Silent Hill: Homecoming explains why videogame heroes are usually loners: They’re really, really bad at small talk.
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Hey Valve, where the crap is Episode 3? What have you been doing for the last 14 months?
Hello?
Ah. Well. While we’re waiting…
Link (YouTube) |
…an indie team is getting set to unleash a complete re-make of the original Half-Life. This is different from Half-Life: Source, which Valve released a few years ago and which just ported the game to the new Source engine so that the game could have physics and a few other accouterments of these modern times. This is a complete remake. It looks stellar. So much so that when I saw the trailer I mistook it for a genuine Valve effort, which would have qualified them for the George Lucas Award of Overzealous Redundancy.
I have been lamenting the state of the mod community since the golden age ended. Games are now so complex that it’s hard for a handful of teenagers to take the tools and make something to rival the original work, which actually used to happen once in a while. The manpower required is just daunting.
It’s nice to see it’s still possible, though. I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out.
The new Silent Hill, now with more of… whatever it is the marketing guys say games should be doing this year.
A new study released by the Institute for Responsible Entertainment revealed today that today’s “hyper violent” video games cause teens to spend hours in a limp, slack-jawed state of simulated mayhem.
Dr. Colin Jenkins, who performed the study said, “It is truly alarming… these kids spend hours playing what amounts to a murder simulator, while at the same time getting less exercise than someone who is asleep. This means the kids will have an amazing propensity for violence, and be in abysmal physical condition. This is dangerous for the kids, and mildly dangerous for the people they might someday try to harm.”
One of the test subjects, a 15 year-old Danny Larson, demonstrated one of the games in question. The game, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, shows Danny’s character robbing an old woman using a baseball bat. When asked about the game’s violent content, Danny’s father replied, “A baseball bat? Hell. I can’t imagine him leaving the house, much less using sports equipment.”
All of the test subjects showed signs of too little exercise, being either scrawny or overweight. Dr. Jenkins, summing up his findings said, “These kids could be a real threat to society if they ever got off their asses and did anything.”
This has been linked to hell and back, but maybe you’ve managed to miss it up until now.
Link (YouTube) |
Also along these lines: My own take on what Star Wars would be like if it was written today.
In World of Goo, incompetence kills. Actually, competence kills too, just slightly less.
Adam Sessler of G4TV has a regular video op-ed titled “Sessler’s Soapbox”. He’s a reviewer who is obliged to give numeric scores to games, and here he clearly comes out against them.
T w e n t y S i d e d
But what really caught my attention was the part at the beginning where he talks about the difficulty of a game and how it does (or doesn’t) figure in to a review score. This is one of those subjects that calls for a thousand words or none, and I don’t have time for a thousand words. The best I can manage right now is to gesture wildly in Adam’s direction and say, “What he has said is significant.”
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?