Archive for the 'Rant' Category

I’m speechless..

Published at March 25, 2008 in Rant. 0 Comments

waz Oh this ones priceless….

Not so long ago in the hazy past, a little game called Manhunt 2 caused just a tiny bit of controversy - Manhunt Banned

The BBFC banned the game for its depiction of “sustained, casual sadism” deeming it too much for UK gamers. David Cooke, director of the BBFC, said the body had twice rejected the game “for its focus on varied and cumulative killings”.

He said the judgement had to include the “full range of possible harm risks to vulnerable individuals and to any children who may be wrongly exposed to such games.”

How is it then that the (government backed) UK Film Council deems it worthy to award nearly 1 million pounds from National Lottery money to a torture movie in the same vein as Saw and Hostel? A film described as “a nasty, pretentious and sordid little movie”

Now, I have ZERO problems with this movie existing. I don’t care, I’ve seen the Saw movies and enjoyed them to a degree, I watched Hostel and shook my head at the poorly written story.. but not at the violence.

How the HELL can the UK government have the brass balls to claim that video games might be too violent and spend god knows how much of our tax money on a study on violence in games, then help fund a f*cking torture movie is beyond me!

I’m literally boiling with rage at this.. if a game was to come out with the same content as this movie.. torturing people until they either break and kill a loved one, or die.. all the anti-game nuts would be screaming from the rooftops!

Seriously, this sh*t needs to stop. If a game is rated for adults it deserves the same treatment films like this get.

EA’s had enough…

Published at January 24, 2008 in General Gaming, Rant and XBox360. 0 Comments

masseffect  ..and quite rightly so. Everyone’s having a pop at Mass Effect lately which wouldn’t be so bad but for the fact that the majority of things the mainstream media are ‘reporting’ on is complete and utter BS.

Latest to take a swing at the game is FOX News, spewing more false claims and citing ‘experts’ that have never even played the game.

Circulating blogs today is a copy of a letter sent from EA to FOX asking for corrections to be made.. The part I find most interesting is EA’s implication that as games take more viewers away from the TV and ratings take a hit, mainstream media is more likely to attempt to paint gaming in a negative light in some vain attempt to pull ratings back..

As video games continue to take audiences away from television, we expect to see more TV news stories warning parents about the corrupting influence of interactive entertainment. But this represents a new level of recklessness.

Do you watch the Fox Network? Do you watch Family Guy? Have you ever seen The OC? Do you think the sexual situations in Mass Effect are any more graphic than scenes routinely aired on those shows? Do you honestly believe that young people have more exposure to Mass Effect than to those prime time shows?

This is very interesting to me as its a theory I have entertained for some time now.. The OC inclusion is genius. That show has more sexual content that Mass Effect and is widely available to people under 17. Pot/Kettle/Black

Really hope EA get somewhere with this…

Technorati Tags:

Debunking the BS

Published at December 13, 2007 in General Gaming and Rant. 0 Comments

If games are addictive than so is couching out in front of the TV night after night for hours on end..

If violent games encourage violent behaviour, why are members or the English football team saying that we’d have better footballers if the kids weren’t all playing video game football? If there so influential to kids then we would have tons of kids flocking to sports, skateboarding, the police force, the army, exploring space, raiding tombs, wielding swords in supermarkets shouting about the Frozen Tentacles of Iceland and the epics it drops when killed…. or is it only GTA that’s influential to the kids?

..if Violent games are so bad for children regardless of content, why do games like Americas Army not only exist, but are used as tools to recruit underage kids to join the armed forces?

Why is it, movies like Hostel and Saw featuring realistic scenes of intense violence and gore in full high definition quality, are considered more acceptable to adults than Manhunt 2 with its blurry, not-so photo realistic graphics?

Yeah I don’t get it either…

Marky Mark.. Why? Really.. Why?

Published at November 9, 2007 in General Gaming and Rant. 1 Comment

Max Payne MovieMy hatred for this next piece of info is so intense its off the map.

Mark Wahlberg to play Max Payne

That’s right, good ol’ Marky Mark (presumably lacking ‘the funky bunch’) has been cast as Max Payne for the upcoming movie of the same name.

Wahlberg might be able to pull it off, some might even say he’s a good actor who has starred in some OK movies.

Not me! My dislike for the guy is so intense and irrational I couldn’t even say how it started but I know I dislike him immensely and I’m a man of principle.. Sorry Marky but you can take your slow mo bullet action and ram it right where the funky bunch came from.

If the Max Payne character model even remotely looks like Marky Mark in the next game then out of principle, I wont even consider parting with as little as a single pubic hair for it..

Penny Arcade on Manhunt 2

Published at November 5, 2007 in General Gaming and Rant. 0 Comments

Penny ArcadeI know, I know.. I said I was sick of the Manhunt stampede, but this is different

Penny Arcade on Manhunt 2

At last, someone calls it as it is…

Manhunt 2 Madness

Published at November 1, 2007 in General Gaming and Rant. 0 Comments

Manhunt 2 I know its a hot topic right now but personally I’m tired of seeing people blow up in one extreme or the other regarding this game. Its got to the point where I’m a few Manhunt posts away from perma-removing GamePolitics.com from my RSS feeds. Not that I’m not a GP fan because I am. I just cant read one more Manhunt post this month..

It seems every site is posting this group or that groups thoughts, this industry analyst, that watchdog, this critic… on and on and on, opinions from people I never heard of and quite frankly don’t care about.

I never liked the original Manhunt. Not because of the hyper-violence but because of its repetitive game-play. I tired of the stylised death cut-scenes after the 3rd or 4th time I’d seen each one. For me it just didn’t cut it as a compelling game. Others disagree and that’s fine. A few of my friends are big Manhunt fans and have offered various counters to my dislikes of the game that I can appreciate and I see the appeal, but personally I cant sit through a disrupting cut-scene for every kill made in a game. I just cant do it, its bad enough to have your flow disrupted for a cut-scene but when its the same one you saw 2 minutes ago but with a slightly different background, its time to move on.

That said, I don’t believe in the ban Manhunt 2 received here in the UK. For a classification board to say Manhunt 2 may negatively effect adults and a few weeks later pass the movie, Eastern Promises, and make a statement indicating that they are not here to make cuts and if adults don’t want to see the violence they can just turn away from the screen, is unreal. This alone should show the problems the classification board has, mainly that it doesn’t count video games as a worthy medium. Had it considered gaming to be viable media they would have looked upon Manhunt 2 in the same light that it looked on Hostel, Saw, or the recent Eastern Promises and classified it in the same manner.

The conflicting statements made by the BBFC prove that either their guidelines for game classifications need reviewing or we need a new independent body to classify games. An independent body that knows and values games as a medium of entertainment, not necessarily art but definitely entertainment.

Note of Absence…

Published at October 22, 2007 in Monster Hunter, Rant and World of Warcraft. 0 Comments

Sick Note excusing me from WoWOver the last month or so I’ve taken a much needed break from World of Warcraft and turned back to console gaming to fill the gap, which has been a nice change. Been able to switch a game on and get something out of it within 30 mins is something I missed when playing Warcraft and the main reason I took a step back for a while.

I like the game and enjoy playing with friends in the guild but lately, looking at the prices for items I’d like, the rep grind needed for heroics, attunement to get into kara, the sheer volume of mats needed for professions and the incurred costs that go along with it, it all boils down to one thing.. grinding.

Want more money? Go grind. Need some rep? Go grind.. Need mats for professions? Go grind… Want to start raiding? Go grind dungeon ‘xyz’….

Now, 1-70 the grind is tolerable. Items drop you can use or sell, you gain mats for professions, you gain XP, learn new abilities, visit new zones, learn about some lore. All good. Get to level 70 and suddenly the game has very little outside of raiding to offer.

Fine.. go start raiding then? First you need to grind your gear which means repeated runs of dungeon ‘xyz’ all the while hoping your group doesn’t have another member in need of the item you want. Even if your the only mage in the group, you then have to contend with the ‘luck’ factor. Then you need to grind some rep/dungeons to continue which is a lengthy process.

In a game like Monster Hunter, no matter what level I am. If I want ‘x’ armour, I go kill ‘x’ monster and the parts I need drop from it. The luck factor is still involved as the high end gear requires specific items and you may have to grind the monster over and over, but by and large the system is more skill based than some. Most armour requires common materials that drop reliably each run, you just need set amounts of it. Therefore your avatar is only as good as the last monster you killed and to proceed you need some skill to take down the next hardest monster using the last monsters armour. That’s the skill and joy of Monster Hunter. In a game like WoW, your character is only as good as the random loot table in each drop.

You could argue that these systems are very similar in that you have to kill say, 10 Rathalos in Monster Hunter to obtain armour crafted from its parts.. but you also may have to run a dungeon 10 times in WoW before ‘x’ boss drops the item you require. The difference is, for every Rathalos run completed I can check my bags and see how many more items I need to craft my armour, there is no mechanic in WoW to say, you downed this boss 8 times, 3 more and he’ll drop the item you want. Its all luck based and you get nothing to show for an unsuccessful run.. MH is luck based but rewards you for every run you complete by visibly pushing you closer to obtaining the item you desire.

For me, WoW is fun but the bottomless well that is the level cap sucks the fun out of the game for me. If I see very little reward for hour after hour of gaming then before long my interest dips and fades completely. However, keep dangling that visible carrot under my nose and I’ll keep running.

Its these points that further enforce my belief that the reason WoW is such a time-sink is not because Blizzard wanted to provide a really lengthy game to keep you occupied long past other games, its simply a business model to keep you paying. The ones who tire of the grind soon cancel accounts and move on to pastures anew. No biggie, subscriber numbers keep going and the regular expansions are sure to draw new players into the game so they can afford to lose a few minority players. For the ones who don’t see it as that much of a grind, the ones who see it as a continuation of the game, the truly hardcore who will sink hour after hour into the game for side-grades that add tiny increments to stats, those are the people this game caters too. The longer it takes to do something, the longer that player is paying Blizzard a monthly fee and ultimately I believe that’s the reason it takes so damn long to do so little in this game.

Technorati Tags: