In preparation to begin to prepare to get ready for my trip to Tokyo I asked a friend who has been to Japan for some books and he recommended these:
He didn’t recommend this next one but I heard about it and since I don’t know Japanese so I figured I would buy this too:
And finally, this is what I’m currently reading:
Monthly Archives: May 2007
Housecleaning…
I’ve trimmed some of the dead blogs from the blogroll and updated some of the other broken links. If there are any other gaming blogs out there that I’m missing, let me know.
Personally, I’ve been accepted to the DiGRA Conference in Japan. That is pretty awesome. It will be the first time I’ve been to a non-English speaking country. …Of course that is if I can afford to go… So click on those ads over there! Jccalhoun needs the money!
Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30
Although I’m not fan of WWII games, this one was fairly cheap, so I bought it. I ended up liking it a bit more than other WWII games. Perhaps it was that it didn’t glamorize the war or maybe it was simply that you generally didn’t get that close to the Germans and so they weren’t humanized very much.
Unfortunately, there are also some rough spots. First off I can’t ignore the question, “Why another WWII shooter?” Like Susan Jeffords’ Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era
So if we must have to have another WWII shooter, how about one about the experience of African Americans during the war? That would at least be different.
Another thing I noticed during this game as well as while watching movies like Saving Private Ryan is that while this is supposed to be taking place in France, with the exception of one scene in Ryan, there aren’t any French people. Where were all the French people during World War II?? I don’t know any specific details about France during the war, so maybe there were all evacuated or something, but it sure seems odd going through these cities and through buildings and not seeing a single French person.
The effect is to make the game sterile, as if there weren’t any innocent people and that everyone who died was a soldier. Specifically in WWII, with all the deaths, it is difficult to play a game like this and not think about all the atrocities that occurred.
Brothers in Arms” Road to Hill 30 is a pretty good game, but with more depth it could have been much more interesting.
Welcome to the new version
After many threats and/or promises I’ve tried to switch the main page to wordpress. It seems to work but I’ve had the old site pop up so this may not be seen by anyone!
If you do see it, let me know what you think. More important than the look should be the fact that the comments should be working. So leave a comment!
The missing link
I know I’m a bit late on this one, but in my defense the only Zelda game I ever played was Ocarina of Time. However, I can’t believe that they made Link right handed for the Wii version of the game! Miyamoto said:
Although Link is [traditionally] left-handed, at E3 we noticed people seemed to be using the right Wii controller to swing his sword. That’s why we decided to make Link right-handed.
As a lefty I find this outrageous! Of course the funny thing is not that they chose to change it because most people are right handed, but that on the message boards I checked out there was always at least one person who said something like, “For the lefties, it isn’t that hard to hold the Wiimote in your right hand.” OK, let’s assume that is true. Then why wouldn’t it be just as easy for right handed people to use the Wiimote in your left??? Funny how that doesn’t seem to get mentioned…
Lefties of the world unite!
learning what not to do while playing is important too…
The semester is over. I’ve got my grades all done. I just have to turn them into the university and then the summer will officially start
Last week I was playing Halo with someone who wasn’t familiar with playing first-person shooters. I explained to her the controls and started playing. While playing she had a hard time moving around. This is to be expected, but the reasons for this weren’t immediately obvious. She didn’t have much trouble actually moving the character. Instead, she had a hard time controlling where the character was looking. She would frequently end up looking at the ceiling or the floor, unable to see where she was supposed to be going. This is not the first time I’ve seen people who are new to FPS games on consols have this difficulty. This got me thinking.
In the past I have thought about the ways in which players have to learn what to do in order to be good at games. They have to acquire skills which are not obvious to those who think that games are mindless entertainment or killing machines. However, in this case it wasn’t so much a matter of learning what to do, but learning what not to do.
Of course we can argue that not doing something is actually doing something, but the point is that I at least had not thought that one has to learn restraint. In Halo you have to use the right stick to look left and right, but you also use it to look up and down. However, you look up and down much less than you look left and right. So you have to learn how to move the stick in one direction without accidentally moving it in another. (or move it on one axis but not the other).
Broadening it out I can see how learning when not to do something is a skill that I myself have yet to master. In online games like Counter-Strike it isn’t that I don’t know how to do something, but that I’m too impatient to learn how not to run around that corner or whatever. And by failing to learn when not to do that is at least one reason why I stink at the game. This is not an Earth shattering insight by any means, but I at least found it interesting.