Recently in realm of the weird Category
It's a PC only mod meaning that I might have to fire up UT3 just to try this out. Or to see who will have the guts to use this in multiplayer.
That's not really a surprise given Fox's record with gamers in terms of misleading their audience with self-styled media pundits and so-called experts who obliquely ignore the ratings on the actual product or who have never played the game in the first place. Facts? What facts?It wasn't that long ago that Mass Effect went through the same thing on Fox. In the analysis that followed, the 'expert' that Fox had called to the floor - Cooper Lawrence - who made Mass Effect out to be promoting pornography was lambasted by those that had actually played the game. See, she didn't play it - but felt in her expert opinion that it was primarily what the game was about and ran with it. It's as if someone had blamed the film, Pirates of the Caribbean, for promoting Somali piracy without even seeing the movie.
She actually apologized, even though Fox never did. But that hasn't stopped Fox from finding experts that now blame games for the increase in rape statistics across the nation without any real statistics to back up that correlation. Once again, the audience is left to take the word of these 'experts' at face value without so much as hard evidence.
Fox went on to draw in Bulletstorm as the perfect example of why the youth of America are falling by the wayside. Now, Bulletstom IS a violent game. That's why it's rated M, for Mature, meaning that it should only be played by adults 18 and over. Not by a nine year old that Fox has been quoted in saying will be playing games just like it.
Short of handling game sales like the TSA handles airports, you're still going to see parents buy kids the games they want because they either don't care or don't know any better. In my time in retail, I've seen parents do this - we deny the kid the sale, then he/she brings in their grumpy parent to wonder why we did that and use their credit card to get the game anyway. It happens.
EA has hit back with a statement defending Bulletstorm and likening it to similar fare such as Sin City or Kill Bill which is fine since both of those films are rated appropriately and are clearly intended for older audiences. Games for adults should be treated in the same way, but according to Fox, they're not. Still, I'm not expecting Fox to issue an apology for this, either, or for any of their experts to recant what they've said. After all, they've got their fifteen minutes of fame.
He's gone, really, according to gaming blog Andriasang, because of the rules that CERO has in place for every game. CERO is the Japanese equivalent of the ESRB, the ratings board over here in the States, though their requirements are a bit different from ours. For example, two of the rules they have against "scenes deemed malicious to an existing person/country" have apparently replaced North Korea with "A certain country in the North" and Kim Jong-il with "Northern Leader".If you're not sure what Homefront is, it's THQ's new shooter that's headed to retail in March. It features the somewhat sketchy premise of North Korea's successful unification of the peninsula and its preparation in the years since for war, culminating in half of the United States falling for a surprise invasion. The story puts players in the shoes of a grassroots resistance movement in occupied America as they take up the fight. With the tensions between Japan and North Korea, it's probably not too hard to understand why this might be a somewhat sensitive topic.
It's also not the first time a game coming in from the States has had to go through the wringer in order to enter certain markets. Australia's somewhat draconian rules have made headlines over the years for their handling of titles such as Valve's Left 4 Dead 2 which only entered the country via a German version that was already edited for content. Typing in "video games banned" in Google brings up "video games banned in australia" as an auto-complete term.
Even the United States has its own funny rules on censorship. One example that jumps out is how the NES' port of Bionic Commando originally pit the player against Nazis complete with Hitler at the end - until it was whitewashed when it came over here. The Japanese fought a vast, neo-Nazi empire while we got - Badds and Master D. Now, more than twenty years later, it sounds as if they're getting the Bionic Commando treatment. Of course, the difference is that one game was based on history and sci-fi; the other more on speculation on current events.
Things have somewhat relaxed a bit since then, even for Nintendo, and I'm also sure the Japanese audiences looking at the game know exactly who Homefront's story is really pointing to. THQ is also apparently okay with it leaving it to Spike in Japan to handle the distribution there. As long as the gameplay itself proves to be just as interesting, a relatively small change like this shouldn't keep Japan's gamers from finding the same amount of fun that other gamers elsewhere are hoping to get from Homefront.
By Brittany Vincent
Contributing Writer
The boys are back in town. By boys, I mean ravenous, flesh-eating zombies. And by town, I mean Fortune City. Luckily Chuck Greene, motocross superstar, is on the case.
In Dead Rising 2, the sequel to the cult hit zombie apocalypse simulator Dead Rising, Greene replaces Frank West as the Average Joe on the run from the starving undead. Yes, there are plenty of zombies, but there's a cure floating around that can stave off the effects of zombification. It's called Zombrex, and Katey, Chuck's tiny daughter, is in dire need of a dose every 24 hours lest she degrade into a shambling monstrosity herself.
In a world where zombie rights groups advocate fair treatment of zombies and pharmaceutical companies are profiting off the suffering of the people, this isn't exactly an easy feat. It's up to players to keep Katey fully dosed with Zombrex as the poignant father-daughter team anxiously tries to withstand, you guessed it, a 72-hour period before help arrives.
Kinect came out yesterday amidst much hoopla and joy for those that managed to snag one. If you haven't heard of what it is, it's the motion sensing accessory for the Xbox 360 that essentially follows your body to do stuff onscreen - like control your dashboard or actually play games using it.
It's got a leg up on the Wii and the Move by not forcing you to hold anything, but did you also know that it takes pics of you? That's what Destructoid is reporting.
Apparently, someone "got too hot" while playing Dance Central and took off their clothes. What they didn't realize is that Kinect randomly took pics of them and now they have no idea how to delete the potentially embarrassing album on their console.
So I guess the moral of the story is: Kinect is watching you? Play safe, my friends.
EVE, if you haven't heard of it, is a space-based MMO run almost exclusively by the players. The economy, wars, and conflicts within the game are mostly against corporate empires run by and filled with real people piloting and building ships making it a place where anything can (and has) happened.
MMO site, Massively, has the goods on this latest collision between real-life and what should have been a relaxing evening for one trader in the game.
In short, the main currency used in EVE is called ISK and, like gold farming, has its own shady cottage industry where people with money can "buy" ISK instead of earning it the old fashioned way. It's not legal according to the game's rules, so as one way to fight this, EVE's developers created the 30-day Pilot License Extension. Players can buy these with real cash to extend their membership.
Now here's the rub: it's also represented as an item in the game which can then be traded for ISK. Thus, people can buy a PLEX (as the Extensions are called) and trade it to other players for massive loads of ISK if they want to. We're talking billions. Later, they made it so that PLEX could be carried on ships for transport. You can see where this is going.
One player apparently had 74 of these things in their ship when two raiders came by and attempted to seize it...only to end up destroying the ship and its cargo. Real world value? $1,294 USD. And in EVE, since this was technically within the rules of how it is played where risk is everything, I don't expect any of that to be coming back to the owner.
Ouch.
Remember the Alec Baldwin superhero flick, The Shadow? Wait, you don't remember Alec Baldwin as a superhero, period?
It's not too surprising considering the drubbing the film was given when it came out in '94, but I liked it enough for its stab at the 1930's radio show and pulp series it was based on. Even if you haven't heard of The Shadow, you've probably seen his modus operandi of working at night as a costumed detective fighting crime in the big city influencing certain other heroes elsewhere...such as Batman. For the film, the costumes, set pieces, the soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith, and the end credits sung by Taylor Dane certainly made its big screen debut impressionable.
It's too bad that its plot based on a psychic descendant of Genghis Khan and a superhero who could control men's minds were forced to wither in the shadows cast by Tim Burton's Batman duet, even with Tim Curry as a slobbering madman. It even had the beat 'em up tie-in by Ocean on the SNES pitting the player in a Streets of Rage like battle against street thugs and Mongol warriors.
But the rumor mill is spinning its wheels on whispers that Quentin Tarantino might be attached to a reboot of what was supposed to be the first film of an ongoing series. Fox has picked the rights up and there's talk that David Slade is on board to direct. On one hand, I'd love to see what Tarantino can do with this kind of material.
On the other, if it ever does come out, I hope that the game doesn't suck.
