I was a little upset when my Xbox 360 gave up the ghost this week (exactly 1 hour before Shadow Complex released in actual fact). Earlier today while making breakfast, I decided to run the Gaygamer.net podcast, I was suddenly made aware of a few facts that I had not previously known about author Orson Scott Card. Even more to the point, they discussed some issues that have also come about on the Chair Entertainment website. In their defence, there has been no official statement from the company yet on the situation that has been alleged to have occurred on their forums. 
 
 I'll have to admit that now I'm a little torn on the issue. On the one hand there is the developer, who by all account, has no issues with the GLBT community. In fact, the writer who actually worked on the game is really quite friendly to the community. The game looks as if it is well made, and fun to play. On the other hand, as a gay man, I do not want any of my money going to a man who wrote this: 
 
 
Even beyond this statement, he has very disturbing views on the separation of church and state, and is also on the board of the National Organization for Marriage (one of the organizations behind proposition 8, and also a group that lobbied to hide the list of donor's to this campaign from public view. At least it seems their views on keeping things in the closet are consistent I suppose. =/ ). I can not, in all good conscience, show my support for this man. Which is what leaves me torn between my desire to support the one, and not the other. 
 
It is a complicated issue to say the least. If you are at all interested in getting some more facts, check out that link I posted to Gaygamer.net, and also this article Gamasutra posted about it.

I'm a little drunk... so this will likely be somewhat unfocused. 
 
I've heard people bitch about monster closets ever since Doom 3 was released. The strange thing about that, the only game that really has seemed to have been "tarred" with this moniker has been Doom 3.  The thing that blows my mind about this, is that monster closets have been around for years... and long before Doom 3 was ever released. 
 
The real question I supposed would be, "what is the monster closet?" An excellent question. In reality... this device is really meant to be an area just outside of the player's range of vision that spawns enemies for them to combat. Every game ever made uses this tactic... from top down shooters, to real time strategy games. The developer needs a place to spawn enemies to attack the player from a position that they may not be ready to engage from. So... why does Doom 3 get tarred with this designation? 
 
The answer is that the developers didn't bother to paint a door on the wall of the location that certain enemies spawn from. Despite the fact that games Rainbow Six Vegas, and Ghost Recon both use this tactic, they get a 'get out of jail free card' because they decide to paint a useless fucking door on one of the walls of the monster closet. 
 
It's entirely possible that I'm crazy (and I invite you here to rebut this argument), but it doesn't make any sense to me that a game like Doom 3 is maligned for picking scary times to spawn enemies as being for having 'monster closets', while games like Serious Sam and the upcoming Serious Sam HD have absolutely no comment on the matter (especially since people are still bitching about it over new screenshots for RAGE). 
 
Give me a good argument for why monster closets in Doom 3 are bad, and why they are awesome in games like Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden 2.

Well... after 5 years, I've finally gone and updated my computer system from the ground up. My system was pretty old... though it still ran a lot of games pretty well. Certain aspects of my rig however still surprised many people... the most of which was the fact I was still running a CRT monitor. 

I haven't had much of a chance to try this out since it happened, but I finally downloaded the surprisingly large update and booted into this afternoon. It might just be me, but I don't remember having this many sound options in the game before (someone please correct me if this is wrong). There are a lot of music tracks in there now, and some of em are actually pretty good. A lot of them also sound like they were recorded well, though there's a few cheesy midi sounds in there too.