Reappearance of RapeLay on CNN prompts world of stupid
Horrifying as it is, to defend freedom of expression and the freedom to access expression one must often discover themselves defending the expression of the indefensible. In a culture that horror and fantasy games garner a great deal of attention sometimes truly scary, socially worrisome games emerge.
And then people get stupid.
Meanwhile, in Australia, a member of the NSW Rape Crisis Centre is using the reconfirmed existence of Rapelay as a means to justify Internet filtering for the whole country, according to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald. Karen Willis “absolutely” believes in Internet filtering and told the paper, “While I don’t think that playing games causes people to go out and
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Grand Theft Auto in the classroom?
UK Police and victim support groups have been putting together a curriculum that will give younger student’s at school a chance to declare a difference between the “real” and the “unreal” using clips and slides from video games. One game in particular is the controversial Grand Theft Auto series.
Stills from violent video game Grand Theft Auto are being used to teach primary school children about violence.
The 18-rated game is being used as part of a police-backed pilot scheme in primary schools in Merseyside to deter youngsters from aggressive behaviour.
Under the scheme, 10 and 11-year-olds are shown stills from the games, which allow players to beat up prostitutes.
These are used alongside real-life images to prompt a discussion on what is good, bad, real and unreal.
The article appears a bit terse in the department of child educational psychology (or totally lacking.) There’s certainly some commentary about children having short attention spans, but …
Heavy Rain exceeds one million sales
Mystery thriller Heavy Rain has exceeded one million in sales, according to Quantic Dream co-CEO David Cage. The game became a sure-hit sensation due to its effective and emotional storytelling that well mimics contemporary television drama, with twists, turns, and gut wrenching moral decisions.
“Heavy Rain is not a videogame anymore in my mind because it breaks with most of the traditional paradigms, but it’s fully interactive,” Cage said ahead of the title’s release, also noting: “If the format becomes successful we will probably have to find a different name for this type of experience.”
Last month he also suggested that Heavy Rain’s commercial success had sent “a strong message to the game industry”, proving that publishers should take more risks with experimental projects.
The first comment, however, hits us as both silly and wrong. Heavy Rain is not “fully interactive” and it is still a video game because we haven’t redefined video …
FEAR 3 by Warner Bros contains some interesting enhancements
It’s hard to recall if we reviewed the first installment of this video game series, but FEAR does fit into the atmospheric horror first-person-shooter pretty well. However, we found ourselves quickly bogged down in the tirelessly moronic AI and other elements that didn’t really let us feel our way through the game. The scary bits, however, if memory serves did tend to prove pretty jump-tastic.
The additional enhancements FEAR 3 will see is something we’re actually intrigued by: co-op play with two different main characters.
In a break from previous installments, F.E.A.R. 3 features two-player co-op. Players have their choose between the super soldier Point Man or the powerful psychic Paxton Fettel. Each has their own special set of abilities, allowing for two distinct play experiences. There’s no mention of competitive multiplayer features.
Other enhancements included could also be noted in
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StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Collector’s Edition details released
If you’re like us, you have intermittent emissions from Amazon.com glowing about fantasy novels, new audio-visual recording equipment, and oftentimes video games. Recently, we saw a fun little mote appear from Amazon.com about the upcoming release of StarCraft II. Possibly one of the most anticipated Blizzard games since—Diablo II. Ever since it’s announcement we have been pouring over YouTUBE videos detailing game play and offering up chunks of information we could digest, however, we’re still not satisfied.
At a price point of around $100 the collectors edition is going to be prohibitively costly to those of us penny-pinching gamers who have been hit hard by the economic recession, but details have been released about what will be in it.
Included in the Collector’s Edition will be items such as a StarCraft issue #0 comic book, an Art of StarCraft: Wings of Liberty 176 page book,
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Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess coming out Apr. 22
…has awesome pipe organ music! See the totally amazing trailer below the quote from Joystiq. The graphics remind me of Castle Crashers from the Xbox, but the game play reviewable looks a lot like a scroller going upwards.
Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess, the PSP Mini about unfortunate anti-monster racial profiling, has been given a release date of April 22 — which publisher Mediatonic has confirmed is worldwide. The game, playable on both PSP and PS3, stars the Duke, who goes on an ill-researched quest to rescue his princess, jumping endlessly upward through vertically scrolling levels, and beating up every presumed guilty monster he sees (hint: all of them).
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If you see this, we’ve changed servers
Vox ex Machina is currently in migration. This post is visible on the new servers. Wish us luck!
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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