Feb 4, 2011
Street Fighter® IV
Reader Jorge R. says he gave his girlfriend his PC gamepad and a copy of Street Fighter IV. After a week, here's her new manicure.
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Reader Jorge R. says he gave his girlfriend his PC gamepad and a copy of Street Fighter IV. After a week, here's her new manicure.
Are you ready for some football? Or are you simply gearing up for some big advertising? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about? Let's talk about it in tonight's open thread.
Comic book fans, you may want to tune into Sunday's Super Bowl game to see the first Captain America trailer (io9 has new shots of the film), if not to see the Pittsburgh Steelers bring the Iron Curtain down on Green Bay. Go Stillerz!
Ahem. If you'd like to send off Friday with some off topic conversation (or talk about video games some more) this is the place! Have a good one.
From the message that Xbox Live user ralphy305 sent a female gamer, it's clear the time he should have spent on his spelling and grammar was instead put to keying in a text representation of an ejaculating penis.
Give the devil his due, though, ralphy305's invective was also a hat trick hitting the titular themes of "Fat, Ugly or Slutty," a repository of hate speech directed at female gamers, which launched last month. "u should hopp off cod & go to the kitchen where u belong & cook ur redneck lesbian gf a cock meat sandwitch fuck u dirty slut no life fat bitch."
The casual racism, snarling sexism and random belligerence one encounters in online play, particularly in a first-person shooter over Xbox Live, is not at all a new phenomenon. It's sadly accepted as par for the course, in fact. But the three curators of "Fat, Ugly or Slutty," have chosen to archive it, not so much for a high-minded ideal, but to hold a mirror up to idiots worthy of ridicule.
"We started the site because we think these messages are ridiculous, horrifying, but above all, funny," wrote the editor known as gtz, answering questions emailed to her by Kotaku.
"The vast majority of responses have been from people remembering the exact same type of messages they have received and laughing with us," gtz elaborated.
That said, she and the other two editors, Jaspir and likeOMGitsFEDAY, see a potential contribution to the discussion of online behavior, even if they aren't so idealistic as to say that Fat, Ugly or Slutty will end up being the agent of change.
"Some other reactions we've seen are A) 'This is part of gaming, deal with it,' and B) 'I am incredibly horrified, I had no idea it was this bad. Some A people are very publicly turning into B people from seeing the site. There's obviously an unexplored conversation to be had there," gtz said.
Public shaming is a worthy goal more easily met, too. "We think people should be held more accountable for their actions," writes the editor known as likeOMGitsFEDAY, a veteran gamer who has been in the PMS gaming clan for the past six years. "We're just helping it along by feeding their handles to Google."
Fat, Ugly or Slutty's shaming campaign stops there, though. The trio doesn't report these submissions to Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network, recognizing the due diligence required of an online service provider makes it prohibitive to ferret out every submission they get where someone's been called a bitch, or worse.
However, "Microsoft is aware of the site and did contact us before the rest of the Internet found the site," said gtz. "Most of our submissions are from Xbox Live, but we have made it clear that we'll take submissions from elsewhere."
The site has a little more than 30 submissions, some of them audio, after coming into existence mid-January. Contributions are tagged "Sandwich Making 101," "Pen15 club," and "Death Threats," in addition to "fat," "ugly," or "slutty," indicating there's very little on the blog that hasn't been written, read or heard before. The difference now is it's not a private message.
The three editors have varying levels of exposure to and tolerance for this sort of thing. gtz says she games "in a friend-only bubble" and purposefully conceals her gender in many online situations "until I get a feel for the community." FEDAY and Jaspir roam among the masses. FEDAY, a member of the PMS clan since 2005, seems to relish dishing out the kind of asskicking that invites such clichéd misogynistic abuse. Jaspir simply loves online gaming too much to let trolls destroy it.
All three repeat what everyone has heard since grade school, but is admittedly difficult to internalize, that words only hurt if you give someone else that power. "It's hard to not have the initial reaction," says gtz. "It takes effort for me to just sit quietly and hope that the match starts soon - also hoping I don't automatically get moved to the team that isn't my friends."
They do see a purpose to Fat, Ugly or Slutty, but are under no illusions that they'll stamp out internet idiocy; they'll more likely chronicle it. "The site has a huge shock factor," says FEDAY, "Mostly from male gamers who wouldn't imagine sending the sort of messages that we post and who are shocked that people do. It may change a few perspectives, but I think trash talking will always be a part of gaming."
Jaspir is a little more jaded. "I don't think much will change," she wrote. "I think in the future, our site will be in the back of the minds of whoever is just about to hit send on a distasteful message, but they'll do it anyway."
Namco will bring the beautifully cel-shaded Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3 (aka Gundam Musou 3) to North American Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s this summer—and it's bringing all-new Mobile Suits with it!
Three developers from Cryptic Studios participated in last weekend's Global Game Jam, the festival that challenges participants to create a game from scratch in just 48 hours. They built this time-lapse video, compressing two days of work into seven minutes.
Jimb Esser (programming), James Laird (programming and design) and Nick Duguid (art) collaborated on "Benny Lava," which you see made here. All work for Cryptic. Benny Lava was completed during the contest - you can download it here. The team says it's "best played with three or more people, one mouse, a couple gamepads, but [you] can use just keyboard and mouse if desired."
The three were among 6,500 participants creating more than 1,500 games across 44 different countries.
The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the world's largest game jam event occurring annually in late January. This year, 6500 jammers created almost 1500 games in 44 different countries in the span of 48 hours.
At least in Japan! That's because Sega will release a Virtual Console Arcade version of Puyo Puyo—which you may have played in the form of Kirby's Avalanche or Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine—with online multiplayer support for Wii.
According to Inside Games, via Andriasang, Sega will release the 1992 version of Puyo Puyo, complete with Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection battles. That's kinda cool! It's also the first of its kind.
Let's hope this isn't just a one-off and that Wii owners will be able to enjoy the tasty combination of online play and classic arcade games in the future.
Sega Readying First Wi-Fi Ready Virtual Console Game [Andriasang]
Check out that list of games nominated for the Writers Guild's Video Game Writing Award. Seem like anyone's missing? Well, there's neither Red Dead Redemption nor anything from BioWare. The Guild says these games makers "refused" to submit a script.
Why is that? The matter of a $60 fee seems to be a sticking point. According to an editorial today by Micah Wright, of the Guild's Videogame Writers Caucus, both BioWare and Take Two Interactive refused to enter scripts for games like Mass Effect 2 or Red Dead Redemption, "even though we've gone to great lengths to make it easy for them to do so."
But the VWC does require that a nominee be a member of the Caucus - which Wright points out is not the same thing as being a member of the larger Writers Guild of America. For that, the $60 fee is required.
"Bioware, for example, refused to submit a script for either Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age this year, and that's too bad, because both games would have likely been finalists," Wright wrote. "Similarly, Take Two Games refused to submit a script for Red Dead Redemption. Why? We don't know. Maybe they hate unions, or maybe they just hate winning awards, or maybe they have enough statues on their mantle. ... Are we happy about it? No, but rules are rules and our rules are clear and very fair."
To those who say the WGA's VWC should evaluate and award games regardless of membership, as Great Britain's Guild does, Wright says that guild's awards are only for British-made games, and the smaller candidate pool requires an open entry format.
Further, there's the dirty little secret of games criticism: "Our judges are all members of the VWC, and thus, professional, working videogame writers. I can't demand that our judges sit down and buy and then devote 80 hours to playing every videogame that comes out at retail... not when they've got jobs and lives to lead and they can read the entire script in 2 hours or less."
Seems like a petty kerfuffle but Wright has a point. I wouldn't expect to win any organization's award without being a member of it myself. His arch remark about "maybe they hate unions" seems to allege that a studio views encouraging or paying for VWC membership as a step toward a giant labor headache.
I don't know labor law nor do I know these studios' policies. I do know that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II is up for a major award and Mass Effect 2 is not. All over $60. Sixty dollars. Wonder what that would buy at retail?
The WGA's Micah Wright defends its game writing award [Games Industry.biz]
Namco is reviving two of its most memorable arcade hits—Pac-Man and Galaga—for the Nintendo 3DS, tapping into some of the system's most unique features, its gyroscopic tilt control and glasses-free stereoscopic 3D. They may take some getting used to.
Both games, Pac-Man Tilt and Galaga 3D Impact, are part of the same package, Pac-Man & Galaga Dimensions, coming to the Nintendo 3DS later this year. Maybe they'll be great. Maybe they'll be interesting curiosities. They definitely smack of first attempts to coming to grips with new control schemes.
The former is a gyroscope-controlled Pac-Man game set in a rainbow-colored world a la Pac-Man Championship Edition, arguably the greatest spin on the dot-chomping, ghost-eating formula. The latter, a Galaga from first-person, Namco describes as a "mash-up of arcade shooter and virtual reality," seemingly requiring the big sweeping movements to play, as illustrated in images released to Famitsu.com.
They may represent inventive uses of the Nintendo 3DS hardware, but like one of the first Pac-Man efforts for the Nintendo DS, the quirky, draw your own Pac-Man game Pac-Pix, may also be indicative of the early growing pains of development for a new system.
Not to say that 2005's Pac-Pix was a bad game or the type of unusual effort we don't want to see on the Nintendo 3DS. But I may be saying that trying to retain a stereoscopic 3D focus on the Nintendo 3DS's top screen while swinging the handheld wildly may represent a disconnect between capitalizing on the unique capabilities of the 3DS and delivering something we'd want to play in public, on a plane or on a subway car.
Granted, I did play my share of WarioWare Twisted on the Game Boy Advance, without public shame and without too much difficulty, on bumpy bus and subway rides. And I liked it. But now I have visions of safety warnings and Nintendo 3DS injuries. Perhaps I'm also worried that the sky is falling.
Namco does appear to be taking some interesting liberties with its most venerable franchises, giving Pac-Man new powers and turning Galaga into an on-rails space shooter—while also resetting expectations for Ridge Racer and Ace Combat—so consider me interested in their experimentation.
With the handheld contest on the cusp of new tilt-controlled, reverse touchscreen-controlled and augmented reality-equipped games coming, perhaps a bit awkwardly at first, these are exciting, unfamiliar times. I'm looking forward to these platforms, the Nintendo 3DS and NGP, maturing along with their games.
A World of Warcraft GM allegedly - allegedly - solves a calculus problem for a beleaguered subscriber. It's most likely a fake, but still funny. But wouldn't it be awesome if it's real? Seen on WoWBash.
Yes, someone out there thinks that turning 16-bit classic Zombies Ate My Neighbors into a big screen zom-com might be a great idea. If this sounds like a scary proposition to you, this project still has a long way to go.
According to a report from First Showing, LucasArts' 1993 zombie classic is being prepped for a Hollywood production, described as "John Hughes meets Judd Apatow meets George A. Romero" or "a bit like Superbad + Zombieland + Home Alone."
It doesn't seem like this Zombies Ate My Neighbors project has the blessing of LucasArts yet, as First Showing reports the writer and producers are still seeking rights and funding. Still, high school coming of age comedy with some goofy zombie slaying? I might be able to get behind that.
Excl: Horror-Comedy 'Zombies Ate My Neighbors' in Development [First Showing via Bloody Disgusting - thanks, Matthew!]
