Rock Band nails it

It's official. Rock Band will include a master recording of this song:



That's got to be one of the five best choices they could have made.

I don't usually like to talk about games before the review goes up

If you have a 360, you should get BioShock.

If you don't have a 360, you should get one.

Fun with the freelance police

It's good to have Sam and Max back.

Why I won't download the BioShock demo

All I needed to hear was the invocation of System Shock 2, way back when BioShock was announced, to know that I didn't need to hear anything else. I've been under a self-imposed news blackout since then, and for the most part it's succeeded. I've seen a couple of screenshots, I know what a Big Daddy is, and I skimmed a Gamers with Jobs article about the game. That's it. I still don't know what the plot is, or what the game mechanics are like (well, okay -- I know it's an FPS).

Now that we're only a week away from the actual release, I figure there's no reason to try the demo. How is that different from screenshots or trailers? I'm told it's an "edited" version of the beginning of the game. If BioShock actually has the complex narrative and philosophical overtones that I'm expecting, then the demo won't shed light on any of that. It's a commercial, that's all. No thanks. I can wait.

The Wii doesn't seem like a well-made machine

The Xbox 360 gets all the bad press, but I've encountered a couple of problems with the Wii now that make me wonder if Nintendo's cost-cutting measures didn't go too far. First there's the overheating problem with Connect24. Apparently if you leave it running for a long time -- months, say -- without ever actually powering the system fully, it can overheat and damage some of the hardware. Well, I didn't turn it on from April until July, and then when I did I was getting some graphical artifacting. So there's that. And just now, my B button got stuck in the down position and I'm not sure how to fix it. This is going to render just about everything unplayable.

In the meantime, my 360 works just fine!

Ask a ninja

Q. Does Tenchu Z suck?

A. Yes.

Resident Evil 5 and racism

Okay, I'm going to wade in here. This may end up being a somewhat disjointed post, but I've been following the meme around the blogosphere and the story is the same anywhere it goes. As far as I can tell, the whole thing started with a post by Bonnie Ruberg on VillageVoice.com entitled "Resident Evil 5: White Man Shoots Black Zombies." It's a pretty interesting take -- in particular, Ruberg suggests that the parasites or T-virus of Resident Evil mythology could be playing out here as an allegory to the AIDS situation in Africa. That post was linked to by a blog called "Black Looks," which was then picked up on Kotaku. The Kotaku post currently has 671 comments and is still going strong.

That's the background. What's fascinating to me is the response from commenters. Readers of the Voice, Kotaku, and Black Looks are all united in their firm convictions that Resident Evil 5 is not racist. Most responses tend to fall in one or more of the following categories:

• The enemies in Resident Evil 4 were white, so why wasn't anyone upset about that?


• Lighten up, it's only a game.


• There's no such thing as racism anymore;


• But if there is, it's black people who are racists.


• Women who complain about racism are racists themselves, or need to get laid.


• It's so hard to be white these days.
  

I would back up each of those points with actual quotes, but it's too depressing to keep wading into those swamps. Seriously, just scan the Kotaku thread. I'm not cherry-picking here. The latent racism getting stirred up is really something to behold. Hardly anybody seems to see the contradiction.

Certainly, I didn't come away from the Resident Evil 5 trailer thinking it was racist. That's because I had the benefit of knowing the context. If you had to sum up the entire series in one sentence, a good one would be: "A powerful organization infects an innocent group of people with a virus that turns them into monsters." That's an over-simplification, but it's basically accurate across every Resident Evil game.

In particular, the fifth installment seems to borrow most heavily from Resident Evil 4. At the end of RE4, there's a short series of stills that shows the happy villagers going about their lives until the arrival of Lord Saddler. It is the first time we are meant to feel pity for them. It doesn't really make up for having mowed down about a thousand of them over the course of the game, but it does show that they are victims in their own way. I feel confident in predicting that the premise of RE5 will be much the same, and that before the game is over you'll find that Umbrella Corp. has been victimizing these people because they thought they could get away with it.

This is, of course, another example of video games wanting to have it both ways: you get the adrenaline-fueled thrill of combat and kill a ton of people, but it's okay because you actually saved all the people in the town afterward. RE4 isn't quite so explicit in that regard, but it's true that video games tend to resort to this kind of fascist mindset. Pick your cliché: "might makes right," "burn the village to save it," and so on.

It's the same across way too many games, and publishers keep getting to duck responsibility because they're only video games. It's ironic that people want Roger Ebert to take games as seriously as he takes movies, when they themselves do not take games as seriously as Roger Ebert takes movies. Read Ebert's review of Dirty Harry and try to imagine any video game reviewer on the face of the planet subjecting a game to that level of scrutiny. Did people tell Roger Ebert he was being overly sensitive? That he should relax and just enjoy the movie? No, they gave him a fucking Pulitzer Prize. If you agree that games should be part of the cultural conversation -- and I do -- then you don't get to draw up a list of exemptions every time somebody says something you don't like.

It's easy to see why someone unfamiliar with the Resident Evil canon would be taken aback by the trailer. What you see are mobs of frenzied black people swarming the good-looking, militaristic, and, oh yeah, white protagonist. Take that at face value. The solution, of course, would be to educate people who express concerns about what the series is really all about. It may not totally change their minds, but at least they might see your point of view.

Here's what I don't think works: telling someone that they're the racist, or that they need to lighten up. Or extrapolating one person's opinion to be the shared opinion of every black person in the world. Or saying that talking about race in games is distracting attention from the real issues. Or pretending that there's no such thing as racism. Anyone who's ever spent five minutes on Xbox Live is all too aware that racism in the gaming community is a legitimate issue (it's also a major reason why I spend as little time on XBL as possible).

In fact, this entire ugly episode has made it more clear than ever that games really are a mirror to our culture. A few comments about a game that doesn't come out for two years has sparked an extremely revealing conversation. There's no way of knowing to what degree the commentariat represents the prevailing attitude of gamers in general. Even so, the latent hatred and resentment that's been unleashed is really something to see. Only now it's cloaked in a sense of white victimhood. Racism hasn't really gone anywhere; it's just gotten better at hiding.

One can only hope that the light is what kills it.

Walter Raleigh Championship

The headline to this post is a shout-out to exactly one reader. Anyway, this week's review is of DiRT, a decent enough rally racing game that served to make me realize that I could never play another racing game again and I'd be okay with that. Okay, Burnout sequels excepted.

I am considering whether to weigh in on the Resident Evil 5 brouhaha. I suppose it is time for my semi-annual multi-thousand word rant, right?

The Heavenly Sword demo is weak

Powerful weak. I'm not sure how it could have been an entire gigabyte, because there's nothing to it. A brief, God of War-like button-pushing sequence, and then two, er, God of War-like melee battles. Then it just stops. Total play time is probably three minutes. The combat seemed like pure button mashing, although certainly it's hard to experiment in the brief time the demo gives you. All in all, I don't know why they bothered releasing this. Isn't the point of a demo to get people excited about a game?

Required viewing

The Resident Evil 5 trailer is up at gametrailers.com. I suppose the inevitable strike against it is that the gameplay doesn't look any different from RE4, and even though that's not a bad thing in itself, you always hope for a big leap forward. Then again, it took several years for the original Resident Evil style to get stale (I didn't get tired of it until Zero, which was the last one before RE4). I can certainly take another game in the vein of RE4.

Additionally, I greatly enjoyed the unexpected face punch in this trailer, and I can only hope that I will get to do plenty of face punching once I'm finally playing the game.

In 2009.

Damn it.

Teh best game EVAR

Still Resident Evil 4.

Miyamoto gets it right

In an interview with Wired's Chris Kohler, Shigeru Miyamoto has a lot to say about Nintendo's upcoming projects. The conversation drifted to video games' place in the public consciousness, and I think what Miyamoto had to say was wise:

Up until now, the biggest question in society about video games has been what to do about violent games. But it's almost like society in general considers video games to be something of a nuisance, that they want to toss into the garbage can. And so really what we feel is that rather than answering the question of what to do about violence in video games, we can, through the games that we create, once again make video games a topic of popular discussion and popular culture, then gradually you're going to see society come to understand video games better and understand what they're all about. At that point, once that understanding is there, people will become able to address their concerns about violent video games from a position of understanding rather than a position of being on the outside looking in.

And so I think that Nintendo's role in that is not to answer the question of what to do about violence in video games, but to expand the overall market in an effort to expand people's understanding of video games.

People who don't play games don't interpret them as anything but loud noises. I'm not fully on board with everything Nintendo's done on the Wii so far, but if developers want to stop feeling like concerned parents are out to get them, maybe the solution is just to make better games.

What a horrifying photo

I honestly don't remember seeing a Darkling sawing off a guy's head as I was playing through The Darkness. It would seem to undercut my thesis that the game had a moving, well-told story.

Happy Fourth of July

Let's celebrate by casting off the bonds of another British tyrant.

Coming next week: A surprisingly awesome game!

Vegas, baby

Rainbow Six: Vegas is a very good game.

Manhunt 2: The Clusterf**k

By now you've probably heard what's happening with Rockstar's Manhunt 2. Briefly: After the ESRB tagged it with the dreaded Adults Only rating, Nintendo and Sony both announced that they would not allow the game to be released for the Wii and the PlayStation 2. Even if they had, major chains like Wal Mart and Target wouldn't have carried it anyway. This raises all sorts of interesting issues, none of which I plan to illuminate in any meaningful way here. Just a few thoughts on the matter.

As distasteful as it seems to make this into a free speech issue, in a sense that's what it is. Nobody's going to prison or anything, so let's not act as though the constitution is under attack. But what's happening here is that an authority is placing a barrier between a producer of ideas and consumers of ideas. In the guise of protecting the children from pernicious influences like violent video games, the console makers and retailers are also making the decision for me about what I can and can't play. I don't know how much I wanted to play Manhunt 2. I never even played the first one. What bothers me is that the decision was taken out of my hands. Now I really want to play it.

The other thing I find striking has to do with the way the big box stores tend to sell games. Have you ever tried to purchase a game at Target or Wal Mart? They keep all of them -- from E-rated games on up -- locked inside display cases. It's nearly impossible to find somebody to open the case and sell you a damn game in the first place, no matter what it's rated. I'm surprised that that's not good enough. As a corollary, I'm not sure about Target, but I know Wal Mart sells guns. I'm not interested in arguing about which is more dangerous, a hunting rifle or a video game that lets you rip off somebody's testicles with a pair of pliers. The salient point of the comparison is this: We're trusting Wal Mart to be vigilant enough to sell firearms only to responsible adults, but we don't trust them to keep video games out of kids' hands. That sounds like the store's problem -- not the publisher's.

With all that said, I certainly understand where the stores are coming from. Having worked at a video store, I know the kind of hellfire angry parents can rain down upon well-intentioned but oblivious retailers. They can choose to sell or not sell anything they want, and there's absolutely no reason for them to shed a tear for the video game publisher. And if Nintendo and Sony want to dictate what sort of content can appear on their platforms, I suppose that's their right too. (I'm not sure what the legal basis is for that, though -- clearly, some higher up at Rockstar/Take-Two signed something to that effect. Otherwise, why not go for the "Unrated and Totally Out of Control!" release?) I also find it a little hard to believe that the AO rating took Rockstar by surprise. They had to know what was coming, but that in itself doesn't mean they shouldn't have tried.

Still, something just doesn't seem right about the way it all went down. I'll live without playing Manhunt 2, if that's what it comes to. I just wish I could have chosen not to play it.

Shadowrun

Shadowrun is an interesting game. Not that it feels unfinished or anything, but as you play it you can almost sense it struggling to come into its own. I think the direction the community takes over the next couple of months will ultimately make or break the game. I also think it would be more fun if I had a regular team to play with; alas, the days of Clan 437 are long past.

Do I just not like video games anymore?

Is that the problem? Everybody freaking loves Forza Motorsport 2. To me, a realistic driving sim is one of the last things I want from a game. Maybe we're growing apart, the Xbox and me.

Red faction

Wired has a neat article on Soviet arcade games. The Soviet Union didn't import any foreign games, obviously, so the article says that Russian developers created about 70 games between the late 70s and early 90s. Could this be why the USSR ultimately collapsed? I don't know what else you can point to. You can take away people's freedom and they'll live with it, but they won't live with crappy games.

David Jaffe is going to murder me

Under their new editor, the Phoenix has taken to putting punchier heds and subheds on my reviews, such as this Calling All Cars! review. That's all well and good, but I think in this case it might get me punched in the nose if Dave Jaffe sees it.