Worth Reading - 05/24/2013

I have been looking for an entertaining Firefighting game for ages, and the one you shared is awesome! Thank you for sharing! It's now on our station computer and everyone is playing it!

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From the little I remember, I do not recall Shadow Warrior at every turn normalizing racism and sexism. To be honest I only played the shareware demo, so maybe it was top heavy that way for the full game. I do remember the skinned cat in the kitchen, and I did not think that funny. But otherwise I agree in sentiment with threepi, at least for a Shadow Warrior game we have not even seen yet! Well, except for the blood and bodies in the trailer.

But if it happily showed what happens to Raccoon Dogs for their fur, I would not buy the game, granted. So again are we talking about the tradition of parody in an upcoming game, or an event that occurs in real life?

In regards to the Kotaku stuff, I'll be completely honest: a few years ago there was a whole stream of false, inflammatory articles on the 'death' of starcraft 2 and esports in general. They were clearly written to create a huge argument in the comment section and draw in page views, and contained not only the writers personal feelings on the subject (in a NEWS story) but also had out-right lies about viewership of major events like Dreamhack or MLG. They may have changed since then, but the steady stream of articles about their link-bating since doesn't engender much confidence in me.

If I hadn't watched Space Brothers I would totally have skipped over that ISS video. It is very awesome to learn about astronauts as real people living and working in space.

In regards to the whole Shadow of the Eternals thing, I'm actually glad that it's so far behind on funding. Crowd funding cannot support multi-million dollar projects. If this had succeeded, other large scale developers would follow suit. Keep crowd funding for the people who actually need it, the indie developers. Not developers that are completely capable of finding investment elsewhere.

Thanks for linking the Sonic Xtreme article, Tricky. That game is so fascinating... even if it did look pretty fucking terrible.

"I'm really good at luring gamer nerds in, then surprising them with a discussion about gender," she says with a sly smile. "I think making things that look like video games and play like video games and are very 'video gamey' video games is a really good way to trick people into becoming more enlightened, educated human beings."

You just tricked me into never playing one of your games.

I liked Anna Anthropy's games a lot more before I started reading the shit she writes.

@sunjammer: Agreed.

I think that generally her games and her desire to spark discussion in the gaming community at large is wonderful. But, her attitude toward anyone who has the slightest disagreement with her is appallingly childlike. She regularly condemns people in the games industry without actually looking into what they really said and/or their reactions and explanations to what they said. Plus her book was filled with odd factual inaccuracies, but whatever.

Again, I have nothing personally against her and generally think she is a force of good in the video game community, but I do think that she should self analyze a bit. She and her friends have a crass, vulgar, and silly way of speaking to each other (which I'm fine with, I do the same with my friends) but the moment she hears/reads someone else's sarcasm that she doesn't like, she and her many twitter friends will dogpile on them.

@truthtellah: I'm just glad that when I see a Totilo article, it's not an article that one might often associate to a typical Kotaku article before he came in. The article where he addressed the AC4 leak where he showed a lot of transparency as to what they do and what they did in that situation despite the fact that there was a conflict of interest, made me more or less trust some of the articles that has come out of there since then but usually just the Totilo penned articles. :)

@threepi said:

South Park has a long history of being preachy when it suits them and then throwing down some regressive BS when it's time for a laugh. Sometimes they wander into Family Guy territory (as in this joke), where it's just irony and shock value but nothing funny or clever or good.

Hey man it's all well and good to defend Kotaku from the dumb arguments Marcus Beer was making but let's not lose focus of the fact that Kotaku is the kind of place that posts vapid articles trying to drum up outrage over a children's game by comparing the censorship of anime butts to the non-censorship of one of the greatest and most influential pieces of artwork of the renaissance.

It's real shit how game developers are now attacked for putting anything remotely politically incorrect in their games. Talk about stifling creativity. Censoring those who actually want to express themselves about race, sex or violence, in any way they choose, is not going to make the problems go away. I'm beyond tired of the no fun allowed brigade intimidating anyone who doesn't parrot their opinions as fact. It is truly regressive and abhorrent that the up-its-own-ass games journalism sector won't defend basic rights to freedom of expression from those clearly trying to suppress it. Fuck them and everyone living in the delusion that your rights end where my feelings begin.

For an example of how this isn't a one-way street, I recall back in Call of Duty: World at War the killing of dogs made me extremely uncomfortable. But I did not take to the internet to harass the developers for "normalizing animal cruelty." The cancer in this industry, largely represented in this week's Worth Reading, have way too much credibility and power for essentially doing absolutely nothing except bitch about video games they generally play at a casual level. What's perhaps most idiotic is the following these loons have from the fringe, a vocal minority if ever there was one.