Video games still suffer from copyright culture rot
This on the heels of a discussion with our kaywngstiad about how we would both pirate our own already owned content (DVDs) in a form we could actually access if our computers continued to keep telling us we cannot play them. The video game community still suffers under stupid Digital Rights Management mechanisms which are defective by design and only serve to drive otherwise honest players away from honestly buying and playing games.
Who the hell wants content that cannot be accessed? If you want me to pay $50 for a game, it better be playable as many places as I want. Every fewer place lowers its value for me. A game I can only play on one machine ever is worth 1/10th as much. Sure, I’ll buy it for $5. Otherwise, why should I bother?
Using Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture as quasi-
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WildTangent and Torchlight, a case for frustration
Us voces have decided to break with tradition for once and go directly into rant mode about a video game experience rather than an outright review or a moral essay on the subject same. In this case it’s about the new game, Torchlight, which has a beautiful gaslight steampunk fantasy element (can anyone say the Alchemist and his goggles?) Needless to say, it caught our attention. Aside from the fact that it’s a blatant rip-off of Diablo via the game FATE, we still actually liked FATE and wouldn’t mind playing Torchlight.
If it would let us play it.
To stat, we downloaded the game from WildTangent. We did this because we know that we can get at least two free plays of any given game out of them, pretty much like a demo. Demos are extremely important to us because it gives us a chance to examine the
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World of Warcraft and PUGs the fix is coming?
Well, as much of a fix as can possibly be done to the bane-of-all-MMOs. Speaking of which us voces absolutely love PUGs—ignore Nelson’s complaints and objections, he won’t play with anyone not vetted by the FBI. They are an experience in both frustration and hilarity for any given game play event. PUGs are the groundwork that we use to gather our friends, sally forth into a strange world, and get our shy socialization shirts on.
Needless to say, Blizzard is introducing a new thing that should make PUGs the next-big-thing.
Blizzard drops details on the new dungeon and raid system for World of Warcraft, which brings with it cross-sever instancing, daily random dungeons, and special rewards for taking part in a pick-up group.
Pick-up groups, or PUGs, are the bane of many an MMO player’s existence. Rather than grouping with your guild
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Bioshock and feminism, point/counter-point
A recent series of articles about Bioshock brought out an interesting thought-exercise into play when Richard Terrell wrote an article about how the video game is anti-feminist, “Look. Don’t Touch: A feminist critique of Bioshock.” But that was quickly noticed by another blogger, who took a decidedly different approach to not only criticizing Bioshock but also Terrell’s article on the matter by Alex Raymond, “Is Bioshock Feminist? A response in defense of Bridgette Tenenbaum.”
Certainly, Bioshock has a lot of elements resplendent in the nature of it’s Jules Verne 50’s atmosphere and the Cold War era stereoscopy but it does seem that in its attempt to portray a multitude of characters, it didn’t leave out its own profound narrative about the human condition. This is something particularly brought out by the moral dilemma presented in the game play: The Little Sisters.
Neither
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Zork walkthrough in rock form
For those who have never played text adventure games, they were a staple of the early computing environment—an extension of Choose Your Own Adventure books into a more interactive form. Needless to say, walkthroughs existed even then, when we only had the light of ASCII to guide us.
ERROL:
I asked pifie to write an instrumental that I could write lyrics too. And for some strange reason he said yes and actually made one for me! So here I am singing to it. It is very… very… geeky.
In fact, I think only two of you will get the reference. But… oh well.
This SOUNDS easy, but it wasn’t… and I messed up in the end, but it was 2am and I got tired. Timing was really hard, and I now officially hate the word "Screwdriver".
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Surprise! The ESRB is not psychic and we don’t expect them to be
Right now, the ESRB is the best rating authority that we have for the video game experience but the tools that they present us do have a major flaw when it comes to rating the people’s behavior in video games…
Wait a sec. Did we actually write that? Did we actually read an article written about how the ESRB may become obsolete because they cannot rate something that their mandate can never cover? Why yes we did, in fact, The Escapist is running an article, “Obsolescence Pending: Rating the ESRB”, on precisely this subject.
“To date, this has meant that the rating given to the designed game content doesn’t cover chat and other forms of player-to-player communication.” This is unsurprising because it’s literally impossible to rate future events based on their content. It is irresponsible and silly to require the
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Top 10: Video Game women who don’t use sex to sell
Truly an excellent example of an article that warms our hearts, plus it happens to cover a lot of games we liked simply because they managed to speak to us out of narrative.
It’s no secret that females in video games are typically blatantly, sexualized byproducts of perverted character design. Between their skimpy attire and grossly exaggerated anatomy, most ladies featured in video games look more like prostitutes than crime-fighting, evil-slaying heroes. While games like Dead or Alive,Ninja Gaiden and Soulcalibur continue to perpetuate the demeaning myth that girls should dress like whores to sell games and kick ass, there are those leading ladies that have striven to break the stereotype.
So here are ten, completely badass video game ladies who are more concerned with messing up faces and ending lives than posing as pin-up girls for a nerdy version of Playboy. It
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Psychosis and bad Internet connections do not mix
In a grand display of a lack of self control—the type that Jack Thompson and his ilk would have loved—a teen in Sweden went berserk and stabbed a girl when he couldn’t connect to Starcraft.
An 18 year old Starcraft player has been reported as attacking a 15 year old girl. The gamer became angry when his internet connection wouldn’t work and picked up a kitchen knife and headed into the street. When there he came into contact with a 15 year old girl who was on her way home from a party and laughing with a friend. He attacked her with the knife but despite several stabs her injuries were not life threatening.
The troubled teenager has now been sentenced to psychiatric care by the Nacka court for these actions, his first offense. The gamer’s thoughts apparently grew dark as a result
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Hellforge reviews Dead Space: Extraction
Hellforge is running a deeply engrossing review of the recently released Dead Space game for the Nintendo Wii: Dead Space: Extraction. This is proported to be an action on-rails shooter that is heavily narrative and story focused—mostly a prequel to explain what happened to create the original Dead Space experience.
Pros:
* Decent visuals….. for the Wii anyway.
* Excellent Sound and Music
* Interesting story, backed by great characters and exceptional voice acting
* Fairly good level designs, with the occasional branching path.
* A newer, tougher take on the On-the-Rails Shooter genre
* Weapons actually useful… but only once upgraded
* Wii-Mote allows for accurate aiming
* Play from multiple perspectives to cover many different areas of the story
* Comic extra is cool
Cons:
* Slow paced at times, with some levels having very few actual encounters
* Short: A mere 10 chapters
* Next to no replayability, as you can’t “skip” dialogue or story scenes
* Not nearly enough extras
* Character …
Top Ten Game Addiction Fallacies
As video games become a new media of communication and actually make a splash in the modern, global community scares will continue to crop up about their influence on the masses. Just like the emergence of literacy, the novel as a form of writing, the radio, rock and roll, and comic books being blamed for every ill society might have video games are the new emerging art form in the crosshairs and the hysteria runs broad and deep.
As does the misunderstanding and gross fallacies on the subject.
Neils Clark decided to response to the top ten errors made in discussing video game addiction, which are tried-and-true elements of most anti-emerging-media propaganda with some interesting twists. It’s a reply to a column over at Green Pixels. The entire article, Big Trouble In …
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