weeks, it has become clear that I have passed a milestone that serves as a marker of my l33t-ness: I’ve nearly worn out the left button on my mouse.

Yes, it seems that those hours of killing demons and aliens have finally taken its toll and resulted in a truly unfortunate casualty (and I say this, without any amount of casualty either). My mouse had apparently died.

I know, I know, “it is just a mouse!” –But it is my mouse. It is an Intellimouse Explorer 3.0. A silver one. Not those lame black monochrome ones that Microsoft is trying to sell now.

After a couple weeks of hoping against hope I could get used to the half broken-ness of the left mouse button, with its seemingly random double clicking, today it got unbearable. I dug out another crappy mouse I had laying around and plugged it in (it was still an optical mouse, and not a ball mouse, though, After all, there are only so many indignities one person can take!)

As I began to wrap the cord around the body of the mouse in some sort of burial shroud, I thought, “I wonder if I can take it apart?” (I mean, come on, it was either that or catch up on my grading!) So I took off the rubbery feet and unscrewed it, unsure of what I would find. Once I had done so, I noticed that the little switches that were under the buttons were all the same, but only in different positions.

My heart skipping, my hands trembling, I pried off the one under the left button, then the one under the right and then I switched them. I put the cover back on, replaced the screws, plugged the mouse back in and hoped that my deadly addiction to dealing death to demons and delinquents would not have claimed yet another innocent victim.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to say that the operation was a success! I don’t have to buy another mouse any time soon! My mouse lives again!!!

Don’t make the same mistake I did. Let my story be a lesson to you all: Do not take your mouse for granted!

Pointless Wii box!

So I was at Target with a couple friends the other day looking for some costume stuff and I spot a Wii stand across the store. Hoping it was a gaming kiosk, i head over. Turns out it was just some Wii accessories. Most of it was generic stuff like skins for the controllers and stuff. One item they had, however, was just ponderous. They had a Wii “Metal Box with Magnets” (which you can see here.

As my friends and I were examining it, another guy came up an asked us what it was. “That’s just what we were trying to figure out.” And we never did… We never did…

Video Game Violence is apparently the number one issue in this election???

It is highly interesting to see how videogames have become such an important issue. What we have here is not simply a failure to communicate, but a generation gap. Old people are statistically heavier voters. Older people are statistically less likely to play videogames. Old people get scared, vote against the person who didn’t “protect the children.” I can’t wait for our gaming generation to get in power.

Since my last post about anti-violent videogame political ads it seems that the other issues have all but disappeared from the airwaves. I can’t turn on a local channel without seeing one of those videogames are evil commercials. Of course it doesn’t hurt that these ads are by National Republican Congressional Committee and not by a specific candidate. That way they can take money from a lot more places than just Indiana and pay for the ads and it also allows the candidates to have plausible deniability since they didn’t “approve this message.”

Last week I got a call from a political party talking about how one candidate voted against lowering taxes for families and things like that. Today, however, I just got a call about how bad it was to vote against laws for prohibiting the sale of violent videogames to children. I’m glad we got that war thing taken care of so that we can turn our attention to these important topics. Oddly enough, the call started off by saying how the opposition had been running negative ad campaigns and then went on to talk about how horrible the opposition candidate was! Irony be thy name!

Anyway, I asked the person what was wrong with voting against some stupid violent videogame law. She seemed stunned by that and repeated the questions, “Is there something wrong with voting against laws that would protect children from violent videogames?” I said, “Yeah, what’s wrong with that?” She then said maybe the opposition was “out of touch with Hoosier values.” I said I was a Hoosier and asked if she thought there was something wrong with my values. Then she hung up.

Genre Trouble

With appologies to Judith Butler, it seems that there is some genre trouble going on in the videogame world. The October issue of Edge magazine has a short column about the fact that there are a million Grand Theft Auto III clones coming out and “GTA Clone” isn’t exactly the best name for it. I’ll go ahead and commit copyright infringement by posting the fill text of it here since it doesn’t seem to be online (Insert here a rant about how expensive Edge magazine is in the USA and how they need an electronic version because I’m poor.):

Just Cause, Scarface, Crackdown, Dead Rising, Yakuza, Saints Row, Gangs Of London – oh, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. And that’s just in this month’s issue: there’s no question a genre has just come of age. Pity we still have no idea what to call it.
The ‘GTA-clone’ – not that it was ever an elegant phrase – just won’t cut it any more, not in the face of the extraordinary diversity listed above. And surely no one’s seriously suggesting that we wrap our tongues around ‘the free-roaming action adventure’ from here on in. Or we could take a tip from the Germans: if for them platform games are ‘run-and-jumps’, perhaps we could have the ‘drive-and-shoot’? Perhaps not.
But that last idea raises another problem. Possibly held back by the fact that we still don’t have a name for it, it’s still not really been agreed what the key components of the genre actually are. It needs to take place in a freely accessible world, but does that space need to be physically contiguous? It didn’t seem to need to be in Grand-Theft-Auto-meets-Mars-Attacks Destroy All Humans. Does it have to include combat? Surely yes, but its absence didn’t stop Grand-Theft-Auto-meets-The-Simpsons Hit’n’Run being widely claimed a clone. Does it even have to be driving and fighting?
There’s no question Dead Rising feels a little like it belongs, and yet it doesn’t really meet that requirement. Perhaps, appropriately, the only way to judge them is like suspected alcoholics. If a game can tick three of the following boxes, then it qualifies: freely accessible play area, story missions and side missions, hidden packages and/or detailed stats, a civilian population to torment, some form of combat, some form of driving. Does that about cover it?
Of course, genres have always been problematic, and they’ve always had awkward names, but perhaps the GTA-a-like issue is so acute because it’s the first true second-generation genre. The familiar roster (driving, shooting, platforming, strategy) are all built around the idea of a game focused on one type of interaction. But what we’re talking about is a genre built out of those genres: a genetic inheritance. It’s just unfortunate that it’s a child that seems to be forever stuck with a double-barelled surname.

I’ve talked about genre before, as far back as my review of Medium of the Video Game. And I recently made a post about it on a Slashdot story asking about A Definitive List of Gaming Genres. I wrote

Genres are only useful for movie stores… Ok, so that may be an exaggeration, but I think the point remains valid: there isn’t much point in coming up with genres.

Mark J. P. Wolf in Medium of the Video Game list a bunch of genres that are fairly useless such as listing demos as their own genre.

While I’m not a fan of applying film theory to videogames, I think that Rick Altman in Film/Genre makes the most interesting use of genre by syntax and semantics. (Actually, there isn’t a lot of need to read the entire book. He lays out syntax and semantics as a way of looking at genre in his article, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” which is widely reprinted and is included as an index in the Film/Genre book).

Regarding the GTA-Clones, besides the obvious title of GTA-Clone, the phrase I seem to hear most is some variation on “urban action.” Which of course has problems of its own since there isn’t any reason why a GTA-Clone would have to be “urban” in nature.
In films, and other media, genres aren’t born fully formed like Athena leaping from the head of Zeus. They develope over time. We may think of The Great Train Robbery as the first Western, but it wasn’t instantly called that. Other films had to imitate it and take elements from it untill enough film were made that people could look back and retroactively determine what a “Western” was. The same thing will have to happen with GTA-Clones. In a few years, we will be able to look back and make up a name for them that is more descriptive than “GTA-Clone.”

Darn those violent videogames!!!

With the mid-term elections coming up, local television has been inundated with political ads. One of the local candidtates, Mike Sodrel and his political party have been running ads against Baron Hill (Of course Baron Hill’s people have been running negative ads as well. They just aren’t as noteworthy.). The funny thing is, these ads seem like they are actually asking me to vote for Hill and not against him. In the first one, Sodrel says that Hill voted against “protecting traditonal marriage” (how banning gay marriage protects marriage is beyond me) and voted against “protecting our flag” (which would be ever so effective…). Who knew those were bad things? And not, the latestest ads bring out the big guns: videogames!

Nice to know that in Indiana the biggest issues are videogames. Good thing there isn’t a war going on or anything…
What will the next ad be? Baron Hill supports blogger? Baron Hill supports left-handed people? I for one can’t wait!

Insert comment here…

LIke I last mentioned, I’m not playing much lately. I’ve got some console games to play, but if I’m going to sit in my recliner, I’m going to kick back and watch a crappy movie or The Tribe season 3 and 4 dvds I bought.

I have been playing a lot of Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, but that’s a really short game. I loved the predecessor, Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, but this isn’t so much a sequel as a remake since it is really just the same game with slightly prettier graphics and tweaked gameplay.

I feel like I should say something about Jack Thompson’s latest debacle, but I think I covered my thought on it over at game politics:

Jack will initially cry foul but in 3-4 months he will begin to use this case as evidence of his accomplishments by saying how he was the first person to force a judge to review a game before it was released or some crap.

Remember, here is Jack’s pattern:
1.Make outrageous claims
2.Repeat claims
3.Lose and/or be proven wrong
4.Claim that he lost because evil people are against him and/or claim he really won.
5. ???
6.Profit!

Even though I thought that the guys from Destructoid were kind of jerks at E3 earlier in the year, they did a bang up job covering the court case.

Ratings? What are they really good for?

Lately, there’s been some commentary about whether or not the ESRB ratings system is broken. I would agree that the system is broken. However, I don’t think it is beyond repair. I think that playing the games is a must. I know that some games, like RPG’s can take more than 40 hours and MMORPGs can take forever, but I think that there is certainly something to be said for actually playing the game to get the character of the game. Without playing the game, without doing anything more than just watching gameplay, there is little way of telling the character of the game. You also can’t tell if there is anything more to the game than what the game producers say is in the game. Call me crazy but depending on the game producers to be consistently reliable doesn’t seem the wisest decision, even if there are penalties for misleading the ESRB.

On the other hand, what good are the ratings? Do they actually help things? They may help parents, but I’m not a parent. Do parents actually read the ratings?

In the article I linked to, the author, Aaron Ruby says the ratings are poorly designed with too many descriptors. Perhaps. I think that it would be silly for a parent to say, “Oh, animated blood. Well, OK then.” After all, There are lots of different types of animation. If we want to use an analogy, Fritz the Cat has animated blood, but I don’t think it is appropriate for children.

On the other hand, the film ratings have some truly bizarre descripters. Next time you see a movie rating, look beneath the R or PG. I mean I remember one film being rated R for “pervasive language.” What is that? Call me crazy but I prefer my movies to have language that is pervasive. Perhaps they meant pervasive bad language (whatever “bad” means…).

However, as gamers, we should be used to having videogames attacked (I love it when reporters or politicians mention that videogame ratings in the USA are self-enforced and neglect to mention that so are film ratings and parental advisory stickers on music….). However, I think that we should site back and wait. The reason why is that the current trend in the film industry is to release a PG-13 film to the theaters, and an “unrated” edition on DVD. Mark my words, it is only a matter of time before some moral crusader takes note of the fact that poor little Timmy is able to buy a film with boobies in it from the store. Then the film industry will get the attention the videogame industry has been experiencing. Maybe then the news will realize who stupid this whole ratings controversy is.

So are there any good pc games coming out before Christmas?

I just finished playing FEAR and found it fairly entertaining. I don’t expect to get the expansion pack though. At least not until it gets really cheap.

Which brings up an interesting point. I don’t really have any games to play right now and I can’t find anything good coming out in the next couple months. I would love to play Dead Rising, but I’m poor and can’t afford a 360. I’m also not really a console gamer so I have no plan on getting a Wii or PS3 — and since I’m no fan of Sony someone would have to give me one before I owned a PS3.

So is the PC gaming market taking the year off and wiating for the consoles to come out before they release anything interesting for PCs?

I am looking forward to Bio-SHock, but it isn’t coming out untill next year. There is also Half-Life 2 Episode 2 (still a confusing name) which is also pushed back untill next year. Even the They Hunger game is eerilly silent on its release date.

While there are some WWII games coming out, man, I am sick of WWII. Even if they are the Greatest Generation, WWII ain’t the greatest setting for gaming. Give it up already! Let’s not even talk about Battlefield 2142…

So it seems like this Holiday season I will be catching up on my reading…

…unless of course someone wants to buy me one of those Playstation 3s…