Archive for the ‘Video Games’ Category
The great thing about posting a review like this on a nerdcentric blog is that I don’t have to waste time defending my beliefs or offering contexts from my youth. If you are reading a review posted on such a poorly marketed site as the Nerdcore Comedy Tour the odds are you have sought us out because we have a shared history of blowing into NES cartridges and spending sixth period in our lockers. If you are reading this the odds are you will love Scott Pilgrim vs the World. For everyone else who got laid early in life and have had an experience with the game of football not provided by Tecmo®, fuck off. I don’t care if you don’t like this movie, it wasn’t made for you, and I hope all of your children are gay.
Where was I? Oh yes, Scott Pilgrim!
While no stranger to controversy, Rockstar Games (the developers of the popular Grand Theft Auto series) have once again found themselves in the cross-hairs. Their latest release “Red Dead Redemption” is a truly beautiful and highly faceted open-world of wild west tropes which outshines its predecessor in every possible way. It is a thrilling period piece that owes as much to Sergio Leone’s thinly veiled Italian countryside as it does to the Houser brother’s thinly veiled Big Apple. It also features the following achievement:
Dastardly: Place a hogtied woman on the train tracks, and witness her death by train. (5G)
As you can imagine, this achievement has been heavily scrutinized as an example of misogyny. As a feminist I share in these concerns and believe it is about time that we as gamers take an honest look at how the trend of polarized moral choices and reward systems do not so much as open the possibilities of immersion as they direct them through narrow corridors of dangerous subjectivity.
With my Stetson® thrown into that heavily populated ring I shall now move on to addressing the voiceless victim of this achievement: the train.
Growing up in the now-distant haze of a pre-internet world, life was hard for a kid who cared about video games. I mean, a lot of kids I knew “liked” video games. They rented them occasionally. They asked Santa for whatever title Mario found himself in that year. I, however, “cared” about video games, and in the eighties that meant reading. And while I definitely was playing with power, I was also cynical enough to know that an unbiased review was going to have to come from a third-party. In my case that was GamePro. It is a little embarrassing how much stock I put into the opinion of those ridiculous avatars, but it was all I had. And then there was Famitsu.
I first learned of the magazine in 1998. I was still a bit heady from the new car smell of the Nintendo 64 and the eternal love of my life, The Legend of Zelda, was about to kick my ass all over again. I wondered if it would ever be able to live up to the hype. (Spoiler alert: it totally did) It was then, while seeking out grainy thumbnail images of like likes that I heard the news: Famitsu grants Ocarina of Time its first ever perfect score, 40/40. It took twelve years but they’d finally found it, the perfect video game. (Spoiler alert: it totally was)
With an open mind and a heart as cold as a wampa’s teat, our valiant hero set out to explore the vast Frankelian world of Hello Kitty Online. The promises of Badtz-Maru boss raids and gold drop Tier 8 head-bows have enticed many to fall under the spell of this free to play MMO. Will our hero share their fate or will he bore of this experiment and do something worthwhile with his goddamn life? Only time will tell.
