Exploring Kalasatama & Trying Out Xbox Kinect
When I’m feeling stressed out, annoyed, insomniac and generally not centered or not like myself, there are a few activities that really help: a weekend at the cabin, an urban exploration / geocaching trip and diving. After a good afternoon or a weekend of those, coming back home feels like I’d been away for a week.
I’ve had a couple of weeks that have been kind of paradoxical: I’ve been both happy but at the same time massively annoyed. This has lead to stuff like spending insomniac nights watching Chernobyl documentaries, since I can’t seem to get my head out of that place (in a good way). Last weekend I managed to dent the bad vibes by a surprisingly interesting urban exploration trip.
(Want to see more photos? Check out the Flickr Photoset here)
Three Ideas for the Game Industry: “Medal of Honor of Duty: Refugee Camp”, “Requiem for a Reindeerspotting”, “The Heist”
I just finished Singularity a couple of days ago, and although it was an entertaining enough shooter in a mindless way, it ended up leaving me more or less pissed off. Why? Well, here we have this idea of the Cold War era Soviet Union coming up with time travel and the player being dropped in middle of that, having to traipse back and forth in time and to manipulate the temporal states of object around him. So, how did they use this idea?
There’s a research base, and there’s an explosion, and all the people have turned into mutants and monsters, and then there’s a bad guy with a facial scar and a glass eye. And then you shoot the mutants. Oh, and you have a gravity gun, never say a word and have an inexplicable plucky female sidekick with all the personality surgically removed.
Fucking seriously? Was that the most interesting way to use that idea? Okay, the game does a couple of nifty scenes with the time travel and the ending is surprisingly interesting, but nevertheless, those were just stick on decals on a really fucking used car.
First, a little bit of bitching, but if you want to get to the ideas, skip to the end.
Games Are Growing Up – Case: Heavy Rain
I’ve been a gamer since 1983 when I got my Commodore 64, and since 2000 I’ve been amongst other things a professional gaming journalist. There is one thing about games that has started to irritate me more and more as the time has passed: although the gamers, the game industry and everybody in between is clamoring that the gaming is not just a hobby for kids anymore, story-wise almost every game seems to be written for kids or fratboys, or at the best case for “the average consumer”.
Stop the press - there are tasteful sex scenes in games!
Hold on, you say, there’s plenty of games with an 18+ age limit, so there’s plenty of games for adults, right? Well, yes – if you define “adult content” to mean boobs and blood, and even on that front games are horribly handicapped on the boobs side of the issue. Go on, list all the games that handle sex and relationships in a non-dramatic, non-comical and mature way, I dare you. True, Mass Effect had a tasteful super soft-core sex scene, Dragon Age: Origins handled hetero and gay romances in a very nifty way and several games, such as the first Still Life, Hitman: Blood Money, Gears of War 2 (the scene) and The Darkness have some sequences that makes violence feel downright nasty and horrible. The depiction of violence as a bad thing hasn’t got that much press, but holy hell, mention sex in a video game and both the mainstream and gaming media are on fire. Surprisingly the moral panic of mainstream press over for example Mass Effect was often far less embarrassing to read than gaming press, which was far to often on the level of “OMG GAMEZ HAZ BOOBZ”. Way to go, branding gaming as a hobby for adults.
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