Generational Gap
I’ve always been an X fan myself. This is perhaps simply because I almost completely missed out on the NES era. I wasn’t really into gaming as much at the time, and a $10/week allowance was just not enough to buy games. I think the only NES game I ever owned was Super Mario Bros. 3, and I never beat it. Damn, what did I do for the first ten years of my life?
Needless to say, I hopped on board for the SNES era (thanks, Blockbuster!) Mega Man X was my first experience with the games, and I loved it. I did play through the original Mega Mans eventually, and I even rented Mega Man 7 one time, but they just didn’t stick with me. Broadly, the same holds true for these remakes of the original games in both series.
The Self as a Context: Violence as a Nihilism in Hamlet and Watchmen
It is probably best to begin an essay about violence – in the context of the self as a context – by noting that my life has, fortunately, been almost entirely free of it. The same cannot be said, most unfortunately, for the rest of humanity; nor can it be said for the superhero genre, which has been marked and in many ways defined by it ever since Beowulf tore off Grendel’s arm circa 600 A.D. I think this makes it significant. I would illustrate this in a longer essay by relating it more fully to Hamlet; I might illuminate popular fiction, even comic books, through the greatest English playwright of all time. Yet my reading of Hamlet has been colored by the superhero genre as well.
A Brutal Kill
Some of God of War’s greatest moments require archaic video game skills to pull off (such as quickly pressing the button that appears on screen), yet from start to finish, stabbing a minotaur in the back of the throat is just awesome. The developers have clearly tapped into some subtle truth: it does not take complex button strokes to convince a player that he or she is a badass mofo. Read the rest of this entry »
Missing It
When Epic announced that Gears of War 2 would never come out for the PC (“Epic: No Gears…”, 1UP.com), I had to force myself not to snicker. The PC version of the first game is, quite frankly, garbage. For a game with a budget that is obviously very large, the bugs, glitches, and overall lack of any adaptation to the PC platform that plague the PC port is simply inexcusable.
I understand it did wonders for cover systems in shooting games, and I cannot argue that. I found myself being able to take cover easily and effectively behind just about everything I tried to, so technically it works. It also fundamentally changes how you play a shooter. There is no strafing and no running (at least whilst gunning). Instead, you scramble desperately between pillar, car, and sofa, spraying enemy positions with fire. “Grit” is an obvious theme in Gears, and the cover system lends a weight to combat that carries the theme into gameplay as well as art style.
