I woke up to a faint buzzing noise and the voice of the suit computer telling me that the life support systems were online. A bright sun shone through my visor as the computer continued its restart routine. I got up and looked around the landscape. It didn’t look good. My Rasamama S36 scout ship was a few meters away in the middle of a plain of what looked at first glance like assorted crash debris.
If you tried to develop a game specifically to rile gamergaters, you might come up with something like “Sunset”. Consider: It’s in the genre derisively named “walking simulators”, where the main interaction consists of moving around the game world and looking at things. It has a black female protagonist. It’s overtly political, with a left wing socialist sensibility. It’s (amongst other things) a critique of popular video war games like Call of Duty.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask was originally released in 2000 for the Nintendo 64. It’s the odd one out of the Zelda games, having a unique premise. Link is ambushed by the Skull Kid, who is wearing a mysterious mask. He ends up in Clock Town in the center of the land of Termina, three days before the Festival of the Moon. Unfortunately, the moon in question — which has a creepy, sinister looking moon face — turns out to be colliding with the world, and hits at dawn on the day of the festival.
« The research, published in a Royal Society journal on Wednesday, found that people who played games such as Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V and Tomb Raider were more likely to employ navigational strategies associated with decreased grey matter in the hippocampus part of the brain. […] By questioning the participants, the researchers examined whether they tackled the virtual reality task using a spatial or response learning strategy. A spatial strategy involves building relationships between landmarks in an environment and relies on the hippocampus.
Biggest screenburn ever, with a big “indie zone”. Upsilon Circuit. A reality TV gameshow arranged around an action RPG. The “stars” play 8 at a time, and when they die they’re permanently eliminated. The real game is what the audience do to intervene in the game. It’s a bit like crowdsourced D&D. I could see something like this becoming a TV show. It has its own Max Headroom style presenter who resembles Doonesbury’s Ron Headrest.
Recently I didn’t play a video game. You might be thinking “So what?”. After all, a lot of people don’t play video games. There are even a lot of video games I don’t play. But this was a new game in a series that I’ve played pretty much all the previous installments of. I’m not easily offended. I played right through Grand Theft Auto V, for example, as well as writing a series of articles defending the series.
Playing “Splinter Cell: Blacklist”. I love that the whole thing starts in Benghazi. (BENGHAZI!) The most unbelievable part of the whole scenario is that so many high level NSA and CIA operatives have Canadian accents. I kinda wish I hadn’t learned to spot Canadian, it has ruined Ubisoft games for me. The evil mastermind has an English accent, because obviously all evil people do. The next mission is in Dallas, so I’m wondering if I’ll recognize it at all.
As the list of people supporting #GamerGate gets shorter and shorter, some are still suggesting that it was a legitimate movement for ethics in journalism that only got corrupted by misogyny later on. I’m sure that there are people who genuinely believe this. Unfortunately, it’s not true. GamerGate started out as slut-shaming and revenge, so here’s the history with dates and links to the sources. On 2014-08-12, Eron Gjoni posted The Zoe Post on WordPress.
It’s obviously tough to approach a game like Depression Quest without any expectations, if you follow the gaming scene at all. I had read about it pre launch, and made a vague mental note to check it out, but by the time the game launched and the #gamergate shitshow blew up I was busy with Borderlands 2. (Yes, I’m probably the last person to start playing Borderlands; I hate paid DLC so I waited until I could buy pretty much the whole thing on disc in a ‘Game of the Year’ edition.
All technology invented before I hit 30 is awesome and wonderful and the natural way things should be. All technology invented after I hit 30 is terrible and leading to the downfall of civilization. (Add examples to fill word count.)