If you’ve never seen the trailer for Law Abiding Citizen, you should watch that first.
Link (YouTube) |
“Tell us what we’re dealing with. A spy?”
“Spies are a dime a dozen.”
It makes me want to see the movie. But if I did, I’d just be disappointed when it was Gerard Butler instead of the Engineer.
In this week’s column, I suggest five games that I think make the “Games as Art” case fairly well. (Assuming, as Yahtzee points out, that both sides are even working with the same definition of “art”.) My list is actually, “Five arty games that could be approached by a newcomer.”
And this leads to the main reason that this debate is boring to me. An Ebert says games aren’t art. A gamer offers up some examples as I have. Then the Ebert will dismiss them. The Gamer will protest. Eventually they realize they are talking about two different things when they say “art”. And then the rest of the debate is an attempt to define art, which is a fool’s errand.
Art or not, it’s a pretty fun way to spend the time.
I should play some more Max Payne this weekend.
This comic ties in with the “Games as Art” debate that’s been simmering for the last couple of weeks. My weekly column will cover this as well. So those of you who have been waiting for my take on it will finally get your wish. I had to install Max Payne to make the comic, so that was pretty cool. I maintain that while the in-game cutscene scripting might look a little stiff today, the game is still obviously a product of the golden age of PC gaming. While the tools they had at the time were crude and their budgets were far lower than what we have today, I think they used their resources better.
I will say that there is something wrong with Max Payne under the hood. The load times should not be this long on a nine year old game. Loading a level takes a full minute? That’s… harsh. Somehow, I don’t think the load times have gotten better with age. I’d love to know how that’s possible.
This episode of Shamus Plays will have more nudity than any other. And also dog vomit.
It’s bound to happen when a group has the kind of rock star runaway success that we’ve had with Spoiler Warning. The sudden fame and money has really come as a shock to most of us, and I think we went a bit sideways there for a bit. There’s been a rift forming between Randy and the rest of the group for some time now. It came to a head near the end of the series when Josh and I got fed up with the way Randy’s hotel vandalism and drug abuse was getting in the way of our greed and womanizing.
So now Randy has broken off to pursue a solo career:
(Randy explained to me that the name of this episode comes from the story of drummer Pete Best who put out “Best of the Beatles” after he was fired from The Beatles. I mention this because I’d never heard this story before and I found it interesting.)
More seriously, there’s no real drama behind Randy leaving the show. Randy is open to doing more in the future. We still hang out and everything is cool, he’s just not doing the show right now. Our Fallout 3 series starts next week. We’ve already recorded the first couple of episodes with Rutskarn, who doesn’t actually like it when we call him Ringo.
Oh my gosh Shamus, WILL YOU SHUT UP ABOUT UBISOFT ALREADY?
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Since the Assassin’s Creed 2 DRM is now truly broken, I thought it would be nice to “celebrate” by giving the game a try. Susan Arendt said in her review that, “You’ll find a lot to love, I promise. Assassin’s Creed 2 is the best kind of sequel.” Wired calls it, “The ultimate killer app.” Yahtzee didn’t threaten to sodomize the developers or eat their young, which is pretty high praise from him. In fact, I haven’t found any negative reviews of the game at all.
Of course, all of those reviews were talking about the console versions. Let’s see how the PC version holds up. I have a review copy here and it’s about time I fired it up and saw what all the fuss was about.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Let’s Play Assassins Creed II:
(Part 1 of 1)”
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T w e n t y S i d e d
