For the record: People attempting to sneer at 2K’s decision to have us play as a Big Daddy in BioShock 2 by stipulating that the mute character will keep us from developing an emotional connection with the game are grasping at straws. Jack, the main character in the original BioShock, was a mute. So is Gordon Freeman in the Half-Life series. So is the Lone Wanderer in Fallout 3. So is frickin’ Link. Funny how we were able to play these characters and feel invested in their experiences nonetheless. It’s not as if a mute character was anything groundbraking, here. On the plus side, if these bullshit arguments are all the critics can muster up to keep their pristine images all glossy and shiny without coming across as shills, then the game is obviously on the right track.
Dismemberment, blunt trauma, chemical burns, and nails in eyesockets will undoutebly shock you into making sure you remain accident free in your workplace. Not a parody. (Via BoingBoing; thanks Tim!)
Joel Bauer is a pompous douchebag, but a hilarious pompous douchebag.
In this video, he goes off on buisness cards: “This is the most impressive buisness card I’ve ever seen. It’s mine. It took me twenty-five years to design this.”
That is just one of the many, many amazing lines in this video. Wait till you hear what life is all about. (Via The Presurfer)
When the first few bars of ”I Must Be Dreaming” by The Monolators started, I didn’t really think much of it, but I’m glad I stuck to it, because what starts off as a low-fi affair, turns into a sweeping, energetic, awesomely arranged garage-ish anthem.
Storefront for the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., located at 372 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. It’s actually a front for 826NYC, a youth oriented, non-profit creative writing center, fronted by Dave Eggers. More pictures here. (Via Design You Trust)
Get ready for the awesomest waste of your time ever: Tone Matrix is a sound sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. Basically, you light up squares, and it performs your music. It is remarkable. (Via The Presurfer)
“During his captivity, US marines forced Saddam [Hussein], who was executed in 2006, to repeatedly watch the move [sic] South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as gay, as well as the boyfriend of Satan.”
And for it, Trey Parker and Matt Stone got an autographed picture of Saddam. I didn’t know Saddam had casting portraits at the ready. (Via Slashdot)
Miss the days of web pages overusing animated Gifs, embedding MIDI songs, and using Comic Sans as default display font? Then get ready to feel like it’s Netscape Navigator all over again with Tobi’s Timemachine add-on for Firefox, sticking it straight up Web 2.0’s pretentious flashpipe.
Finally, someone at Capcom explains why the game known as “Biohazard” in Japan was distributed everywhere else in the English-speaking world as “Resident Evil.”
“As an example, I pointed out that a crappy DOS-based game had just come out in the US called ‘Biohazard’ (not to mention the New York hardcore band of the same name) and that we’d never be able to secure the mark. As a result, the head of marketing held a company-wide contest to come up with a new name for the game.”
Konami’s newly-announced game, Six Days In Fallujah, is already stirring the pot. And with reason. Why? Too soon; that’s why. And I’m not just saying this because it’s a video game. I’m raising this point because I fear it won’t be properly dealt with.
Let’s argue that video games are taking baby steps to become a legitimate form of expression, trying to enter that coveted realm of “legitimate art.” Some games have recently made great strides into melding the elevating aspects of art to the interactivity and quirks of the video game medium. BioShock is a prime example of that. But you know, even the “legit” art forms, like movies and books are capable of making poor results, and often do it “too soon.” The movie United 93 was done too soon, was poorly thought out, and wasn’t well executed. It was a callous studio attempt at cashing-in on a generalized period of mourning.
It wasn’t a video game that pulled off such a stunt.. It was a movie. One of the “legit mediums.”
Fallujah and Iraq are weighty subjects. They represent a sequence of events which have not had time to heal over. The healing can take time because these events, and the events leading up to them (let us not forget those) are scarring. Precedent can be stated back when when Platoon was released in 1986: It was almost ten years after the Vietnam War and people still were sensitive at the thought of such a movie being made. But it was brilliant and an honest interpretation of the hell which is war. It was acclaimed instead of discarded, cherished instead of scorned, considered a masterpiece instead of a being reviled as a cash cow.
I’m not irked by the fact that it’s a video game trying to do this. I’m irked by the potentially lacklustre approach to the subject matter. Mainstream entertainment has a tough enough time getting its own stuff right, I fail to see how Konami can feel secure in taking such an endeavour on. But, regardless, I can only hope that they are conscious enough to understand context and point-in-time demand a certain amount of respect and a delicate, well-thought out execution.
Consequentially, if the same game was made fifty years from now, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
This handy Flash application will help you determine the cooking time to cook the perfect hard-boiled egg. It even factors in how high over the sea level you are in meters, as water boils faster the higher you are.
Hearing a name like Headless Heroes could easily refer to the god-awful state of the current NBC superhero show, but in this case it is attributed to the wonderous musicians of the dreamy and bittersweet “True Love Will Find You In The End“, upon which psych folk figurehead Alela Diane sings.
