This in from Gamepolitics. The bad boys at Rockstar have crafted a product sure to turn a few heads, particularly of those in the anti-game league. It’s not a sequel to Bully or another hidden sex minigame, but it is a bloodstained baseball bat. With the Grand Theft Auto IV logo on it.
Honestly, I’m not sure what to think of this, whether to call it a glorification of baseball bat murderers, or say it’s a sick (but kind of cute) joke. All I know is that a bloodstained GTAIV bat now exists… and I kind of want one.
But perhaps the most important thing out of the pile is footage of gameplay, brought to you by the folks at Gametrailers. While it appears to be the same game in some aspects (isometric point-of-view, clicking the mouse like crazy to slaughter armies of beasts) Diablo III differs in a lot of impressive ways. I particularly liked the ability to interact with the environment. Now your characters can tear down walls to squash their pursuers. Nothing is stationary anymore.
So far only two character classes have been revealed: the Barbarian and the Witch Doctor. The Barbarian carries a lot of his/her (I almost forgot–you can choose the sex of your character now) signature moves from Diablo II and remains the master of melee combat. The Witch Doctor wields heavy blasts of fire and can attack from the netherworld.
Seemingly gone from the Diablo world are the health and mana potions. Now enemies drop colored balls that your character can absorb to regain strength. In place of the belt that used to hold the potions is a skill bar, where players can quicklaunch special abilities at the touch of a button.
A release date was not given in the press release. Blizzard will gradually put out more information as times goes by. As a fan and veteran mouseclicker, I’ll be keeping a close eye on Diablo III”s development. It’s looking like one hell of a game already.
“Bullshit, I’m gettin’ old. And it’s okay. Because thanks to our fear of death in this country I won’t have to die. I’ll pass away. Or I’ll expire, like a magazine subscription. If it happens in the hospital they’ll call it a terminal episode. The insurance company will refer to it as negative patient care outcome.” - George Carlin, “Doin it Again”, 1990
Well, here’s some depressing news to wake up to. George Carlin, one of my favorite comedians and
one of the great philosophers of our era, died of heart failure yesterday. He was 71.
Carlin was admitted to Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA after complaining of chest pain. He died later in the day.
He was famous for his tirades on humanity, religion, and modern language. His “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television” (NSFW link, protect your co-workers by plugging in headphones) bit caused a ruckus with the FCC and led to a classic case of censorship. He left behind a legacy of media, including 14 HBO specials, four books, and 22 comedy albums. He also hosted the first episode of “Saturday Night Live” and played the narrator on “Shining Time Station”.
He was an established orator and I mourn his departure.
Here’s a little something extra to help digest the bad news. It’s one of my favorite bits of his.
While I don’t consider myself a particularly conservative viewer, I do keep a mental list of films to avoid like plague-infected vampire rats. At the top of that list, bolded and underlined, are the Scary Movie sequels and the (?) Movie spin-offs that Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg fart out every year. These travesties feature lame-brained parodies of popular scenes, gross-out humor, dated cultural references (oh look, it’s Dr. Phil, ahaha), and a kind of cheap, low-rent presentation aimed at easily misled people with low expectations.
Bearing all of these faults in mind, do I now have to extend the same restriction to Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs? After all, it features lame-brained parodies of popular scenes, minimal gross-out humor, dated cultural references (oh look, it’s the sound-effects guy from PoliceAcademy, ahaha) and, if not a low-rent presentation, then a somewhat mediocre one. And since it’s more heavily a spoof of Star Wars than any of the other sci-fi movies it riffs, it was released three years too late. I’m torn on this one. Spaceballs was one of my favorite movies growing up, but if I gave it any kind of praise now I’d feel like a hypocrite.Is there anything that can save it from ending up on my eBay sale list?
Has Uwe ‘Turkey’ Boll finally created his (passable) masterpiece?
It would certainly seem that way, according to a Gamepolitics post this morning. The notorious director’s latest opus Postal has scored the top award at the Hoboken International Film Festival. GP received word from a press release sent by Vince Desi, head of Running With Scissors.
In addition to the top audience award, Boll received the pick for Best Director. No, I’m not lying. The results are right there on the page.
Postal had a limited theatrical release on May 23. It hits DVD on August 26.
Unless I’m putting together a marathon viewing session, I usually don’t organize my Netflix queue into any particular structure. It’s mostly just random mashups of movies I’m behind on seeing. Any odd patterns or trends that I notice are strictly coincidental and not part of any predetermined study. So when I watched this batch caught onto the curiously deceptive nature of the PG rating, I want you to know that I hadn’t intended to make it a topic of discussion beforehand. It just fell into my lap.
Without going into a CAPAlert Guy-style rant, I was amazed at what filmmakers were able to get away with pre, and post, PG-13. Sixteen Candles and Clash of the Titans both featured topless nudity. Beetlejuice had scenes of gore that would’ve scared the hell out of me as a kid, as well as one use of the ‘F’ word. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was rife with innuendo and adult themes.
The amount of racy content in these films came as a shock to me, because I’ve always associated ‘PG’ with lame family comedies and Christmas schmaltz. And although the PG-13 rating came about in 1984, some of the above examples occurred in movies after that period. I feel that the The MPAA is generally fair in their judgment, but they’re also a permissive bunch.
Enough of my blather. You get the idea. Click the jump to check out this month’s selections.
I’m a bit late with this piece of news. Wolf3d’s sweet sixteenth was actually yesterday. But this is too big a story to fall through the cracks.
Feeding into the popular theory that kids are heavily exposed to violent media their whole lives, I was 9-10 years old when I first played Wolfenstein 3D (the shareware version, likely) on my friend’s brand new PC. At the time, I didn’t know what the point of the game was, that the enemies were Nazis, or even what ‘Nazis’ were. I was just flying down corridors, in a fully 3D environment, blasting any guy that moved and watching him land in a puddle of his own blood. I was opening secret passages and collecting treasure. Most importantly, I was doing things on a computer that the dusty old Apple IIGS at our house could never do.
Eventually we got a PC of our own, with a CD drive no less, and I acquired my own copy of Wolfenstein 3D— the shareware version first, and then the full six-episode package later. I spent many months mowing down Nazis (I knew who I was fighting at this point) stalking Hitler, having my throat attacked by menacing guard dogs, and using a chaingun to rain down an orgy of destruction on my enemies. I was also having the living hell scared out of me at every opportunity; to this day, Wolf3D tops my list of ‘Most Frightening Games’. To have an enemy silently sneak up behind you and open fire is terrifying.
It’s hard to believe that very game has turned sixteen. It makes me feel a whole lot older than my 23 years, and saddened as well. As fun and engaging as games are these days, they had a certain charm back in the early 90s that can never be replicated. Waxing poetic about all these memories is making me feel so nostalgic that I’m tempted to spend the entire day playing either Wolfenstein or Star Wars: Dark Forces.
To celebrate Wolf3D’s birthday, here are some fun facts:
It was released before the ESRB was established, and was rated with a self-applied ‘PC-13’ (The ‘PC’ stood for ‘Profound Carnage’)
The full game came with a thick hint manual that had every level and every secret explicitly mapped out. The book also featured a behind-the-scenes guide to id Software’s operation, which is especially interesting if you’ve read the book Masters of Doom. It remains in my bottom drawer intact, although the front cover is long gone.
Every episode had a secret level. Episode Three’s was modeled after the classic Pac-Man maze, with all the Nazi enemies replaced by ghosts.
The end boss of Episode Three is Adolf Hitler. He first appears in a mech-suit wielding four chainguns, then as himself wielding two. To reach him, you must first fight through a small army of robotic ‘fake’ Hitlers.
Hitler has the goriest death in the entire game. After his body crumbles to bloody pieces, you get to watch a slow-motion replay of the event.
The Super Nintendo version was heavily edited and censored. Later on, an unlicensed game from Wisdom Tree called Super Noah’s Ark 3D appeared, which blatantly redecorated Wolfenstein’s maps. Rumor has it that id Software was upset with Nintendo for sanitizing their game, and gave Wisdom Tree the go-ahead.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words are just funny.
So when Glenn Beck, a conservative talking head on CNN Headline News, called video game bloggers “losers” because they had the gall (the gall I say!) to write mean things about him, I could only chuckle. Then I ran to my blog like the shut-in moron I am to write up a post. Shame on me! How lame can you get?
“Whatever happened to Pong?” Mr. Beck asked last week, as he was discussing the newly-released Grand Theft Auto IV. He expressed concern over the game’s violent nature. He talked about the possibility of your 12-year-old picking up a hooker, having sex with her, and then beating her to death with a baseball bat; yes, he commented on the hooker thing, because no one else ever has. Then he had the president of the Parent’s Television Council show up to discuss the moral implications.
Gaming wastoids were naturally incensed by Mr. Beck’s one-sided piece, and took to their blogs in protest. Mr. Beck apparently read some of these responses and was not pleased. So in the middle of an interview with Dr. Cheryl Olson, (co-author of the book Grand Theft Childhood) he casually slipped in “I could care less” and that “video game bloggers, they’re losers.”
Now that’s just being unfair, Mr. Beck. I consider myself a video game blogger (on occasions when I update with something video-game related) and I’ve never said anything mean about you. In fact, I’d never even heard of you or your show until your GTAIV rant last week. I must’ve been busy trying to steal the train in San Andreas or kill the pig in Manhunt during your career. Oh, and graduating from college, can’t forget that.
I’ve always been taught that when someone calls you names, the natural thing to do is turn the other cheek and move on with your life. Mr. Beck’s retort here harkens back to the days of kindergarten verbal exchanges. Doesn’t he realize that by insulting gamers, he’s only encouraging more posts about him in the future? Maybe a comment like this will become a weekly feature on his show now. But unless Gamepolitics reports on it, I likely won’t see it. I’ll be too preoccupied with driving Madd Dogg’s manager into the ocean. Because I’m a loser, you see.
Has Uwe ‘Turkey’ Boll finally created his (passable) masterpiece?
