Don’t give me the “developers and designers will go without food because a millionaire CEO greenlighted a bucket of fail” crap.  Between the pseudo-maturity and ad campaign, Dante’s Inferno needs to fail.

I lived through Mortal Kombat.  The outcry wasn’t just “blood and guts”, it was the context it was presented in.  The game was a candy bag.  All you knew is that your opponent needed to be separated from his limbs.  The nature of the arcade and the tech limitations of the time didn’t let you go deeper than that.  And why bother?  People wanted blood.  When the Super Nintendo version failed to deliver on that, the Genesis port outsold it four-to-one.

Fun.

The culture’s moved past Mortal Kombat, a.k.a. “video game violence without rationale”.  This torch was ceded to God of War, and even the protagonist behind that game’s laughable brutality has a motivation for it.  The reason for Dante’s Inferno: The Video Game?  “We have a poem and we need to make a game.  Hell is about death, so let’s have the character create lots of it.”

And we ended up with God of War down to the mannerisms, animations, graphics, camera angles, and gameplay devices.  And it ain’t good enough to justify it.

(more…)

British company Datel has been using the X-Box 360’s lifespan to concoct memory units for the console. They supply more memory at a lower cost than Microsoft’s product.  You know where this is going.

Datel, who expressed disappointment over a recent Xbox 360 firmware upgrade that eliminated the ability to use its third-party memory cards with Microsoft’s console, has responded with a lawsuit.

The complaint, filed in the Northern District of California U.S. District Court, alleges that the October 2009 Xbox 360 update, and subsequent lock out of Datel products, was designed to “to exclude competition from the Xbox 360 aftermarket for controllers, and to force consumers to buy Microsoft’s own controllers.”

Datel claims that Microsoft informed them that the lockout of Datel products was an “unintentional effect” of the software update, but notes that Microsoft told G4TV that, “Unauthorized MUs are not tested for compatibility or certified for safety and compliance standards and thus could damage -customer’s Xbox 360 consoles.”

I don’t claim to be a lawyer, but believe me: I know my tech history.

From 1978 to 1980, Atari tried to litigate the upstart Activision into oblivion.  Hey, they didn’t create the Atari 2600, so what right to they have to develop games for it?  The courts called “bullshit”.  Atari’s inability to win the battle justified the third party development and subsequent market saturation that caused the Video Game Crash of 1983.

Nintendo learned from Atari’s shortcomings and rigged lockout technology into the Nintendo Entertainment System.  That didn’t stop a number of developers from cracking the tech and making horrible games for the console.  Sega went a step further, building memory allocation into the Genesis that required all games (licensed or elsewise) to display a “Licensed by SEGA” screen.  The company believed this would grant them room to kick the crap out of unlicensed Genesis developers.  When Accolade became one of them, the courts ruled in their favor, stating their engineering and subsequent game development was within the confines of fair use law.

Legal precedent has established that you are allowed to build the key as long as you don’t reverse engineer the keyhole.  Datel created a key.  It provided more bang for the buck than Microsoft’s.  So the company used a firmware upgrade to change how the keyhole works.  In that case, we’re no longer talking about Atari and Activision.  It harkens to United States v. Microsoft, the court case that declared the company’s tendency to “buy out” competitors (make a similar version of competing software and then program Windows to lock out the original) constituted a monopoly.

So uh, yeah.  Good luck with that “stall the legal process until Datel runs out of money to fight the issue in court” thing, Microsoft.

The most memorable thing about Dungeon’s Lair-ripoff Mirror’s Edge? It’s created an Electronic Arts Clusterfuck™ where the “little guy” is the asshole.

Electronic Arts is asking the United States to cancel five trademarks held by Tim Langdell’s Edge Games, saying the marks have been effectively abandoned. In comments to Kotaku, EA portrayed its actions as done on behalf of the development community.

Langdell, at the center of many controversies over the years regarding trademark rights to the word “Edge”, has been involved in a similar dispute with Electronic Arts since 2007 concerning its title “Mirror’s Edge.” On Sept. 11, EA filed a petition with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to wipe out five trademarks involved in the case, saying they have been threatened by Langdell for a year over the distribution of Mirror’s Edge.

…

Over the years, Langdell has been accused of heavy-handed behavior against developers who wittingly or unwittingly use the word “Edge”, which he trademarked years ago for use in video games, and a slew of other associated products since then. In addition to the disagreement with EA, Langdell has been involved in a bitter dispute with Mobigame, whose iPhone game EDGE has appeared on the iTunes App Store and was later removed when he challenged Mobigame’s usage of the title.

Admittedly, I’ve stayed away from this issue because I don’t claim “expert” on the patent process.  But I do live in a part of the country where middle-class whites try to be one of two things: The wannabe ghetto thugs that bore my namesake, or rich socialites with a golf pedigree.  I know “phony”. Believe me, that covers a man who fabricates a development cycle solely to maintain a trademark he doesn’t deserve.

As far as the industry is concerned, Tim Langdell has made one contribution to gaming over the last twenty years: Absolutely nothing.  And when you are looking to protect the integrity of your work, it is preferable that you can boast actual “integrity” or “work”, not a website designed to justify your dick behavior.

Commander Handsonface, status report!

A PlayStation 3 gamer has filed suit in U.S. District Court in California, alleging that SCEA suppressed his free speech rights and caused him pain and suffering by banning his account on the PlayStation Network.
In a complaint filed on July 6th, Erik Estavillo of San Jose writes that he his disabled by a variety of disorders; among these are agoraphobia, a fear of crowds[.]

…

In his request to the court, Estavillo, who appears to be unrepresented, asks that SCEA be enjoined from banning players. He also seeks $55,000 in punitive damages.

First-amendment rights don’t apply to services and property, and said first-amendment rights were likely used to be an obnoxious fuck, yada yada.  Consider the equivalent: I post on the Battle.net forums.  I have been banned from the message board over a hundred times.  During the creation of this entry, I made the following post:

Imagine Blizzard tires of this.  The company deletes my Warcraft III account, that of over three-thousand games played.  I proceed to sue Blizzard Entertainment for 55,000 dollars, claiming:

“Blizzard eliminated my ability to use the Battle.net forums as an advertising outlet for my web site.  I would like to be compensated for the revenue which I could have potentially earned as a result of this advertising. In addition, the company destroyed the significant time and effort that I put into my Warcraft III account.  They damaged my internet reputation, infringed upon my first amendment rights, and ruined my life in the process.  Thanks for ruining my life by making some of my favorite games, you tyrants!”

Yup.  Sony’s public relations team should be happy.  As of this moment, they’re no longer the biggest asshole(s) affiliated with Sony products.

This has been on my mind for some time.

My Warcraft III win-loss record directly measures my success as a human being.  For this reason, I take the game more seriously than any amateur should.  Despite my role as an internet badass, a guy who openly criticizes political arguments by quoting a poster’s win percentage, I’m actually humble about my gaming ability.  If I lose the game on count of giving the “flag inspector” the right of way, I’ll owe up to that mistake.  I’ve nothing to lose from admitting that a legendary cyber-athlete like myself can make totally human errors.

Honestly, I have never been able to understand what compels one to cheat in an online game.  Your immediate response may be “to boost the value of his or her pathetic soul”, but I think it goes beyond that.  Chalk this up to a chess mentality: “If somebody does X, they are expecting Y as a result, and Y may eventually lead to Z.”  If someone hacks in a video game, they are expecting…what, exactly?

This isn’t necessarily the Russia Hackteam crowd I’m looking at, those who view shooting somebody through a wall as no different than picking up the Rocket Launcher.  I’m talking about those who want their performance “enhanced” by cheating.  Sports and politics provide financial incentive for people to step over each other.  If I could jam a needle in my ass and become a pro-level baseball player, I would be taking lessons from Barry Bonds right now.  The majority of players who cheat in online video games (probably a teenager, probably Eurasian, probably a virgin) will never have the opportunity to create money or fame through playing video games.

So you get a fancy number next to your account name.  That fancy number will get wiped out in a matter of months.  You will still play people who can throw you through the metaphorical plate-glass window.  You will alienate those who actually care about whether or not you hack.  And if you’re doing it for the lulz, that would go down as the lamest form of grief play in the history of online video games.  Honestly: What is Y?

New Rule of Video Games: If you announce that you are going to create a video game, someone out there will take offense to it.

It has been only a day since the news broke of Konami’s plan to publish Six Days in Fallujah, but the game is already sparking anger as well as calls for a ban.

To be sure, releasing a video game based on one of the bloodiest and most controversial actions of the Iraq War is a public relations gamble for Konami and developer Atomic Games – especially since the war is still going on.

Early negative reactions to Six Days in Fallujah have been both sharp and diverse, with a decorated British Army officer and a representative of a U.K. peace group both expressing outrage over the game.

Let’s forget that the United States Army commissioned a first-person shooter that will become an historical statement for the country’s military fetish.  Forget that Call of Duty 4 allows players to fight each other in recreations of these war zones.  Forget that during the leadup to the Second Gulf War, SCi published a game set during the first Gulf War.  And in this game, you had the option to give Saddam Hussein a warm glass of “bullet to the brain”.  And Six Days in Fallujah is the game that has people livid?

“I haven’t played it” has rarely stopped video game critics, but “announced one day ago” is fairly new.  The only information we know about the game bodes well for its success: It’s labeled as survival-horror.  Resident Evil didn’t win fans with its gameplay.  It won fans by combining a crappy control scheme with the possibility of death around any corner.  In the race to make an authentic war game, “survival-horror” sounds dead-perfect.

Here’s my hypothesis for this most recent outcry: During the Golden Age of Video Game, the primary objective was to get the highest score possible, and then brag about it on the predecessors to the internet.  During the eight-bit era, storyline and setting were introduced to the very large audience that wasn’t acquainted with PC adventure games.  These paper-thin plotlines reflected a cultural climate where Reagan teamed with God to fight Communism and baby rape.  So Bowser kidnapped the Princess.  How did she get kidnapped?  Why was Mario rescuing her?  None of that mattered, you accepted that Bowser was evil because the game told you he was.

In the eyes of the general public, those two eras are their perception of video games.  Now, Konami has announced a video game that will be based on one of the most controversial incidents of the Second Gulf War.  In the eyes of these particular critics, Six Days in Fallujah is going to be a military shooter where good-guy Americans kill bad-guy Iraqis in the name of a high score.  They fail to realize that video games have taken significant strides in becoming accepted as an artistic medium that can convey the message of a skilled producer or director.  For now, let’s see if the game makes it to shelves.  If it does, then we can go ahead and have a debate on its value to society.

From Andrew Swan, a writer for the University of Minnesota, Morris newspaper:

Now, as an avid gamer and someone who hopes to merge his love of writing and gaming into a future career, I’ve been paying close attention to Obama’s view of gaming throughout his campaign and his presidency, and there seems to be a common theme throughout.  While many gamers seem to see Obama as continuing the ignorant government-led assault on video games, vilifying them as sources of corruption, stagnation, and ignorance for our children, in context Obama’s references to gaming fit snugly in with his overall desire to stress the importance of personal responsibility for Americans.

Obama is not saying that video games are leading to the decline of education amongst our children; he is laying the blame on parents who are content to park their kids in front of a television screen for hours a day instead of actually interacting with their children, helping them with their homework, etc.  In fact, Obama has embraced video games throughout his entire campaign.  Both his daughters are gamers, proud owners of a Nintendo DS and a Wii, and Obama himself has stated he likes to kick back and relax with a game of Bowling on Wii Sports (let’s hope for his sake his virtual  backspin is a little more effective than his real-life skills).  Obama also spent millions on advertising placed within video games, including Burnout Paradise, Guitar Hero, and Madden NFL 09.

Yes, kids, there is a magical butterfly known as “context”.  Simply because a politician has mentioned video games by name does not mean he is out to ban them.

Last year, JV Games pissed off the entire universe when their beer-pong game for the Wii received a Teen rating.  Eventually, all of the alcohol-related content was removed, and the moral decay of civilization was averted. Notable to the discussion was the words of the comapny’s vice president, a man who proved he was better at telling lies than creating video games.

[Jag] Jaeger said the video game was never about alcohol, but rather the growing sport that has developed around beer pong. There’s even a World Series of Beer Pong that is held in Las Vegas where contestants vie for $50,000 in prize money.

“The game never showed any drinking, it never depicted anyone getting drunk,” he said Monday in a telephone interview from his Las Vegas office. “The thing is, it’s becoming a really well-known sport.”

See, the aptly-named Jaeger was merely pushing a game that emphasized plastic cups and ping-pong balls.  That is, until public scrutiny moved on to the next non-issue.

Based on a game born on college campuses in the early 80s and released as Pong Toss – Frat Party Games™ in the United States, Beer Pong! Frat Party Games™ is now available in Europe.

Here’s a suggestion, jackass: Instead of changing the title, why didn’t you try making the game playable?  At least the web site is entertaining, in that Street Fighter movie kind of way.

In the midst of Prohibition, the political humorist Will Rogers noted that “[t]he South is dry and will vote dry…[t]hat is, everybody sober enough to stagger to the polls will.” That old hypocrisy now has a new enemy, as rookie game producer JV Games assures you their beer pong game has nothing to do with alcohol. Their WiiWare title “Frat Party Games – Pong Toss” merited enough criticism to coax developers into scrapping the alcohol references. However, the game’s new-found Teen rating earned concern from parents, worried the game may encourage their teenage snowflakes to start drinking. It’s bad enough the moralists will get their week with the mic, it’s even worse they won’t attack the real problem: another horrible game using bad press to generate sales.

This is the story: the Attorney General of Connecicut accuses the ESRB of being “under the influence” when they gave Pong Toss its rating. Patricia Vance, the President of the ESRB, replies with politically-correct bullshit about the game involving “nothing more than tossing pingpong balls into plastic cups”. And Jag Jeager, the ever-ironically-named V.P. of JV Games, defends the product by stating “it’s not about alcohol, but rather the growing sport developed around beer pong”, the popular college drinking game. GamePolitics details the situation, one that will become infected with the same parasites that claimed Grand Theft Auto IV encouraged drinking, even though the gameplay shows the exact opposite.

What’s the first reason for learning history? Surprise, the shit repeats itself! In 1983, Bally Midway released a bartending-themed arcade game by the name of Tapper. Using Budweiser product placement, George Gomez of Midway stated the company’s goal was to get the game into Budweiser bars. If a third of them bought in, their game would have the commercial reach of Pac-Man or Asteroids. Take a guess what happened:

“Unfortunately, the beer-themed game that was supposed to be placed only in bars soon found its way into the mainstream arcades. Parents were not happy about having their kids exposed to alcohol advertising, a public outcry ensued, and soon the game was stripped of all Budweiser references and renamed into a more innocuous Root Beer Tapper.” (43)

If bad games sell more copies in the wake of controversy, this game needs to stay away from the Wii. The mass media is granting free marketing to a consumer base known for its casual nature, i.e. they’ll be dumb enough to buy it. Vance correctly noted that “[i]ronically, this is likely to result in more rather than less consumers being drawn to this game, particularly those very minors all of us seek to protect.”

Please do not buy this game. At its budget tag of ten dollars, “Pong Toss” should only exist to remind people that Mario 64 and Super Metroid can be downloaded from the Virtual Console for a cheaper price. Unfortunately, she’ll be a high-selling scapegoat for a nation of parents that can’t do their job.

As with others who have little objection to religion, its exploitation for political or economic gain is my concern. Enter Christian-themed video games, which have unapologetically done the latter. In 1991, Wisdom Tree gave new meaning to “god games” with their epic failure Bible Adventures. With games tailored to a Christian lifestyle, why not a Christ-conscious game review web site? I won’t object to purchases based on the word of God, but this breaches the line between “religious consumerism” and “utterly insane”.

Guitar Hero II
This game is incredibly fun and addictive I will not deny that…[t]is game is great for parties provided that the music, language or pentagrams won’t offend anyone. I’ll be hesitant on purchasing any more games from this series.
Final Score 76%

LarryBoy and the Bad Apple
This game is fun for the whole family. The mini-games support two player modes and kids at any age can enjoy them. (Adults too!) The violence is cartoon like and there is no blood or gore. There are good moral lessons learned and you’ll see how other people are affected by the consequences of our actions. There’s plenty of humor but none of it is gross or offensive.
Final Score: 98%

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy my time in San Andreas. It’s a finely crafted game. However, the very questionable content makes it difficult to recommend this game to Christians. Violent action, strong language, drug references, and a healthy dosage of sexual content permeate what could have been a masterpiece. Discerning gamers should think long and hard about whether wading through a sea of sin is worth it.
Total Score: 71% C-
(Worth noting the review gave a “+3” to “Promotes importance of family values”.)

Dance Praise
Overall I’m impressed with this game and would recommend it to any church or any DDR lover.
Final Score: 94%

Resident Evil 4
From a secular standpoint, this is the magnum opus of survival horror games…and it is not out of the realm of reason that many such fans will remember this as the best game ever on the Cube…[t]his is Metal Gear Solid meets Resident Evil with a bit of Metroid Prime thrown in, and the results are predictably spectacular. From a Christian perspective, there are elements to this game that are unavoidably troublesome…[t]hose who are uncertain about whether or not to get it might want to rent it first.
Rating: 76%

Bibleman: A Fight for Faith
A Fight for Faith gives me mixed feelings. Covenant Studios did so many things right with this game, and it is their first video game ever. I was extremely excited when I installed this game, and started playing it. It took me a few minutes to become frustrated with the deflecting the shots, and dying with Cypher in the first level repeatedly. I was like, this is the Easy difficulty? So, I tried playing with Biblegirl (for a macho man like myself that was a stretch). Biblegirl was so easy that I felt like there was no challenge at all. I took time to enjoy the sounds, and music. I took time to wonder at the really cool level design (especially the maze level). The Wacky Protestor has some lines (about a chrome bumper) that had be laughing. Ultimately the decision is yours ? I only hope that I could give you the tools to assist in your purchasing decisions. God bless you and yours.
Overall Score: 89%

Starcraft
The multiplayer is simply brilliant.
Rating: 77/100

I’d rather not end this on a theological talking point, but God thinks you’re idiots for killing others in his name, and he doesn’t care who controls the Holy Land. I don’t think he cares if you’re having a good time with God of War 2.