As should be evident by now, your humble and obedient servant is a creature of spite – yet few things inspire greater loathing than those who prey on others. Said loathing finds its form in the dream of a new world – a bright and beautiful one – in w...
UK based rapper and YouTube personality Dan Bull has been rapping about the internet, politics, gaming, and more since 2006. Over this time he’s earned quite the following in the nerd core realm, with some of his most popular tracks being gamin...
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The Wii U is available for purchase, the PS4 is well on its way, and now it’s Microsoft’s turn to show us what they’ve got in store for the oncoming next console generation. After months of rumors about always-online func...
Animal Crossing isn’t the only game that has real staying power in my Wii/Wii U… five years now after the release of Wii Fit (Seriously? Five years? That’s insane!), I still use it nearly every day. And as you can see from the chart...
So, if you’ve been on the internet recently, you’ve probably heard some of the controversy surrounding certain design choices made regarding the soon-to-be-released 2d fantasy action RPG from Vanillaware entitled Dragon’s Crown. And for those preciou...
The Game Developer’s Conference may have been just about a month ago, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to talk about some of the conference’s biggest stories while sipping mimosas. Join myself, David Edison, and special gue...
Nintendo’s Tomodachi Collection is a life simulation series only available in Japan. It can be best described as a mix between The Sims and Animal Crossing. Players control their Miis (which they can transfer over from their Wii consoles) as th...
When a big name publisher like EA holds an event to talk about LGBT issues in video games, it’s pretty obvious that places like Gaygamer.net are going to be there in full force. I mean, it’s what we do, after all. But what about other outlets that don’t typically have an LGBT focus?
Over on Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander has put together her notes on the EA Full Spectrum event, and it is definitely worth your time. She conducted a handful of interviews with various academics and developers for their thoughts on how the industry has dealt with (or more commonly, not dealt with) LGBT players. There’s also a few nuggets of insight about the indie-triple A development relationship and how genre doesn’t need to be the deciding factor for inclusion (as our own Chris Eades noted in his post event write up, RPGs don’t have to be the only kind of game that feature us).
“The passionate LGBT gaming community has felt unheard, like an afterthought at best, for so long that it’s unlikely that early steps taken by EA or any other publisher are going to immediately impress, or even satisfy everyone. And consumers are right to be skeptical any time a massive, for-profit company decides to start saying it’s genuinely concerned about the safety and happiness of alienated consumers.”
It’s definitely an interesting read on LGBT issues for a non-LGBT focused publication, which tend to have a more timid approach to these problems until someone else trailblazes the path a bit. Go check it out.
A hack for the original Legend of Zelda gives the titular character a chance to protect the world of Hyrule from the villainous Gannon and rescue the fair…dude, Link. Anyone interested in grabbing the swap patch can find information in the video.
And in the craziest turn of events, the character replacement has zero effect on how fun the game is! Who would have thought that an adventure game starring a woman could be so dynamic and interesting? (sarcasm)
Oh, and the creator of this hack has also put together a neat little page describing exactly how she did the work. It doesn’t look very difficult to swap out a few character frames. Maybe some dedicated gaygamers could put together a project of their own, eh?
It’s been a long time since we saw major media outlets blaming violent tragedies on video games. Oh, silly me, that’s right. It’s actually only been four days.
They’re calling him a deranged gamer. According to their police informant, it seems the shooter wanted to be the ‘best’ of the worst and rack up more kills than other mass shooters had managed before.
“This was the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an elementary school because he felt it was a point of least resistance, where he could rack up the greatest number of kills.”
What do we say to defend ourselves from this kind of attack on our medium? Or what about these quotes a bit later on?
“In the code of a gamer, even a deranged gamer like this little bastard, if somebody else kills you, they get your points. They believe that’s why he killed himself.”
“These guns, one of them an AR-15, in the hands of a violent, insane gamer. It was like porn to a rapist. They feed on it until they go out and say, enough of the video screen. Now I’m actually going to be a hunter.”
I’m honestly speechless. This violence debate seems primed to get a whole lot worse before it gets even a tiny bit better.
If you’re one of the millions of video game players like me who has never tried out Double Fine Production’s Psychonauts, you’ll soon have even less of an excuse to put it off. Double Fine announced today that not only are they sharing a booth space at PAX East with Capy Games, but they’re also smashing some of their best titles together into one big, giant, really ridiculously awesome steam bundle.
Alongside Psychonauts, the other six games in the bundle include Brutal Legend, Costume Quest, Stacking, Critter Crunch, Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, and Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP. All those games your more indie aligned friends have been talking about for years for the price of $34.99.
I know. My wallet suddenly got lighter, too.
The bundle will only be available from March 21st to March 29th, so make sure to snag it while you can. And if you’re heading out to PAX East, keep an eye out for the Double Fine/Capy booth. They’ll be selling a special boxed version of the bundle and a convention-exclusive shirt commemorating the super team-up. Their booth will be the one surrounded by the starstruck nerds wearing video game t-shirts and jorts. You can’t miss it.
14 year old Nathon Brooks has been charged with the attempted murder of his parents in Washington State after they…wait for it…grounded him from using electronics for two weeks. Even better, he later told police that he played violent video games constantly and blamed their influence for his actions.
“He said he quit playing violent video games because he thought they were making him more violent,” Moses Lake police Sgt. Mike Williams noted in the incident report. “I asked him how much he played video games, and he told me ‘24/7,’ up until he got his electronics taken away.”
According to police reports and surveillance footage from inside the house, Brooks pried open his father’s gun safe, and took the .22 caliber pistol into his parent’s bedroom. It was there that he shot his mother, and father multiple times in the head, but not before they were able to call 911.
A local hospital has discharged Brooks’ father and has his mother listed in stable condition. Fortunately, despite playing large amounts of violent games, Nathon was unable to kill his parents after multiple shots to the head. But that hasn’t stopped the blame from falling onto video games.
Not only have many mainstream media reports focused on the police quote above, they’ve also drawn pretty clear comparisons back to the gun violence debate going on in Washington D.C. and the recent massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Because that’s what they’ve been trained to do – focus on the scapegoat.
I used to think that I would never want kids. Why would I want the responsibility of keeping alive and training a little blob who’s completely reliant on me to put aside my life and devote years to their existence? And you can’t even battle them against other parents kids, which Pokemon has taught me is the main reason you have pets.
But stories like this have a way of changing my mind. See, there’s this guy, Mike Mika. He’s got a little girl that likes to play games with her father. She’s only three and not very good at them yet, but she plugs away anyway. One of her favorites is the arcade classic Donkey Kong, but she doesn’t understand why she can’t play as Pauline and save Mario from the gorilla.
Not one to let his kid go disappointed, Mika, a programmer and chief creative officer at Other Ocean Interactive, got to work rewriting the game with a reversed protagonist. The result was one happy little girl and one of the simplest, yet coolest mods to a classic title that we’ve seen in years.
Naturally, the dedicated misogynist jerks of the internet took it upon themselves to trash the mod and call the girl all sorts of offensive names, but let’s forget all that junk for once. Instead, let us focus on what is perhaps the most lovey, saccharine story we’ll get this year.
In case you’re wondering, no, Mika hasn’t released the mod and has no plans to do so. But I’d imagine someone is already hard at work recreating the simple character swap and putting it up as a download if those interested.
It finally happened. The most infamous video game related Kickstarter ever, Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, finally delivered. The first video in the series went up yesterday and can be seen above. I highly recommend it.
But not everyone was as happy as I to see this project finally come to life. The folks over at Gameranx have put together a brief look at some of the hateful, ignorant, misogynistic, and utterly baffling comments left across various outlets reporting on the video. It gets pretty intense, just as one might expect after the death and rape threats Anita Sarkeesian (the project creator) received shortly after the project was conceived.
That’s the point, though. Yes, it may seem like she’s going over a lot of well-worn territory and explaining for anyone who’s spent a bit of time with their eyes and ears open to feminism ideas, but not a lot of people have. To many people, these are new concepts. Yeah, they might know that Mario was at one time Jumpman trying to save Pauline from an obvious King Kong stand-in and roll their eyes at the worn-out idea of saving the fair maiden from the clutches of evil, but the implications and pervasive infections into how we think about women in our everyday lives is something that they probably missed before.
These videos are for the laymen, the nonacademic people that this message most urgently needs to reach. Professors can argue about the merits versus inadequacies of certain policy changes until they’re blue in the face. This is the kind of easy to understand, down to Earth discussion that we as a community so desperately need to have.
Expect another video every week for the next couple months.
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