Last week I blogged about this cool Asteroids jacket Ty Pennington was wearing. Well, thanks to my friend, Meredith managed to track down a picture someone posted on Flickr of a guy wearing one on a subway, In the comments, someone found out where to buy the jacket.
So unless you buy me one, dear reader, I don’t think I”ll ever be able to buy it. Won’t you help this young man’s dreams come true?????
A couple of months ago I bought a used version of the Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death game for the PC. I know the game didn’t get very great reviews but it was dirt cheap.
So I tried to install it and no dice. The damn game just would NOT install. Put the disk in and an error comes up. You guessed it: copy protection. Way to keep your customers from playing a game they actually paid for…
I even tried things like isobuster and still couldn’t get it to work. Of course I would have called tech support — except that the only tech support phone numbers on the game were numbers in England. The site of the US publisher didn’t even have the damn game listed on their website. The UK website didn’t have any useful information, either.
So I turned to that last resort of the desperate man: piracy. The game is kind of old and it wasn’t that popular to begin with and so I couldn’t find it on any bittorrent sites. So I searched and searched and finally found it on edonkey. Three days later I finally had an ISO of the game I bought and paid for more than a month ago…
So the only way I could play a game that I legally bought was to pirate it. And they say piracy is what costs media companies sales…
Anyway, so I finally got to play the game. I thought it was a little better than the reviews led me to believe. It was nice and straightforward shooting. There’s an interesting feature where you are supposed to arrest people rather than kill them that I found fun. It was a nice challenge to shoot perps enough to make them drop their weapon but not kill them. Then there were the zombies…
I love zombies. I even own the Uwe Boll masterpiece House of the Dead. So I also liked shooting zombies in Dredd vs. Death.
Sure, the game is pretty much by the numbers with the standard plot of horrible mastermind behind all the evil and the boss battles, as well as the disembodied voice that tells you where to go. However, I found it charming.
The graphics are rather dated. This isn’t surprising for a game whose copyright is 2003. There is one thing that the game’s maker, Rebellion should be damn proud of. Like their last big game, the original Aliens vs. Predator, this game loads nearly instantly. After playing games like Half-Life 2 which have lengthy loading times, I am amazed at how quickly Dredd vs. Death loads. If Rebellion can do it, why can’t the other companies?
Since I’m tracing the genealogy of Rebellion’s games, in addition to the super quick loading times, there is another trait that is carried over from AvP: the saving. When Aliens vs. Predator first came out for the PC (Rebellion had actually released an Alien vs. Predator game for the Atari Jaguar back in the day) there were no in-level saves or quick saves. If you died, you had to start the level all over again. Like AvP, Dredd vs. Death has not quicksave. AvP had in-level saves and quick saves added in a patch and for the gold version, so I was surprised that Dredd vs. Death didn’t. At least it has checkpoints and you can escape out of the game and save it, so it isn’t that bad. However, it is interesting to see the traits common to the two games from the same developer.
Overall, I’d give it seven thumbs up. If you can find it for 5 dollars, and your system doesn’t have a problem with crappy copy protection, or you don’t have any problem with pirating it, I would say it was worth it.
Now, I’m not one to wear an Atari shirt or something, but i just saw a really cool article of clothing. I don’t usually watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (Is Extremem Makeover: Body Mutilation Edition even on any more???), but I flipped it on to see the end. Ty Pennington not only actually had a shirt on, but also had a jacket on. The cool part of the jacket was that it was a black raincoat-style material but it had outlines of while circles on it. Then they showed a close-up of Ty. It wasn’t a white circle pattern — it was an Asteroids pattern!!!
I totally want one!!!! I haven’t been able to find one online, so if anyone sees one you have to leave a message!
I got a bit of cash for Christmas, so I hit up ebay for some retro gaming. I am not much of a console gamer and so although I’ve had a Pong machine, an Atari 2600, 7800, NES, PlayStation and XBox, I’ve never had a portable system so I got myself a gameboy advance sp and a few games. While I was at it, I went ahead and got an N64. Goldeneye was such a talked about game, and I hadn’t ever played it, so I’ve wanted to get it for a long time. Well, now I’ve finally got it — just when I’ve got grading to do!!!! Noooooo!!!!!
While it seems that , for now, Vi Simpson’s Videogame Violence Bill is dead in the water, according to the IU newspaper, Simpson hasn’t given up hope of getting the bill passed into law. According to the article, Simpson said, “I’m hoping we’ll have an opportunity to re-introduce the bills in November, and generate some additional interest in them.”
Of course, let’s not forget that most anti-videogame crusaders are basing their claims on misinformation. For example, take Simpson, who issues a press release about her videogame bill that stated:
“Right now kids can walk into just about any store and get their hands on a video game in which they can shoot police officers, use drugs, steal cars, rape women or even assassinate a president. That’s frightening to say the least,” said Simpson.
It would be frightening — if it were true. But it isn’t.
As Game Politics points out:the notorious JFK Reloaded is not – has never been – available in any retail store. So, unless there is some other game about assassinating a president, she is wrong and her bill wouldn’t do anything (not to mention that there’s no law against a child buying JFK or the Manchurian Candidate, so why should videogames be any different?).
Of course, also in that statement, is that other straw man: rape. In this, SImpson isn’t alone. Our other good buddy Joe Lieberman also seems to think that Rape Master 3000 is a best seller because Lieberman has also said that there are videogames featuring rape. On that webpage there is a videoclip and about 35 seconds into is, Lieberman says, “It’s a crime to sexually abuse or rape a woman. Yet repeatedly in these video games the players are being rewarded for doing exactly that.”
No. No they aren’t. I first said that there are no American videogames that feature rape in them back in January of 2004 — more than TWO years ago! You would think that such a stupid misconception would die by now. Unless someone is still out there selling Custer’s Revenge, then people who say that there are videogames on store shelves that feature rape, they are just plain wrong. I know it, you know it, isn’t it time our elected officials knew it? Even Grand Theft Auto’s Hot Coffee features consensual sex. If you don’t want your kids playing games that feature sex, then fine, but don’t make up things to make is sound worse than you think they are!
So it seems as if we have two options here: Either our elected officials are misinformed and ignorant or they are lying. Isn’t either alternative unacceptable?
Game Politics has a story of a gamer who committed suicide. Apparently, Jack Thompson, anti-videogame lawyer and compassionate man apparently posted a message so horrible that the comment was deleted and Game Politics has decided to no longer allow anonymous comments. MetalGearSolid.org got a copy of it before it was deleted and posted Jack Thompson’s response to the suicide. Here is the message that is attributed to Thompson:
Your “gamer friend” will find peace through the Lord, Jesus Christ, but sadly it’s too late for that.
There is a void in every heart. You can fill it up with the things of God, or the things not of God. This unfortunate soul chose to fill it up with combat games. The playing of these video games is masturbatory activity, meaning senseless self-stimulation. If you gamers could use a dictionary you would know that that term is not necessarily a sexual one.
The real tragedy here extends beyond the life and death of this one fellow. There are literally millions of young people and young adults whose despair is deepend by turning to the things of this world and then finding them meaningless.
All of you gamers need to put down the controllers and get a life. The utter inanity of the vast majority of postings here shows how vapid “gaming” really is.
You are one of the cheerleaders for this wasting of time and the wasting of lives. Do you feel any remorse for having contributed to this “culture of death?” Of course not. Hey, let’s all play MORE games, and ignore all the really productive things to do with our lives.
Let’s pretend to be shocked that a gamer might descend into deeper depression, as his gamer “buds,” knowing he was killing himself, couldn’t figure out how to call 911 themselves for him. That would have involved leaving their computers I guess.
Sad. Sad for all of you.”
One can only hope that this is not really Thompson and that it is just some tasteless joke by a troll. Whomever posted it must have a taste for irony. Suggesting that gamers don’t know the definition of a word when the person who posted this obviously doesn’t know the definition of what it means to be a good Christian or what it means to be compassionate strikes me as quite ironic.
So once again, people are talking about videogame journalism and how horrible it is.
Reading these posts, however, it seems that people have very very different ideas of what “good” is. I know, I know, saying that taste is subjective is a pretty crazy idea! I’m not saying I’m some bastion of good taste. I liked the Doom movie after all…
Here was my comment on Slashdot:
Most of the comments here talk about horrible reviews, but is reviewing really journalism? Is Roger Ebert a journalist? Not to degrade reviewers. But do people really 100% trust one videogame review?
While I like reading reviews, I read videogame reviews the same way I read film reviews: with a grain of salt.
Maybe it is because of my research interests, but I’m a lot more interested in the non-review journalism such as articles that talk about trends in gaming or gaming culture. That is more of what I think of when I think about journalism instead of reviews.
What is most interesting is that one of the people Robin Hunicke mentioned as, “look[ing] beyond muzzle flashes, explosions and crisp sound” is also the same person that wrote what Something Awful called
…the most pretentious review ever written about anything…. You could write a gushing review of “Time Code” as a concrete poem shaped like a moebius strip and you would still be a galaxy away from Kieron’s review of Darwinia.
Then there’s everyone’s favorite Escapist Magazine. Am I the only one that couldn’t look bast the horrible pretentious layout? It may well be the best thing ever written about videogames, but I wouldn’t know because I’ve never been able to read a single article because– call me crazy — but I hate having to click next every three words.
The thing that most frustrates me is that all the complaining about the state of videogame journalism seems to imply that somewhere out there there is some field of journalism that doesn’t totally suck. Sure there are the exceptions and there are the rare good articles, but what are these people reading, listening to, or watching that they think that videogame journalism is some exception to the sad state of journalism? Complaining about horrible videogame journalism is like complaining about someone staining the couch cushion when the couch is sitting in the middle of a garbage dump. It may be accurate and a valid complaint, but it is kind of missing the point.
Bloodrayne the movie opened last weekend. I didn’t get around to seeing it, but after hearing about the horrible reviews, I was looking forward to seeing the trainwreck this weekend. But I guess I wasn’t fast enough. The movie stinks so bad that the theaters in town aren’t showing it any more! Bastards!
I could go see Grandma’s Boy, but I’ve already seen it. I wouldn’t go see it again. If you haven’t seen it yet, it might be worth a matine, but I certainly wouldn’t bother paying full price for it.
The essay I got published in the Italian-language collection, Doom: The First Person Reader has been posted online in english at the Videoludica website.
It’s called, “Re-Examining The Half-Life Story: A First Person-Shooter With A Good Plot?”. I wrote it more than two years ago, so if I were to re-read it, I am sure I will be horribly embaraced by it. Therefore, I don’t think I’ll be re-reading it!
Since it was originally published in Italian, and I don’t read or speak Italian, I figured it would be a good place for a first publication. Chances are any potential job search committee here in the USA wouldn’t be able to read Italian either, so I could claim it was a brilliant article. On the off chance someone who might hire me actually could read Italian, I could just protest that the subtlties of my argument were lost in translation. It was a perfect plan! Of course I didn’t imagine that it would get posted online in English! Now my work has to stand on its own merits! Curses!
I will note that as far as I am able to tell, my essay is the only one that has been published on the site. I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. Either they started with the best essay or the worst. As to which it is, as all the math textbooks in college would say when they gave an example too tedious or too complicated to solve, “I leave that as an exercise for the reader…”
Can’t blog now… Too busy playing Bio Menace…