How I got rickrolled by Kotaku about Dragon Age

So this morning, I got lured in by this Kotaku article titled Dragon Age: Origins - A Tragedy in the Making? I say lured in because as much as I appreciate Kotaku for their extremely broad coverage of the gaming industry, I don’t like being rickrolled by a writer by making me think that a game that I’ve been following for awhile is in trouble for no reason.

AJ Glaser, who’s a regular writer for Kotaku, wrote about how Dragon Age is under tremendous expectations. That it’s being billed as the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate and the fact that it’s ship date has been delayed to allow for a  simultaneous release on both the PC and on gaming consoles makes its release that much more difficult. Read more

Are games too juvenile?

It’s not often that the game industry receives a general dressing down and have it stick. At the last day of the Game Developer’s Conference, Heather Chaplin, a journalist who has been covering gaming for eight years for such media outlets like NPR, addressed the gaming industry at large. Calling games in general deeply stunted in guy culture, Chaplin stated that the gaming industry is too old to simply rehash zombies, aliens and girls in metal bikinis wielding axes.

According to Pixelvixen707:

Like Wendy slapping around the lost boys, Chaplin patiently but firmly laid down the line. “It is you guys as game designers who are mired deeply in ‘guy culture,’” Chaplin said. The problem isn’t the medium: “You are a bunch of stunted adolescents.” Games avoid any of the things that separate men from boys: responsibility, introspection, intimacy, and intellectual discovery. And “when you’re talking about culture-makers, this is a problem.”

Criticisms of the gaming industry have been made before, but rarely at the developers themselves at the conference dedicated to them. Certainly a market argument can be made that video games, like movies and music, caters to the tastes of its audience. In recent years, games featuring the aforementioned zombies, aliens and metal bikinis have often done well.

I take no sides on this issue. I enjoy a lot of the “schlock” that Chaplin criticizes, but acknowledge her point.  I’m interested to hear your opinion on this.

From Pixelvixen707 via Game Politics.

Changing my mind on Stuttgart

I’m not afraid of expressing unpopular opinions. I’ve done it a few times on this site, and will probably do so again in the future. Recently, when I took a stance in favor of a lesbian gamer who had banned on the Xbox Live network, I got quite a few negative comments that implied more or less that I was wrong and lacking in the intelligence department. I felt somewhat vindicated when Microsoft did what I suggested they do in the first place: seek dialogue instead of indiscriminately banning people. Strangely, after I updated that bit of information on my site, the comments vanished. Read more

Current anime season weak

Over the last couple of years I watched a lot of anime. I mean a lot. Not only was I watching some really good anime, but I was also catching up with shows that I either never watched, had previously ignored (and rediscovered) or just some that I felt I needed to watch to complete my anime education.

So what are some shows that I feel that are part of a good anime foundation?

• The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - an epic anime that seemingly becomes more legendary as time passes
• Nodame Cantabile - a great anime with unforgettable characters, great musical sequences and a really sweet ending
• Ouran High Host Club - this anime made me laugh so many times I lost count
• Card Captor Sakura - along with Sailor Moon, the archetype of the magical girl animes
• Neo Evangelion - can’t have a good foundation without including at least one mecha anime
• Maria-sama ga Miteru - the archetypical shoujo anime that is technically yuri, but involves no explicit ecchi and instead focuses on the intense (and implied) relationships of  girls who attend an exclusive Catholic academy
• Naruto - a “kid’s” anime that sometimes surprises you about the lessons it imparts about growing up

This isn’t an all inclusive list, and there’s probably a good debate of which 9 or 10 shows would give you a decent enough foundation into the types of Japanese anime. And possibly even more debate as to whether just 9 or 10 shows would be enough. Read more

Is Star Wars passé?

“Why are you still writing about that movie? That’s the question my wife posed to me recently and the more I thought about it, the more the question bothered me. Why am I still writing about this movie?

Star Wars, now known also as Episode IV, debuted in 1977, which makes this movie over 30 years old! Three decades - enough time for a Star War fan to grow up, have children and in turn have those children have kids of their own. To say that the original film is long in the tooth is not an exaggeration. A 10-year kid probably looks at me talking about Star Wars like I looked at someone really old talk about the old Flash Gordon serials that were broadcast on the radio back in the day.

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