I don't have cable right now so I'm rewatching old shows and movies. A lot of them are animated. Such is my way. I'd like to have a nobler reason for rewatching them--something like when James 
Let's say you're the newly-sentient internet. How would you decipher
the meaning of all the bits and bytes whizzing past you? And what about
the real world outside your electronic realm?
Former Comics Editor, Guy Leshinski
has very kindly given us permission to reprint a prophetic interview
with Bryan Lee O'Malley in 2005. Will Bryan Lee O'Malley attain the
Holy Grail of cartoonists? As Bryan says, "We'll see..."
Results tagged “shooters” from The Cultural Gutter
"Ramirez! Get Your Ass Over Here!"
4:04 minutes of Ramirez getting orders shouted at him in Modern Warfare 2. (via Gamma Squad)
"Total Nowhere Emotion Expansion"
What is "Total Nowhere Emotion Expansion?" It's a digital art exhibit on the back of a trailer in Australia. "Eight artists from five countries have mashed together snippets of
online culture - chatrooms, Second Life, online dream journals, first
person shooters and more - to make some interesting observations about
what cyberspace has become." See it here. (via Articulate)
Rules of Engagement
At Hit Self-Destruct, Duncan writes about Far Cry 2, Call of Duty 4, rules of engagement and civilian deaths: "Where there are no civilians, there are no mistakes, there's no
collateral damage and it starts to feel safe. It changes from war into
a murder mystery vacation. Maybe there isn't a morally unimpeachable
way to make a entertaining game about atrocities, but I'd feel better
if those games didn't try and make me feel so good."
Recreating Aliens
Rock, Paper, Shotgun revisits the classic shooter, Aliens vs. Predator, and finds one moment to match the Aliens movie:
"I don't need to fight the Alien queen, to control a powerloader or take off and nuke the entire site from orbit -- I just need to be the last Marine left alive, fighting to the inevitable end."
Games x2
Gamers With Jobs looks at the pendulum that's swinging from fantasy back to science fiction: "After ten years of elves and magic, I could use a bit of a change."
And The Escapist is the new home of Shoot Club! Awesomely nerdy dialogue reproduced faithfully, and some insights too: "There's nothing like bald math to undermine a game. The scales fall from my eyes and I cannot bear to earn another XP."
Hopped Up on Speedrunning
Shortly after 2 pm on the afternoon of May 18th, 2005, Brandon Erickson stepped
back from the
Star Wars arcade cabinet he'd been playing continuously, with no deaths,
extra credits, or nap breaks, for the past 54 hours, having failed to break the
Twin Galaxies record of three hundred
million points in 49 hours established 21 years earlier by one Robert Mruczek.
Perhaps these records of scale are best left in the distant past: all the
golden age games had to offer a master player, after all, was more, more, more
of the same. Let marathon play sessions in pursuit of the biggest score be
consigned to the ashbin of the '80s along with the big cars, big hair, and
shoulder pads in power suits; the fashion of our times dictates that minimalism
is the new bombast.
One thing game-players in 1993 were not wondering was how quickly they could
blast through DooM -- no, they lingered over every atmospherically-flickering
alcove, marveling at its unprecedented immersiveness. It was not until its
maps had been fully savoured that they would raise the bar, culminating in a
powerhouse drive to excel and trump their friends' achievements under curious
self-imposed limitations by doing the same, only faster.
Continue reading...
Gaming in a World of Grown-Ups
Every gamer thinks about gaming at work. Unless they review video games for a living, and then perhaps they dream about sitting in front of excel spreadsheets all day. The ridiculously absorbing MMORPG formula has players planning out their character's next level or what equipment to buy, surfing the official forums for hours on end just to feel close to the game. Then there's the Civilization IV session that had to be cut short, knowing work was just a few hours away. Or a few minutes away, depending on how many times the phrase "just one more turn, and then I'll go to bed" was uttered.
Continue reading...
Keep Playing, It Might Get Better
There comes a point in every game where the player asks themselves why they're wasting time on a terrible game. It's a scenario no gamer wants to be presented with - and it's a developer's worst nightmare. Depending on how the storyline is integrated with the game, a game's quality can be easily determined within the first few hours of playing. And like the movies that go straight to video or are shown at awkward times during the weekends, sometimes they're impossible to tear yourself away from. How much worse can it get?
Continue reading...
Valve Turns It Up Another Notch
Portal is a thinkin' man's first person shooter coming out from Valve, the folks behind Half-Life 2. Talking about HL2, Episode 1 has exceedingly clever in-game commentary that is reviewed and excerpted at Waxy.org.
Teaching the Value of Human Life
When you're put behind the crosshairs of a gun, do you assume you have to shoot to kill? Better still, do you have to shoot to win? For the majority of First Person Shooters, that is certainly the case. What if you were given the choice to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, but still be able to complete your objectives? It sounds like the trend of stealth action games starring super-spies in skin-tight bodysuits. But it’s not. It’s a law enforcement simulation.
Continue reading...
The Time Machines
I hated studying history in high school. It was as if the curriculum had been designed to leave out everything that impressionable minds could possibly associate with, while making no provisions to seem like it was anything but handed down from an institution. However, in recent years it's a totally different story. I won't read any book that isn't related to history. I can watch History Television and the Discovery Channel and be immediately engrossed in a program related to some aspect of world history or anthropological pursuits. How did this happen? In a word: games.
Continue reading...
A Just War
Every time a new World War 2 First Person Shooter is announced, the collective groans from gamers and game media can be heard for miles, as if nothing more could be possibly done with this setting. The genre receives a bad reputation mainly because of the sheer amount of mediocre copycat titles that seem to be released every year. However, for every Elite Forces: WWII Normandy (Third Law, 2001) or World War II Sniper (Jarhead, 2004) there is a Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2003) that genuinely makes an effort to advance the gameplay.
Continue reading...
All Psych Studies Stink?
Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality takes himself as the basis for his study of computer gaming causing violence: "After playing 'killing simulators' for decades, how am I not some kind of crazed predator? Why are me and my droogs not out for a bit of ultraviolence?"
Rethinking Brain Eating
If he feels vindicated, he doesn't show it. As Marc Laidlaw waits for his co-workers to finish a talk, we sit down at a table in San Francisco's cavernous Moscone Center and talk about Half-Life 2 (Valve, 2004).
Its 1998 predecessor is legendary for pushing the form both narratively (bringing atmosphere and intelligence to the first-person shooter) and technologically (the Half-Life engine having been used for the online phenomenon Counterstrike). As if living up to that wasn't enough, the sequel took six years to make and was plagued by delays and a code leak of a beta version of the game. But I meet up with Marc the day after the first-person shooter game has swept the Game Developers Choice Awards: it won Best Game, Technology, Character Design and Writing.
Continue reading...
There's an interesting interview with an actress in ilovebees, a "search opera" run to promote Halo 2 that was more innovative than the shooter itself (probably in no small part due to novelist Sean Stewart's involvement).
The Scientist-Hero Returns
I was a little nervous as I waited for Half-Life 2 (Vivendi, 2004) to start. The original Half-Life (Sierra, 1998) is one of the reasons this column exists -- the game brought atmosphere and intelligence to the first-person shooter without skimping on the visceral kickassocity, and brought me back to videogames after a decade of neglect.
The sequel had been talked up in the gaming community for years, and even being over a year late hadn't destroyed the enthusiasm. (Though coming out at the same time as Halo 2 [Microsoft, 2004] did destroy the chance of mainstream press attention -- the much less interesting game on Microsoft's Xbox console was backed by much more marketing money.) We remembered being Gordon Freeman, the scientist in the hazmat suit -- a hero in glasses, for Christ's sake -- having to shoot himself out of the Black Mesa lab turned horrific by an inter-dimensional snafu. We were willing to wait.
Continue reading...
War Reporting
I know how Tim Carter feels. When I tell some people that punk rock saved my life, I get funny looks too.
In his documentary about Counter-Strike (Sierra, 2000), Carter tries to make a connection between videogames and martial arts. I think he fails at this, but he makes a valiant and genuine attempt to communicate what he knows to be true: that despite how bloody, violent and pointless the military first-person shooter looks to people on the outside, the game had a positive impact on his life.
Continue reading...
Playing Soldier
Wargames
are huge and always have been. If you think the latest videogames are anything
new, think chess. Think toy soldiers. They're fun, they're violent, and they
have a moralistic narrative frame that makes them palatable to most political
persuasions.
Not mine, however. I'd always prefer to be a thug than a soldier, not because I dig on evil but because I hate taking orders. So, in the interest of not sending an anarchist to do a grunt's job, I've gotten Scott Waters, who spent three years the military, to comment on some wargames.
Continue reading...
Is it possible to have too much fun?
Is it possible to have a pleasure circuit overload?
"Girls are to be kept away from those activities of civilization that over-stimulate the imagination and the senses, such as fashionable novels, paintings, music, balls, theaters... as this can lead to uterine epilepsy, sapphic tastes, and nymphomania."
While this is Victorian-era advice, it's reflective of how certain people deal with something that's new and sexy: hysteria. It's the same people who are now blaming video games, today's over-stimulant of choice, for everything from obesity to mass murder. Even those of us who aren't concerned parents or members of the religious community have a tendency to look at video games as a waste of time when compared, say, to reading a novel.
As someone who makes his living from writing novels, let me tell you that this is sanctimonious horseshit.
Continue reading...
"Ramirez! Get Your Ass Over Here!"
4:04 minutes of Ramirez getting orders shouted at him in Modern Warfare 2. (via Gamma Squad)"Total Nowhere Emotion Expansion"
What is "Total Nowhere Emotion Expansion?" It's a digital art exhibit on the back of a trailer in Australia. "Eight artists from five countries have mashed together snippets of online culture - chatrooms, Second Life, online dream journals, first person shooters and more - to make some interesting observations about what cyberspace has become." See it here. (via Articulate)Rules of Engagement
At Hit Self-Destruct, Duncan writes about Far Cry 2, Call of Duty 4, rules of engagement and civilian deaths: "Where there are no civilians, there are no mistakes, there's no collateral damage and it starts to feel safe. It changes from war into a murder mystery vacation. Maybe there isn't a morally unimpeachable way to make a entertaining game about atrocities, but I'd feel better if those games didn't try and make me feel so good."Recreating Aliens
Rock, Paper, Shotgun revisits the classic shooter, Aliens vs. Predator, and finds one moment to match the Aliens movie:
"I don't need to fight the Alien queen, to control a powerloader or take off and nuke the entire site from orbit -- I just need to be the last Marine left alive, fighting to the inevitable end."
Games x2
Gamers With Jobs looks at the pendulum that's swinging from fantasy back to science fiction: "After ten years of elves and magic, I could use a bit of a change."
And The Escapist is the new home of Shoot Club! Awesomely nerdy dialogue reproduced faithfully, and some insights too: "There's nothing like bald math to undermine a game. The scales fall from my eyes and I cannot bear to earn another XP."
Hopped Up on Speedrunning
Shortly after 2 pm on the afternoon of May 18th, 2005, Brandon Erickson stepped
back from the
Star Wars arcade cabinet he'd been playing continuously, with no deaths,
extra credits, or nap breaks, for the past 54 hours, having failed to break the
Twin Galaxies record of three hundred
million points in 49 hours established 21 years earlier by one Robert Mruczek.
Perhaps these records of scale are best left in the distant past: all the
golden age games had to offer a master player, after all, was more, more, more
of the same. Let marathon play sessions in pursuit of the biggest score be
consigned to the ashbin of the '80s along with the big cars, big hair, and
shoulder pads in power suits; the fashion of our times dictates that minimalism
is the new bombast.
One thing game-players in 1993 were not wondering was how quickly they could blast through DooM -- no, they lingered over every atmospherically-flickering alcove, marveling at its unprecedented immersiveness. It was not until its maps had been fully savoured that they would raise the bar, culminating in a powerhouse drive to excel and trump their friends' achievements under curious self-imposed limitations by doing the same, only faster.
Continue reading...Gaming in a World of Grown-Ups
Every gamer thinks about gaming at work. Unless they review video games for a living, and then perhaps they dream about sitting in front of excel spreadsheets all day. The ridiculously absorbing MMORPG formula has players planning out their character's next level or what equipment to buy, surfing the official forums for hours on end just to feel close to the game. Then there's the Civilization IV session that had to be cut short, knowing work was just a few hours away. Or a few minutes away, depending on how many times the phrase "just one more turn, and then I'll go to bed" was uttered.
Keep Playing, It Might Get Better
There comes a point in every game where the player asks themselves why they're wasting time on a terrible game. It's a scenario no gamer wants to be presented with - and it's a developer's worst nightmare. Depending on how the storyline is integrated with the game, a game's quality can be easily determined within the first few hours of playing. And like the movies that go straight to video or are shown at awkward times during the weekends, sometimes they're impossible to tear yourself away from. How much worse can it get?
Valve Turns It Up Another Notch
Portal is a thinkin' man's first person shooter coming out from Valve, the folks behind Half-Life 2. Talking about HL2, Episode 1 has exceedingly clever in-game commentary that is reviewed and excerpted at Waxy.org.
Teaching the Value of Human Life
When you're put behind the crosshairs of a gun, do you assume you have to shoot to kill? Better still, do you have to shoot to win? For the majority of First Person Shooters, that is certainly the case. What if you were given the choice to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, but still be able to complete your objectives? It sounds like the trend of stealth action games starring super-spies in skin-tight bodysuits. But it’s not. It’s a law enforcement simulation.
The Time Machines
I hated studying history in high school. It was as if the curriculum had been designed to leave out everything that impressionable minds could possibly associate with, while making no provisions to seem like it was anything but handed down from an institution. However, in recent years it's a totally different story. I won't read any book that isn't related to history. I can watch History Television and the Discovery Channel and be immediately engrossed in a program related to some aspect of world history or anthropological pursuits. How did this happen? In a word: games.
A Just War
Every time a new World War 2 First Person Shooter is announced, the collective groans from gamers and game media can be heard for miles, as if nothing more could be possibly done with this setting. The genre receives a bad reputation mainly because of the sheer amount of mediocre copycat titles that seem to be released every year. However, for every Elite Forces: WWII Normandy (Third Law, 2001) or World War II Sniper (Jarhead, 2004) there is a Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2003) that genuinely makes an effort to advance the gameplay.
All Psych Studies Stink?
Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality takes himself as the basis for his study of computer gaming causing violence: "After playing 'killing simulators' for decades, how am I not some kind of crazed predator? Why are me and my droogs not out for a bit of ultraviolence?"
Rethinking Brain Eating
If he feels vindicated, he doesn't show it. As Marc Laidlaw waits for his co-workers to finish a talk, we sit down at a table in San Francisco's cavernous Moscone Center and talk about Half-Life 2 (Valve, 2004).
Its 1998 predecessor is legendary for pushing the form both narratively (bringing atmosphere and intelligence to the first-person shooter) and technologically (the Half-Life engine having been used for the online phenomenon Counterstrike). As if living up to that wasn't enough, the sequel took six years to make and was plagued by delays and a code leak of a beta version of the game. But I meet up with Marc the day after the first-person shooter game has swept the Game Developers Choice Awards: it won Best Game, Technology, Character Design and Writing.
Continue reading...There's an interesting interview with an actress in ilovebees, a "search opera" run to promote Halo 2 that was more innovative than the shooter itself (probably in no small part due to novelist Sean Stewart's involvement).
The Scientist-Hero Returns
I was a little nervous as I waited for Half-Life 2 (Vivendi, 2004) to start. The original Half-Life (Sierra, 1998) is one of the reasons this column exists -- the game brought atmosphere and intelligence to the first-person shooter without skimping on the visceral kickassocity, and brought me back to videogames after a decade of neglect.
The sequel had been talked up in the gaming community for years, and even being over a year late hadn't destroyed the enthusiasm. (Though coming out at the same time as Halo 2 [Microsoft, 2004] did destroy the chance of mainstream press attention -- the much less interesting game on Microsoft's Xbox console was backed by much more marketing money.) We remembered being Gordon Freeman, the scientist in the hazmat suit -- a hero in glasses, for Christ's sake -- having to shoot himself out of the Black Mesa lab turned horrific by an inter-dimensional snafu. We were willing to wait.
Continue reading...War Reporting
I know how Tim Carter feels. When I tell some people that punk rock saved my life, I get funny looks too.
In his documentary about Counter-Strike (Sierra, 2000), Carter tries to make a connection between videogames and martial arts. I think he fails at this, but he makes a valiant and genuine attempt to communicate what he knows to be true: that despite how bloody, violent and pointless the military first-person shooter looks to people on the outside, the game had a positive impact on his life.
Playing Soldier
Wargames are huge and always have been. If you think the latest videogames are anything new, think chess. Think toy soldiers. They're fun, they're violent, and they have a moralistic narrative frame that makes them palatable to most political persuasions.
Not mine, however. I'd always prefer to be a thug than a soldier, not because I dig on evil but because I hate taking orders. So, in the interest of not sending an anarchist to do a grunt's job, I've gotten Scott Waters, who spent three years the military, to comment on some wargames.
Is it possible to have too much fun?
Is it possible to have a pleasure circuit overload?
"Girls are to be kept away from those activities of civilization that over-stimulate the imagination and the senses, such as fashionable novels, paintings, music, balls, theaters... as this can lead to uterine epilepsy, sapphic tastes, and nymphomania."
While this is Victorian-era advice, it's reflective of how certain people deal with something that's new and sexy: hysteria. It's the same people who are now blaming video games, today's over-stimulant of choice, for everything from obesity to mass murder. Even those of us who aren't concerned parents or members of the religious community have a tendency to look at video games as a waste of time when compared, say, to reading a novel.
As someone who makes his living from writing novels, let me tell you that this is sanctimonious horseshit.
