Friday, February 25, 2011

inFAMOUS 2's Moral Choice Blunder

The first inFAMOUS had it's flaws, but was a good freeroam superpower sandbox game with an above average story. The moral choice system, however, was shallow and flawed. Well, inFAMOUS 2 has decided to change that, but whether it's for better or worse remains to be seen, but after watching this video, I'm betting it's the latter.




Okay, you've seen it, now let me chime in with this week's rant.

This is the first I've seen of the moral choice characters introduced for inFAMOUS 2, and I'm not impressed. The choice of good and evil won't even feel like a choice to me, because the black chick is so incredible stereotypical that I'll be forced to side with the white chick just so I don't have to listen to her.

Now I'm sure some moral fag is going to jump on this post and go on about how I'm racist and discriminatory and need to be more tolerant of ethnicities other than my own, but fuck that. Discrimination is simply the act of liking one thing over another, and if you're given a choice between siding with a woman who is bland, and one who makes you cringe every time she opens her fucking mouth, of course you're going to choose the former, no matter how overwhelmingly bland she is.

As has been asked in other threads, posts, tweets, and various forms of internet communication, why does evil now equate to a Haitian person with dreads and excessive amounts of tribal tattoos who looks like they practice voodoo?

This seems to be something that is all too common these days, developers adding token black people to movies, games and T.V shows so no one calls them racist for having an all white cast of characters. If this isn't the reason for the character's addition, then kindly forgive my paranoid assumptions, but she's still unbearably fucking grating to my eyes and ears, and probably sense of touch as well since this is a PS3 exclusive and you just know Sony is going to cram that shitty motion control gimmick of theirs in somewhere so they can justify the existence of the Sixaxis and Move tech.

I swear to god, if at any point during the story she waggles her finger back and fourth while moving her head from side to side and says "No you didn't", I will personally travel to Sucker Punch headquarters and smother the character designer responsible with a moist towelette soaked in Tabasco.

(Disclaimer: I have no intention of traveling anywhere or doing anything to any member Sucker Punch or anyone else on this planet. This message has been written to appease the Coalition of Uppity Naive Tossers, or C.U.N.Ts as they are more commonly known.)

Monday, February 14, 2011

Where are all the Dutch women at?


Okay, the title may be a little misleading, but still.

I received an email the other day asking the reason behind my sometimes sporadic updates. Well, sometimes I just calm the fuck down and can't find anything entertaining to rant about, and sometimes shit comes down all at once, leaving me with a lingering sense of inspiration to fly off the handle. In this case, it's more of a "holy shit, this is awesome" kind of inspiration, instead of the usual, "die you miserable pig fucker", kind of inspiration.

Knotrust is an Austrian crossover band, meaning they know a few different languages and use them all in their music, which is surprisingly awesome.

I first heard of Kontrust when Hentai Palm went down about a year ago. Hentai Guru Numbus posted the video to Knotrust's hit single, Bomba, as a place holder . At first I just loled, but then found myself going back to the downtime page again and again just to listen to it. After a while I tracked down a couple more of their songs and came to the conclusion that this is a band I would actually be willing to pay money to listen to, so I digitally cantered on over to itunes and bought Time to Tango, which is their latest album. After listening to that for a while I started to crave more, so I went and bought their previous album Welcome Home. While not as awesome as Time to Tango, it was still pretty good. I then tracked down their first album, Make me Blind, through other methods as I couldn't find it for sale anywhere, which is probably a good thing as it was shit by my standards and appears to have come out before they got that hot female lead they currently have.

Here is a link to their official video for Bomba. If you don't get a lol or three out of this there is probably something wrong with you. If you find it strangely compelling as I did, I suggest you find some place to squander your money and get yourself a copy, be it digital or physical.

Kontrust on itunes

Thursday, February 10, 2011

On Ignorance and Slander


Oh boy, here we go.

Recently, Fox News aired a segment on Bulletstorm, giving it the title "Is Bulletstorm the Worst Video Game in the World?" due to its copious amount of severed limbs and skill shots named after sexual slang. In this segment, they massacred comments made by Scott Steinberg, CEO of TechSavvy Global, and M2 Research’s Billy Pidgeon. Their unaltered comments can be read here and here along with some more back story on this media clusterfuck.

The fuss seems to revolve around the fact that many of these "skill shots" have been humorously named after sexual acts and slang. Rear entry is when you lovingly give your enemy a lead enema. Topless is when you not so delicately remove the top half from the bottom half of your enemy. And Gang Bang is when you wrap a flail grenade around your enemy, then proceed to kick him full force into his companions, detonating the explosives when the moment is just right.

Let me start by saying I'm not posting this rant in defense of Bulletstorm, since Bulletstorm doesn't require defending. In case you missed my earlier post about it, Bulletstorm is a balls to the wall, over the top FPS developed by People Can Fly, a polish developer currently under the employment of Epic studios. They are best known for their 2004 balls to the wall, over the top FPS: Painkiller.

It's already been established that Fox News is shit, and is entirely staffed by scaremongering cockbags who constantly falsify information to make entire mountain ranges out of mole hills, and that they are known for altering quotes from the interviewees that actually have the intelligence to not just tell them exactly what they want to hear. However, they do often find people with such incredibly uninformed opinions that they are akin to sparkly diamond mines in the eyes of Fox. One such person is Dr. Carole Lieberman, who provided Fox with deliciously slanderous statements about upcoming game Bulletstorm.

Dr. Lieberman is a known criticizer of violence and sexuality in video games, stating that "Video games have increasingly, and more brazenly, connected sex and violence in images, actions and words. This has the psychological impact of doubling the excitement, stimulation and incitement to copycat acts. The increase in rapes can be attributed, in large part, to the playing out of such scenes in video games.". This is of course, a baseless statement and complete and utter bullshit, but that doesn't stop her from spinning her wheels while referencing studies that never occurred.

Dr. Lieberman has admitted to never playing video games, so its a little hard to understand how she might feel that she is qualified to say anything about them aside from that they come in a plastic case and might include instruction booklets.

I don't deny that there are individuals out there that may take what they see in any medium, and act it out in real life, but these are individuals with inherent mental defects that would act on these ideas no matter where they saw or heard of them, including their own delusional fantasies. Such individuals are often in the spotlight when it comes to reports on video games, because news about calm, collected adults who enjoy video games in privacy of their own homes don't get the same kind of reactions as stories about terrorists that use outdated games as a unrealistic ground for training. Likewise, psychiatrists see the worst of the worst, since mentally healthy individuals do not seek out help for such issues. If you search for news about violent offenders who have at some point in their lives played violent games, you are almost certain to find such examples, and if you are pigheaded enough you will probably disregard any evidence you find that sits contrary to your beliefs.

Half the comments against her and her book are so saturated in sarcasm they're dripping. The rest likely come from people who are at a loss for words due to the anger they are feeling. She states that she would need to look through her records and check online for something to back up her claims, which makes it seem that she has really been winging it the entire time and if someone is going to put her on the spot and question her ideals she would like to have the opportunity to do some actual research.

It seems to me that if you've been bombarded with angry people emailing you, and reporters questioning your statements, you may just want to get your shit together so you can defend yourself. If after this amount of time you don't have your shit together, it becomes undeniably evident that you didn't know what the fuck your were talking about in the first place.

Video games are of course the media punching bag of the new millennium, though the baseless criticism started about a decade earlier, it has done nothing but escalate these last 11 years. It does seems rather ironic then that politicians and the like use video games as a target, when their own country constantly glorifies war and military service, and often carries out operations that are an absurd waste of taxpayer money in an attempt to hold back the unwashed hoards of dirty foreigners that allegedly attempt to attack this hypocritical nation of fat, uneducated cannon fodder who haven't yet been drafted by their local military recruitment center. And to think I was listed as being patriotic after completing one of those online tests...

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Cage The Elephant:Thank You, Happy Birthday


So I bought Cage the Elephant's new album today, thinking "Fuck yeah! These guys were awesome in their debut album". Well, I was right on one aspect. They were awesome....

These songs fit together about as well as a square into a circular hole. I was honestly taken aback by how bad most of them were. It litterally assaulted all my senses. I felt as though I had been touched by a roofie slinging date rapist, who invited you out for dinner and dancing but then took you to a run down car park and violated you against a concrete barricade covered in fresh hobo piss. The album art assulted my eyes around the time I returned to the download page thinking I had somehow got the wrong files. With all the screaming that proceeded to fill my home (His, not mine) I thought the lead singer had been taking pointers from Jonathan Davis. The bad smell might have been attributed to a burning disc had I not purchased the album from itunes. And the entire ordeal left a bitter taste in my mouth.

All in all, listening to this album was a lot like bad sex. It left me feeling drained, pissed off, used, and a little guilty, like I had just went home with the fat chick at the party after an entire 26oz of Smirnoff Blue Label.

If you're like me, and discovered this band through their stellar opening song used in the intro to Borderlands, I can almost guarantee you will hate all but 4 songs on this album. You won't like the 4 songs either, you'll merely be able to tolerate them, as though someone had been stabbing you in the eye with a piece of splintered wood soaked in lemon juice and vindaloo sauce, then switched to something slightly more bearable, like a rusty icepick...

Call of Duty: Bullets and Loathing



I've never been an online gamer. I first got online in 2006 on a pathetic dial-up connection, which was the only option at the time. By 2007 I was on a semi highspeed connection with a tremendous amount of lag, and still am to this day. It's because of this that I can take an objective standpoint and muse about the Call of Duty series and all the famboyism and hatred surrounding it, and do so with little bias.

To me it's never been more than a semi-realistic, though admittedly rather short, polished single player FPS. The gaming sites that I frequent often have members spouting such idiotic things like "Well, it can't possibly be worse than Black Ops" or "Iron sites have ruined the FPS scene". Now let's get one thing stright, there's no way on this polluted, used up little planet of ours that iron sites can "ruin" an entire genre of games. Things can always be implemented poorly of course, but that can be said for any feature in any game ever. The CoD series has done it particularly well in fact, and it is always left as an option. As for things being worse then Black Ops, well sure they could. Granted, I wasn't as blown away by Black Ops as I was by Modern Warfare, but at the end of the day it was still much better than most of the disposable shooters of the last ten years.

When you have a popular, highly functional franchise like the CoD series, one must start to wonder why it attracts so much disdain. I mean, why would you hate something that at the best of times could be considered one of the most accessible shooters of this console generation, and at the worst of times an abysmally short single player game where your avatar can soak up more lead than the clay hill behind the local firing range and still continue fighting? Well, if you take a standpoint where you are neither willing to sell the rights to your first born child for a copy of the next iteration, nor march on your local government office demanding that a bylaw be made making it punishable by death to make another entry to the series, you may start to notice that much of the hatred is unexplained and maybe even unwarranted.

As one anon said, "Haters gonna hate", but that still doesn't really answer the question. Were the hater's mothers once violated before their very eyes by a service-man holding a rifle snugly to his shoulder? It's unlikely, though knowing our country's military record, not impossible. I can then only come to the conclusion that perhaps it's not the game, nor the mechanics of the game that draw so much hatred, but the apparently rabid online community, allegedly filled with foul mouthed 12 year olds with absurdly over developed fast twitch muscles and hand eye coordination, or perhaps the hackers and cheaters that plague the game's servers. It's not too far fetched to assume that maybe some people just don't like to be one upped by others, or just can't get into the game.

Perhaps we'll know the answer to these questions for certain some day. Right now, though, my money is on the stupidly vulgar people that infest an otherwise ordinary competitive community of gamers to such an extent that they spill out onto the rest of the internet allowing anyone with a functioning pair of eyes to see their seething hatred for what it is: the knowledge that no matter how hard they try in life, they will never create something as awesome as Nestle Flips.