“Angry Birds Space” went on sale last night. Two weeks ago, after news broke that this game was coming, another game called “Space Birds” hit iTunes. Look familiar? It’s a rip-off in every possible way…VERY lazy. Come on, people! Write your own games, don’t copy the hits right down to the artwork just so you can make a few easy bucks off the easily fooled.
Then again, if you’re dumb enough to think this is an actual Angry Birds game, maybe you deserve to lose that dollar!
I’ve been eyeballing the iCade for a few months now, wondering if I want to spend $100 on a gadget with a very narrow focus: playing a handful of iPad games using old-school controls. But the more I looked into it, the more appealing it looked–because if you’ve chosen to jailbreak your iPad, you suddenly have access to MAME which plays thousands of classic arcade games (provided you can find the ROMs). So, shortly after my 40th birthday, I said “Fuck it!” and ordered one.
I rarely spend that kind of money on this sort of goofy, cheesy thing, but something about it really appeals to my inner arcade nerd. That kid who, throughout the 80′s, used to hang out at arcades for hours on end, gleefully dumping quarters and tokens into machines that were so exciting at the time. I still remember what it was like with all the loud, crazy electronic noises filling the room and the groups of people huddled around machines, stacking quarters on them. My brother and I used to make a pass through the arcade each time we went in, just in case a new game had arrived…that was always something exciting. (I remember when “Tron” came out and the machines had these giant monitors stacked on top so the crowd in back could better watch the action.) Today the very sight of a tabletop Ms. Pac-Man game sends me back 30 years! So I definitely have a soft spot for arcades and the golden age age of coin-op gaming.
Once I put this together and got it working, I snarfed down a few compatible apps and gave it a spin. The controls work like a charm: the joystick is very responsive, and the buttons have that perfect clicky quality. They’re physically unlabeled so you have to remember what does what, but it’s not too bad. The unit even has a fake coin slot which lights up when it’s connected to your iPad. Sweeeeet.
The real fun came when I installed iMAME4All on my jailbroken iPad. I dumped some ROMs into it, and suddenly a whole new world of retro arcade gaming opened up. I’ve played MAME games before, but never like this, with a joystick and buttons to be madly mashed! All my favorites are there: Donkey Kong Jr., Jungle Hunt, Zaxxon, Tron, Qix, Q*Bert, Dig Dug, Wizard of Wor, Alien Syndrome, Joust, Super Pac-Man, Gauntlet II, Gorf… It’s an arcade nerd’s dream, and it really takes me back to those days I remember so well.
The biggest caveat to playing the old arcade games is that iMAME is a little finicky: you have to have ROMs that were tweaked a certain way, otherwise they won’t work. You can find massive archives of them online, but unless they’re in that specific format (MAME 0.37b5), they won’t work. Luckily I found a couple of sites which offer them: this one (free and verified) and this one (pay site, not tested by me). It’s also a legal gray area, as some companies still own the copyright to the code while many have long since gone out of business…so that’s a dilemma for you to work out for yourself. Also, the controls are a little odd sometimes, such as for games which required a trackball or steering wheel, but nearly everything I tried was playable and looked/sounded wonderful.
So I’m not 100% sure it’s a good deal for those who are unwilling or unable to jailbreak their iPads, but if you’re adventurous and willing to do some tinkering, it’s a great trip down memory lane!
How irritating that Bioshock 2 requires a Windows Live Games account/profile to even launch the game. You can’t save your game unless it’s logged in, either! Thank you, 2K Games, for invading my $50 game with your asshole DRM and making gameplay more cumbersome. Hmmmph.
Wow, check out the mind-blowing hysteria surrounding Grand Theft Auto IV. I haven’t seen so many people worked up about a videogame since…well, since the last Grand Theft Auto game came out.
Remember the Hot Coffee hack which unlocked a sex minigame in GTA: San Andreas? It wasn’t accessible to everyone, only those who knew about the hack and made the effort to apply it, but the resulting media explosion guaranteed that everyone playing the game knew about the hack. The result was a tame and unerotic sex scene between your character and a girlfriend. Hardly what I’d call “porn” (no naughty bits were visible), but OH did the Protect Our Children folks go apeshit. They attacked the game’s violence too, but they paid far more attention to the hidden sex stuff. How American: demonize the sex, because blowing someone’s head off with a shotgun from your car window isn’t nearly as bad.
And, of course, the sleazebag lawyers slithered out from under their cow patties to help parents sue for whatever they could. Jack Thompson in particular made a lot of money ranting against the game company, but he also made himself out to be a complete crazy-eyed ass over the following years as he crusaded against anything that he personally found offensive. The man is a nutjob, no doubt about it.
So this week we see the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, and peoples’ heads are already exploding. The random violence, the sex, the booze, the crime syndicates and strip clubs–it’s the perfect recipe for a moral and ethical conniption, at least for those who take videogames with such deadly seriousness.
I tell ya, watching this kind of meltdown is becoming its own form of entertainment! The thing that really set people off this week was a certain YouTube video showing what kinds of sexual shenanigans you can get up to in GTA IV. Basically it amounts to (minimally clothed) lapdances in strip clubs and some at-a-distance views of a prostitute servicing you in your car. And, of course, the player chose to run over the prostitute with his car afterwards. Predictably, Jack Thompson is completely losing his shit over it:
Grand Theft Auto IV is the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio. We now have vaccines for that virus… The ‘vaccine’ that must be administered by the United States government to deal with this virtual virus of violence and sexual depravity is criminal prosecutions of those who have conspired to do this. If you doubt me, look at the aforementioned streaming audio/video. It will make you sick.
Or horny, if you’re part of the game’s target demographic. But really–polio? If you say so, drama queen.
In another fit of outrage, MADD has condemned the game for allowing players to drive drunk: “Drunk driving is a choice, a violent crime and it is also 100 percent preventable.” Well, no shit–it’s a choice and 100% preventable in the game, too. It’s not like you have to drive drunk to win. They’re also asking the game’s publisher to stop selling the game “out of respect for the millions of victims/survivors of drunk driving.” Have these people completely lost touch with reality? Then again, I’ve read that MADD has a tendency to demonize alcohol in general, not just drunk driving…
Last but not least, all this business about killing prostitutes in the game (business…get it? Ha?) has pissed off some feminists big time. This is where it gets interesting. Feministing.com posted this little rant:
…many young men are going to have their first (or already have, as this is not new content for GTA) sexual experiences via GTA and then they are going to kill the women they are sleeping with. The implications of that are mind-blowing.
It is no question that GTA is merely reflective of the bigger misogyny embedded in capitalist patriarchy, but the question is why is a game that depicts such violence towards women so popular? How is that acceptable? I think this has two consequences in the land of no child left behind where standardized educational systems have led to a cutback in the teaching of metacognition in elementary schools.
My, such adorably earnest analysis. I’m especially tickled by that “bigger misogyny embedded in capitalist patriarchy” bit. She must be proud of that one! What I want to know is how playing a videogame with simulated sex can be someone’s “first sexual experience.” It’s hardly the same as real intercourse, but…fight on, sister! (I’m not even sure the game has nudity in it. If it doesn’t, her statement is doubly stupid.) One blogger in particular slammed the feminist rant with amusing vigor: “Jesus Christ, if this is what degrees in gender studies hath wrought, polysyllabic bloggers still carping about the patriarchy, please fucking stop handing them out.” Ouch.
What fascinates me is how all these different groups are defining this game according to their own agenda. For instance, the feminist blogger took two unrelated aspects of the game–random sex and random violence–and combined them into a single anti-woman theme for the entire game simply because the player in the video chose to do one and then the other. To me this says more about the player than the game, how about you? The MADD folks did this as well: you can drink in the game, and you can drive in the game. So when a player gets drunk and starts driving around, suddenly this is a “drunk-driving game” and we all should be outraged? What the hell? I suppose that if the player kicks a cat, the PeTA folks will be screaming about banning this “animal cruelty game.”
Games like this have an incredibly detailed and interactive world. This allows the player the freedom to do many different things to innocent bystanders, some of which are shitty and cruel. But it’s not a requirement to do these in order to play the game. You don’t have to kill random bystanders, it’s all up to the player–and the player eventually pays a price for doing these things. One commenter finally brought all this up on the aforementioned Reverse Cowgirl blog‘s follow-up post:
As a 25 year old educated male feminist working for the police I find the amount of hysteria that these games raise amongst people absolutely ridiculous… It isn’t that the game is about killing prostitutes or visiting stripclubs that makes it appealing, it’s that those things are possible along with a plethora of other things including: becoming a vigilante, putting out fires, driving ambulance, driving taxi, repossessing vehicles, watching tv, surfing Rockstars own parody of the internet, flying a helicopter, jumping 2 buses on a motorcylce while tossing molotov cocktails at a hummer, play darts, play pool, go bowling, get drunk, rough up criminals, eat a hamburger, buy a nice suit, take a girlfriend out on the boardwalk, watch a really really lame cabaret and comedy club… the list goes on and on. Killing is an integeral game mechanic and sleeping with prostitutes is just window dressing, don’t construe the IGN video as some sort of overarching example of the game.
So what do I think about the sex stuff? Well, I watched the video in question and thought, “This is kind of lame. Is this supposed to be entertaining or arousing?” I showed it to Critter and he thought the same thing. Visiting strip clubs and picking up hookers for lame videogame sex isn’t my idea of fun…it looked boring and silly, and to me it’s easier to downplay since it’s just a tiny fraction of the overall game waiting for the player. Of course, we’re both gay queer homosexuals so naturally we’d find all this lame and boring, but we’d think the same thing if there were virtual guys gettin’ it on in the game. Yawn. But I do know for a fact that there a lot of douchebag straight guys playing this game who are very impressed by the sex bits. They’re practically drooling about it on the YouTube comments. It’s a game made by men, marketed at men, played by men. Really, what can you expect? The guys who are impressed by videogame boobies are the same ones who wear their baseball caps backwards, flip their collars up, and read Maxim magazine. Well, not all of them…some are hardcore gaming übernerds holed up in their aparments with their Playstations, eating chicken wings by the bucket and bickering online about which Commander Adama could kick the other’s ass. (God, I love generalizing about ze heteros…) Is the sex stuff demeaning? I think so, to a degree…but I find it more silly and lame than anything. However, I also find it a bit demeaning that you, a male character in the game, must steal and weasel and kill your way to the top of a crime syndicate. If we’re to take this game so seriously, why isn’t anyone complaining that this is a shitty way of setting good career goals for young males? (Maybe they are…I just can’t hear them through the shrieking about everything else.)
As for the violence, I’m a little torn. I’ve played a lot of videogames which involve shooting things, and I’ve found that the more realistic the graphics are, the more disturbing it is to me when killing a person in the game. They’re very lifelike nowadays, right down to the death-twitch. My geek side says, “Wow, look at those graphics!” but on another level I’m thinking, “Um, violence this realistic really necessary? T.V. and movies are bad enough…do people really need virtual participation in it?” But remember Carmageddon, where you race your car around and get points for running people down? (In some countries the people were changed to zombies with green blood because of the gore.) The graphics were awful and hardly realistic, but I had a blast mowing people down and the splattery sound effects made me giggle. It was just stupid fantasy, nothing more–and I haven’t run anyone over with the car yet. And let’s not forget The Simpsons: Hit & Run, which borrowed its gameplay directly from the GTA games, letting you drive around hitting people (if you choose) or beat/kick the shit out of them as you complete your tasks. It’s a lot of fun. Where was the outrage about that? I mean, “hit and run” is right there in the title! Somebody think of the friggin’ children!! Oh, that’s right…it’s a cartoon, so it’s not as bad. Gotta love that fairweather outrage.
In GTA IV, you can run people innocent down with your car, beat them up, chase them down the street and blow them away with your shotgun. The graphics look pretty damn good in the videos, so I sort of get that feeling: “Do we need this level of detail, do people enjoy this?” I know that the game gives you complete freedom of choice about these things, and yet there’s something about the realism that sort of puts me off. But I don’t want to ban it or keep others from enjoying it, because I’m not convinced that videogames make people into crazy murdering psychotics. (On the contrary, several studies have found that videogames can release stress, even the violent ones.) I’ve blasted zillions of people and creatures into bloody chunks in videogames, and again, I’ve never had the urge to kill in real life. So I’m not quite sure where this leaves me with the violence thing. Am I being wishy-washy about it? Regardless of how you feel about it, let’s not forget that if your kid is playing these games and you don’t approve…maybe you’d like to step in and do some parenting.
At any rate, it’s a fascinating debate to watch, because people are crazy passionate about it. What do y’all think about games like this? Does it offend you or do you blow it off as an unnecessary moral panic?
The churchies are kickin’ wit’ da Xbox, yo! Some are actually hosting videogame tournaments at church, letting kids blow the everlovin’ shit out of each other in a glorious, Jesus-endorsed digital bloodbath:
Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”
…At Sweetwater Baptist Church in Lawrenceville, Ga., Austin Brown, 16, said, “We play Halo, take a break and have something to eat, and have a lesson,” explaining that the pastor tried to draw parallels “between God and the devil.”
First they bitch about how violent these games are, and then they provide kids the means to play them–in a church, mind you–with a religious message attached? Nice try, dirtbags. These “youth minister” guys creep me out. They’re like big hairy wolves wearing ill-fitting sheep masks.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me snicker at the so-called “hip” Christian movement, especially when it involves undercover preachers whose sole job is to lure kids and teenagers into the fold at any cost. They try to speak the language (“I’m, like, down with Christ and stuff”), dress like teenagers (“Got my shirt at Old Navy, dude”), and pretend to be laid-back, nonjudgmental older brother types (“Hey, let’s do some fraggin’, high score gets to lead tonight’s prayer”). Their desperate attempts to worm their way into the hearts and minds of teenagers ends up looking silly and pathetic to everyone else. Yes, this includes cross-shaped MP3 players. 
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve played my share of violent games. Many of them had exploding bodies, oozing aliens, and very realistic gore. I just get pissed when people like this try to bash it and then use it as a “learning tool” for their own agenda. You can’t have it both ways, people…leave these kids alone! (And come to think of it, religion and violence go hand-in-hand. Maybe they’re conveying the right message to these kids after all…?)
The media coverage of the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech has been both fascinating and disgusting to watch. If the entire U.S. media could have a giant spontaneous orgasm, this is it! They’ve descended like filthy carrion, fed on the flesh of both the living and the dead, and pooped out some record ratings. T.V. network executives all over the country are congratulating themselves and toasting to the grand success they’ve had this week. Because it’s such a ratings smash, it’s all we will hear about for the next month or two, or at least until something else comes along for them to feed on.
Things got interesting once NBC decided to publish the killer’s multimedia portfolio. He essentially put together a complete press package of photos, video files, and a printed manifesto…a “digital vanity package”, as Boing-Boing puts it. He knew what he was doing, knew exactly how to get the most exposure possible to spread his deranged message and try to justify his actions. NBC, not being able to resist such a ratings frenzy, released everything to the rest of the press and made the killer an instant media star. His name and face are everywhere–he’s practically the new American Idol. NBC claims that they “agonized for hours” over whether or not they should publish it, but we all know their mind was made up the moment they opened that package. They’re facing a bit of a backlash for doing so, and it added almost nothing to the investigation, but they knew the media and the public would eat it up. Some of the material does give us a window into the killer’s warped mind, but are full slideshows and glossy video montages really necessary? (Any other news agency would have done the same thing, of course…NBC isn’t the only whore out there.)
The latest “discovery” centers around a purported link between the murders and a movie called “Oldboy.” The killer took pictures of himself doing certain things (pointing a gun at his head, wielding a hammer) and somehow they’ve decided that because the actors in this movie did similar things, they must be connected. I’m not quite convinced. Earlier, douchebag lawyer Jack Thompson blamed the killings on violent videogames. Because, you know, we have to find something to blame. It’s not enough that he was a troubled, psychotic manic-depressive type. No, we need something in the media to blame, something we can physically point to and say, “This is the cause! This made him a killer!!” Maybe he watched violent movies, and maybe he played violent videogames–many people do. But this kind of mental instability isn’t actually created by such things. If that were true, I’d be running around with a chainsaw and a shotgun after having seen “Evil Dead 2″ so many times.
Today my biggest question is: how soon before some asshole comes up with a Virginia Tech ribbon/sticker/shirt/bracelet for sale? Has the cashing-in already begun? I’m sure it has. Somewhere out there, mere days after the murders, someone is selling a product designed to milk tears and empty wallets, and it won’t be strictly for charity. Hey, they did it after 9/11, so why not now?
Quick to jump on anything popular that brings harmless fun and entertainment (and being whores for cheap publicity), a group of Christian whackjobs have decided that the Nintendo Wii game console is a portal to porn simply because it has the ability to surf the internet. They’re making the Wii sound like it’s an evil device with a mission to corrupt your lil’ children with dirty stuff. Sigh. So by their stupid fucking logic, anything that can access the internet is a Tool of Evil: cellphones, PDAs, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and (I almost forgot) home computers. These are the same people who want to clothe sculptures of naked people (“Nudity isn’t art, it’s sinful!”) and ban Harry Potter books from school libraries (“They’re Satanic!”).
It’s so hilariously and pathetically absurd, and yet it doesn’t surprise me in the least. Forget the portal to porn–these crazed churchies have blown the portal to insanity wide open.
An utterly ridiculous story has emerged from the Panicked Parents division of the media claiming that the Nintendo DS can attract child molesters. Apparently when your kid hops into a PictoChat room, which has a wireless range of about 50 feet (it’s not on the internet), pedophiles will automatically tune in and attack. Well, that’s what the story wants you to believe, anyway. It may have happened to a kid or two at an airport or something, but I seriously doubt it’s as widespread a problem as, say, MySpace (a.k.a. Pedophile Heaven). What a crock of sensationalist crapola. Thanks to Keith Richards for alerting us to this grave danger facing our precious ones!
Pardon me while I have a total fanboy worship moment here. If you don’t like videogames or gadgetry, feel free to move along!
We’ve been craving a Wii for months, and gave up on getting one for Christmas since supplies have been dry. After a few weeks checking the Wii Seeker website, I saw that Best Buy and Target were getting big shipments on the 21st. Yes! So last Sunday I did something I always see geeks doing on those tech blogs: I got up early, drove to Best Buy, and lined up with a bunch of other geeks before the store opened. I felt sort of like a consumer tool, but damn it, sometimes I must obey my gadget-lust. Eventually I was rewarded with a Wii voucher, and half an hour later I was driving home with a Wii in my hot little hands (har-har). Also picked up three games which I had read were a lot of fun: Rayman Raving Rabbids, Elebits, and Zelda: Twilight Princess. And thanks to a couple of gift cards my dad gave us for the holidays, the price was slashed quite a bit. Can’t beat that with a stick!
Oh my god. We’ve been having a blast with this thing. Raving Rabbids is hysterical and clever–we giggle and laugh like a couple of dorks every time we play it, and we probably look silly waving the Wiimotes around. That’s why it’s so much fun. Finally games are fun and interesting again, and the Wiimote is simply amazing! It lets you perform movements in 3-D space…your physical movements with the controller have depth and movement and force within the game. I’ve never seen anything like it. Call me an old fart, but other consoles make you memorize the positions and functions of 12 different buttons on their controllers (which varies game to game), and that’s not my idea of fun. Screw that…we’re playing games, not performing brain surgery! I have no problem playing PC games using the keyboard and mouse, but these controllers are just ridiculous and it’s one reason I’ve had zero interest in the Playstations or Xboxes. The Wiimote is world of difference.
Nintendo is obviously innovating instead of rehashing the same old shit. The DS created a whole new type of handheld gameplay using the touch screen, and now they’re reinventing their main console in a similar way. And this is one reason why I’ve come to admire Nintendo: they had the balls to release a new console with graphics only marginally better than their last one, which would normally be considered corporate suicide in this market…but they coupled it with a brand-new kind of controller and a killer price ($250). They’re smart enough to realize that good gaming isn’t about super-duper-fancy graphics, it’s about fun gameplay, which is sorely lacking in the competing systems. Now the Wii is the most sought-after gaming console on the planet, selling out within minutes whenever it hits the shelves. I don’t think it’s all just hype–I think people are seriously loving this thing. Plus, to me the popular alternatives seem expensive and boring. $500 for a Playstation 3? You’ve got to be kidding! No wonder they’re not selling.
The Wii is also attracting more than just hardcore gamers…it’s bringing casual gamers back into the fun. I don’t want to spend hours on the couch pressing buttons, I want something different. What they’ve done with this is quite a feat and has been interesting to watch how people are reacting to it. During my two-hour wait in line, I made smalltalk with the guy next to me. He’s a Microsoft employee and a serious Xbox 360 worshipper…and he was dying to get one of these things, it was going to be a late Christmas present for he and his wife. That was kind of interesting.
In other whackjob news, remember that Christian videogame based on the Left Behind novels that was slated to come out soon? Well, it’s out…and Wal-Mart is already being petitioned to stop carrying it. The best part is that several Christian groups are part of this campaign as well, disturbed by the convert-or-be-killed message of the game. Oh, this should be interesting to watch, with Wal-Mart being the big disgusting conservative-friendly company it is!