Monday, June 15, 2009
Not Hiatus exactly, but Hiatus-ish...
I'll keep this short. I'm going to Russia today for the next two months. I started a new blog specifically for this occasion. http://donutgoestorussia.blogspot.com. You'll follow it won't you? I'll also be contactable by email, facebook, etc. but with what frequency I'm not entirely sure. This doesn't mean don't try, just don't be offended if it takes a couple days to get back to you. Anyway, see you all around.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
On Racism
Resident Evil 5 comes out on Friday. I might-ish have a pre-order for it (the release date snuck up on me and I didn't realize it until pre-orders had closed) in the sense that one of the many awesome people at the Union Square Play n' Trade said he was pretty sure he'd have a copy of the game for me, and hopefully will call tomorrow to confirm so I can get it at midnight. Play n' Trade fucking rocks. Had I gone to a gamestop, they'd tell me I was too late, then demand I sell them my games for a dollar apiece so that I could preorder something else instead of, you know, what I want.
(Edit: Showed up at midnight, had a copy of the game with my name on it sitting in the box of preorders. Seriously, Play n' Trade fucking rocks.)
But i digress. What i really wanted to talk about was controversy, because nowadays it seems like no game can be released without some kind of big issue being broached by, well, idiots. The hot button issue for RE5? Racism. Wait, fucking what? Racism? Are you fucking kidding me? You kill zombies and fight an evil corporation who is evil for the sake of being evil. Pretty standard fare for an installment in the Resident Evil series.
Oh wait, back up: Did I mention the game is set in Africa? Did the "uninformed media schlock" alarm just go off in your brains? Do you see where I'm going with this?
Yes, people are accusing the game of being racist because you kill black people. In Africa. Say, wasn't that the name of the continent where like, there are a fuck ton of black people? Hell, there were so many of them that out of the goodness of our hearts we took them to America to live on biiiiig plantations so that they could chill and get out of the desert. Of course, then Abraham Lincoln kicked them all off of the plantations and they had to get jobs. At least, that's my knowledge of the situation based off what I skimmed on Wikipedia. My point, however, is that the game is set in Africa. You know what I would find a lot more jarring? A game set in Africa where there was nary a black zombie to be found (incidentally, if Rob Zombie and the guy from In Living Color teamed up, they should totally call their band Black Zombie). Shooting zombies that happen to be black because the infection hit in fucking Africa isn't racist, it's the plot of a fucking videogame.
I found an article on the Wall Street Journal via Joystiq that seems to sum up the problems with the allegations of racism in one particularly poignant line:
"the zombies hardly seem zombie-like when they control machine gun turrets and steer watercraft. Aside from when their faces open up and turn into tentacles, the zombies look like everyday African people, albeit ones that are trying to kill you"
Let's look at this a little closer, hmmm? "aside from when their faces open up and turn into tentacles"? Aside from? That seems like a pretty big detail to simply cast to the side when you're asking whether a game that's been in the works for years is denegrating an entire race. Also, if they look like Africans who are trying to kill you, wouldn't you be remiss if you didn't shoot them in the face? Also, I know Africa isn't the greatest place in the world to live, but if even the majority of citizens resembled the zombies in this game, then Africa would have been foresaken as a lost cause long ago. Christ, the spaniards didn't throw this much of a temper tantrum with RE4. Is the moral of the story that places that aren't predominantly white aren't allowed to be in videogames because if bad things happen to minorities it automatically means its racist? Hell if that was the case all crimes against minorities would have to be classified as hate crimes even if the crime had nothing to do with race, but that'd be sill... what? oh shit.
(Edit: Showed up at midnight, had a copy of the game with my name on it sitting in the box of preorders. Seriously, Play n' Trade fucking rocks.)
But i digress. What i really wanted to talk about was controversy, because nowadays it seems like no game can be released without some kind of big issue being broached by, well, idiots. The hot button issue for RE5? Racism. Wait, fucking what? Racism? Are you fucking kidding me? You kill zombies and fight an evil corporation who is evil for the sake of being evil. Pretty standard fare for an installment in the Resident Evil series.
Oh wait, back up: Did I mention the game is set in Africa? Did the "uninformed media schlock" alarm just go off in your brains? Do you see where I'm going with this?
Yes, people are accusing the game of being racist because you kill black people. In Africa. Say, wasn't that the name of the continent where like, there are a fuck ton of black people? Hell, there were so many of them that out of the goodness of our hearts we took them to America to live on biiiiig plantations so that they could chill and get out of the desert. Of course, then Abraham Lincoln kicked them all off of the plantations and they had to get jobs. At least, that's my knowledge of the situation based off what I skimmed on Wikipedia. My point, however, is that the game is set in Africa. You know what I would find a lot more jarring? A game set in Africa where there was nary a black zombie to be found (incidentally, if Rob Zombie and the guy from In Living Color teamed up, they should totally call their band Black Zombie). Shooting zombies that happen to be black because the infection hit in fucking Africa isn't racist, it's the plot of a fucking videogame.
I found an article on the Wall Street Journal via Joystiq that seems to sum up the problems with the allegations of racism in one particularly poignant line:
"the zombies hardly seem zombie-like when they control machine gun turrets and steer watercraft. Aside from when their faces open up and turn into tentacles, the zombies look like everyday African people, albeit ones that are trying to kill you"
Let's look at this a little closer, hmmm? "aside from when their faces open up and turn into tentacles"? Aside from? That seems like a pretty big detail to simply cast to the side when you're asking whether a game that's been in the works for years is denegrating an entire race. Also, if they look like Africans who are trying to kill you, wouldn't you be remiss if you didn't shoot them in the face? Also, I know Africa isn't the greatest place in the world to live, but if even the majority of citizens resembled the zombies in this game, then Africa would have been foresaken as a lost cause long ago. Christ, the spaniards didn't throw this much of a temper tantrum with RE4. Is the moral of the story that places that aren't predominantly white aren't allowed to be in videogames because if bad things happen to minorities it automatically means its racist? Hell if that was the case all crimes against minorities would have to be classified as hate crimes even if the crime had nothing to do with race, but that'd be sill... what? oh shit.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Fuck TBNYU right in their stupid fucking asses
I simply cannot come up with a good introduction. I want to, but I'm so fucking livid right now that my thoughts can barely maintain some kind of coherent train. Let me dial it back about 17 hours or so to 9 PM last night, when our neighborhood friendly student activist group, "Take Back NYU" decided to "occupy" the 3rd floor of the kimmel center in protest of... stuff. I'd be more specific, but their list of demands is so all over the place it's like they took random passages from the anarchists cookbook and fed them through some kind of mad-lib machine. Their demands encompass everything from re-banning Coca Cola products on campus, to a flat and lower tuition rate, to student-led financial oversight committees, to 13 (yes, they specified a number) scholarships for Palestinian students, to making the NYU library available to the public, and of course, the usual request for amnesty for all involved. After all, a protest wouldn't be fun (that is the point of protests, right?) if people actually got in trouble. You can find their pitiful sham of a website (and I hesitate to post this link because then it means people might actually click through and give them the attention that they want) at http://www.takebacknyu.com where you can find their full list of "demands" and a half assed justification for their retarded actions.
So let's look at the things I've got the biggest qualms with. First off, the involvement of any demands related to palestine and "using our excess funds to rebuild the university of Gaza". What. The. Fuck. Are you fucking kidding me? Since when is TBNYU the fucking PLO? It's like they couldn't get enough people to support their stupid fucking demands so they tacked Palestine on to make it seem like they're culturally aware and oh-so-sensitive. This also makes their list of demands look like the aforementioned anarchist mad-lib.
Next up: re-banning Coca Cola. Come on, are you fucking serious? Do you really think Pepsi is the paragon of human rights in their south american bottling plants? Fuck no, they're just good at hiding it, and apparently were better than Coke. If a company has shit set up in the third world, they're probably abusing their workers, so stop treating Coke like they're the worst of the fucking crowd. Striking workers have been mowed down by the dozens in banana plantations, but does NYU ban Chiquita? FUCK no, so let it go, you fuckers finally lost.
Scholarships to Palestinian students? Look, I have very little opinion on the Israel/Palestine thing simply because I don't feel I'm informed enough to have an opinion, but answer me this: I get almost no financial aid from the university in spite of the fact that my family in addition to paying for NYU is still paying off my sister's education (she graduated last year). So why is some person based solely on their ethnicity more entitled to help from the university than I am. I am going to be paying this shit off until I'm about 108 if you count grad school. So FUCK you, you TBNYU fucks. If you care about solving problems for NYU students, why don't you try to make it fair for ALL of the NYU students, and not just 13 of the ones who happen to also be middle eastern.
Full disclosure of all the school's financial allocations with approval by the students? Is this a fucking joke? What do you think that our higher ups do? Believe it or not, John Sexton has a hard fucking job that makes him WORTH the six figure salary. NYU has done great under him. He is not some malicious overlord sitting in the top of some crooked castle spire counting the millions of dollars he's embezzled from the wide eyed youths of America. And full disclosure? DO YOU FUCKS EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT WOULD ENTAIL? Even if it did get released it would be literally thousands upon thousands of pages of pure financial jargon and do you know why? Because we have tens of thousands of students paying upwards of 50,000 dollars per year. That is a lot of fucking money, and no one, especially not an oversight board composed of the same fucking jackoffs who compiled this idiot manifesto in the first place would be able to make heads or tails of it without advanced accounting degrees. Guess who does that? The people whose salary you are paying to WATCH WHERE OUR FUCKING MONEY IS GOING. And the system works. How do I know? A guy in my office was laid off in fall 2008 for embezzling. They catch this shit, they are on it. You occupying a fucking cafeteria of all things solves fucking nothing you stupid dipshits.
The grand point I'm trying to make here is this: Thanks to the jerkoffs at TBNYU, this will now be the face of the student body at an institution that I am irrevocably bound to for at least the rest of the semester. There has been moderate press coverage, but only of their side, and it is not clear that while (according to the website, so its probably a lie) "over 200" (read "probably 50 or so") students are in fact functional fucking retards, the remaining tens of thousands of us do not agree with this bullshit and do not care to be represented in this retarded half assed wannabe revolutionary way. FUCK SHIT DICK COCK PISS!
That is all.
P.S. Including this sentence, the word "fuck" or some variant thereof appears 25 times total in this article. Can you tell I haven't slept in like 28 hours?
So let's look at the things I've got the biggest qualms with. First off, the involvement of any demands related to palestine and "using our excess funds to rebuild the university of Gaza". What. The. Fuck. Are you fucking kidding me? Since when is TBNYU the fucking PLO? It's like they couldn't get enough people to support their stupid fucking demands so they tacked Palestine on to make it seem like they're culturally aware and oh-so-sensitive. This also makes their list of demands look like the aforementioned anarchist mad-lib.
Next up: re-banning Coca Cola. Come on, are you fucking serious? Do you really think Pepsi is the paragon of human rights in their south american bottling plants? Fuck no, they're just good at hiding it, and apparently were better than Coke. If a company has shit set up in the third world, they're probably abusing their workers, so stop treating Coke like they're the worst of the fucking crowd. Striking workers have been mowed down by the dozens in banana plantations, but does NYU ban Chiquita? FUCK no, so let it go, you fuckers finally lost.
Scholarships to Palestinian students? Look, I have very little opinion on the Israel/Palestine thing simply because I don't feel I'm informed enough to have an opinion, but answer me this: I get almost no financial aid from the university in spite of the fact that my family in addition to paying for NYU is still paying off my sister's education (she graduated last year). So why is some person based solely on their ethnicity more entitled to help from the university than I am. I am going to be paying this shit off until I'm about 108 if you count grad school. So FUCK you, you TBNYU fucks. If you care about solving problems for NYU students, why don't you try to make it fair for ALL of the NYU students, and not just 13 of the ones who happen to also be middle eastern.
Full disclosure of all the school's financial allocations with approval by the students? Is this a fucking joke? What do you think that our higher ups do? Believe it or not, John Sexton has a hard fucking job that makes him WORTH the six figure salary. NYU has done great under him. He is not some malicious overlord sitting in the top of some crooked castle spire counting the millions of dollars he's embezzled from the wide eyed youths of America. And full disclosure? DO YOU FUCKS EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT WOULD ENTAIL? Even if it did get released it would be literally thousands upon thousands of pages of pure financial jargon and do you know why? Because we have tens of thousands of students paying upwards of 50,000 dollars per year. That is a lot of fucking money, and no one, especially not an oversight board composed of the same fucking jackoffs who compiled this idiot manifesto in the first place would be able to make heads or tails of it without advanced accounting degrees. Guess who does that? The people whose salary you are paying to WATCH WHERE OUR FUCKING MONEY IS GOING. And the system works. How do I know? A guy in my office was laid off in fall 2008 for embezzling. They catch this shit, they are on it. You occupying a fucking cafeteria of all things solves fucking nothing you stupid dipshits.
The grand point I'm trying to make here is this: Thanks to the jerkoffs at TBNYU, this will now be the face of the student body at an institution that I am irrevocably bound to for at least the rest of the semester. There has been moderate press coverage, but only of their side, and it is not clear that while (according to the website, so its probably a lie) "over 200" (read "probably 50 or so") students are in fact functional fucking retards, the remaining tens of thousands of us do not agree with this bullshit and do not care to be represented in this retarded half assed wannabe revolutionary way. FUCK SHIT DICK COCK PISS!
That is all.
P.S. Including this sentence, the word "fuck" or some variant thereof appears 25 times total in this article. Can you tell I haven't slept in like 28 hours?
Thursday, January 22, 2009
To keep my mind off of the all consuming nausea
So it's been a bit since my last post, and what with one of my best friends leaving the university, the start of classes, and some devil-illness that caused me to vomit for 2 days straight (and still be unable to really eat solid food) I've been a bit busy, so this post is a bit dated. Anyway, I got me a pretty nice haul of video games this christmas and thought I'd share some thoughts on them.
Mirror's Edge: This game really got panned by the critics as not living up to the awesome-osity that was the demo. After having had plenty of hands on time with the full thing i can say that while many complaints about this game are valid, they simply don't hinder the gameplay THAT much. The biggest complaints were about the confined and confusing indoor areas, and the appalling combat. And while the combat would never be acceptable in any kind of FPS, it is important to note that mirror's edge is decidedly NOT an FPS. In fact, I liken it to a first person Prince of Persia (Sands of Time, of course, not the awful sequels), and if anyone remembers Sands of Time, they would do well to note that the game succeeded in spite of the combat mechanism, and after a few hours of play, you could figure out the chuggy and painful mechanics enough to beat the system out of forcing you to waste too much time on the battle sequences. The same can be said of Mirror's Edge in that when there aren't any enemies on screen, figuring out the running-jumping-sliding-etc. puzzles is a god-damn blast. The plot is kind of superficial (futuristic 1084-esque dystopia with government conspiracies out the wazoo), but provides a decent enough setting for your character's actions to make sense. It won't be taking home game of the year for me (that'll be Fallout 3 this year and every year until something better comes along) but I can promise one of the most unique experiences available on the 360 to anyone willing to overlook a few minor pitfalls. 7.5/10
Left 4 Dead: I feel like part of the experience of this game still has to come through for me because I don't know anyone who has a Live account and owns this game. Thusly my only co-op experience has been split screened, which is fun, but you really start to wish you had more screen space when say, you're getting reamed by approximately 50 zombies hungering for your brains or other innards. I don't have quite as much to say about this as I did about Mirror's Edge simply because as far as gameplay mechanics go, there isn't a lot there, but not every meal has to be gourmet quality. Sometimes you have a hankering for some McNuggets and goddamn if they don't hit the spot just right. If you ever wanted to know what "28 Days Later" the video game would play like, this is it. Fast, frantic, loud, gorey, and a lot of fun if you can get at least one other person on board to play with you. I'd say it gets roughly a 6.5/10, losing points only because the missions, in spite of varying enemy sets, the missions feel very interchangeable and samey, and the campaigns feel just a little too long at points. Still though, for a half hour of mindless zombie slaughterin', look no further.
Prince of Persia: I, um... Well, this is awkward because this game was so bad, so insufferable, that I sold it within 3 days of getting it after playing for approximately 90 minutes total. The characters are static, obnoxious, saturday-morning-cartooney stereotypes (wisecracking anglicized yet inexplicably "persian" Prince, mysteriously hot sorceress who is also a total cunt, evil sorceror reviving dark gods for some reason never fully made clear). The combat is even more insufferable than any other PoP title, featuring quicktime instant failure events at every goddamn turn and attacks that, while pretty, you never feel particularly invested in the execution of (pressing "B" will vault you into the air to hurl the enemy down with this spinning flair that seems almost too effortless to even be fun or visceral). Also, no one in the history of gaming has ever liked having to scavenge for 50 bajillion of one kind of item (light seeds, in this case) in between every mission. Remember finding the 100 hidden packages in GTA III? Imagine that half of the game was that. And your character never shut the fuck up. And the disk was printed on poop so that when you put in the drive your console burst into flames. 2/10, and it only gets those 2 because parts of it are kind of pretty.
Mirror's Edge: This game really got panned by the critics as not living up to the awesome-osity that was the demo. After having had plenty of hands on time with the full thing i can say that while many complaints about this game are valid, they simply don't hinder the gameplay THAT much. The biggest complaints were about the confined and confusing indoor areas, and the appalling combat. And while the combat would never be acceptable in any kind of FPS, it is important to note that mirror's edge is decidedly NOT an FPS. In fact, I liken it to a first person Prince of Persia (Sands of Time, of course, not the awful sequels), and if anyone remembers Sands of Time, they would do well to note that the game succeeded in spite of the combat mechanism, and after a few hours of play, you could figure out the chuggy and painful mechanics enough to beat the system out of forcing you to waste too much time on the battle sequences. The same can be said of Mirror's Edge in that when there aren't any enemies on screen, figuring out the running-jumping-sliding-etc. puzzles is a god-damn blast. The plot is kind of superficial (futuristic 1084-esque dystopia with government conspiracies out the wazoo), but provides a decent enough setting for your character's actions to make sense. It won't be taking home game of the year for me (that'll be Fallout 3 this year and every year until something better comes along) but I can promise one of the most unique experiences available on the 360 to anyone willing to overlook a few minor pitfalls. 7.5/10
Left 4 Dead: I feel like part of the experience of this game still has to come through for me because I don't know anyone who has a Live account and owns this game. Thusly my only co-op experience has been split screened, which is fun, but you really start to wish you had more screen space when say, you're getting reamed by approximately 50 zombies hungering for your brains or other innards. I don't have quite as much to say about this as I did about Mirror's Edge simply because as far as gameplay mechanics go, there isn't a lot there, but not every meal has to be gourmet quality. Sometimes you have a hankering for some McNuggets and goddamn if they don't hit the spot just right. If you ever wanted to know what "28 Days Later" the video game would play like, this is it. Fast, frantic, loud, gorey, and a lot of fun if you can get at least one other person on board to play with you. I'd say it gets roughly a 6.5/10, losing points only because the missions, in spite of varying enemy sets, the missions feel very interchangeable and samey, and the campaigns feel just a little too long at points. Still though, for a half hour of mindless zombie slaughterin', look no further.
Prince of Persia: I, um... Well, this is awkward because this game was so bad, so insufferable, that I sold it within 3 days of getting it after playing for approximately 90 minutes total. The characters are static, obnoxious, saturday-morning-cartooney stereotypes (wisecracking anglicized yet inexplicably "persian" Prince, mysteriously hot sorceress who is also a total cunt, evil sorceror reviving dark gods for some reason never fully made clear). The combat is even more insufferable than any other PoP title, featuring quicktime instant failure events at every goddamn turn and attacks that, while pretty, you never feel particularly invested in the execution of (pressing "B" will vault you into the air to hurl the enemy down with this spinning flair that seems almost too effortless to even be fun or visceral). Also, no one in the history of gaming has ever liked having to scavenge for 50 bajillion of one kind of item (light seeds, in this case) in between every mission. Remember finding the 100 hidden packages in GTA III? Imagine that half of the game was that. And your character never shut the fuck up. And the disk was printed on poop so that when you put in the drive your console burst into flames. 2/10, and it only gets those 2 because parts of it are kind of pretty.
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