Trends

I remember one time I was at a friend's house, and we played Halo 2 online. We joined a custom game where they were playing by rules they made up. It was called "Zombie". I don't know if it started there, or was carried over from a different game. It was based on honour rules. If you died by the enemy's hand, you had to manually switch over to the enemy's team, and now must face your former comrades. Like how after you've been bitten by a zombie, you become a part of the same mindless horde that took you down.

People liked this enough for it to be a built-in game mode in Perfect Dark Zero and Halo 3. No more having to go in and change teams by hand.

Then Gears of War 2 had the "Horde" mode, where victory is impossible and the only real goal is to see how long you can last against waves of increasingly dangerous opposition. The end is inevitable, the goal being to see how long you can cheat death. People liked this enough, so Left 4 Dead put in "Survival" mode, and Halo gave us "Firefight".

Then games like Dark Void gave us Jetpacks(although they were around during the Duke Nukem and Tribes times, they were out of vogue until recently.) We liked those, so now they're back apparently.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

One of the folks behind "Amnesia: The Dark Descent" explains the perilous road from pitching an idea to selling a completed product. He mentions Super Mario 64 as an inspiration for his horror project. Yeah.

We tend to take releases for granted, and it's a tiny miracle that any video game that isn't a guaranteed thing like Halo or Mario gets released, but Thomas Grip explains just what a nail-biting photo-finish some games turn out to be. These guys were on the precipice of closing up shop more than once, and were saved seemingly only by the occasional Steam sale. Because of this, they were able to release a game that was about atmosphere and dread instead of killstreaks.

It also means we got videos like this.

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~A.H.

Movie Bob: Dark Matter

There are a few people whose opinions I don't always agree with, but who otherwise represent stable pillars in a sea of undulating childishness. People who would rather wait a while to let their thoughts take form, instead of racing to be the first to say something stupid. People that I sometimes look to for guidance on certain issues I feel unprepared to deal with. People whose opinions are more valuable than mine. People like Roger Ebert, Shamus Young and Pitchfork. And people like Bob Chipman.

So what happened to Bob?

Extra Credits: A Shoulder To Lean On

Allison Theus, the artist for the show Extra Credits needs shoulder surgery badly. James Portnow, the writer of the three-pronged weekly effort put up a place to give donations. Because her insurance wouldn't cover it under a "pre-existing condition", they needed about $15,000. As of this writing, they have...

Wait WHAT???

Robosexual

I'll either have an Operation Rainfall post or an Extra Credits-related post up tomorrow. Until then, I direct your attention to this review of "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" by Roger Ebert.

Speaking as a guy who has spent way too much time thinking about a big-budget adaptation of the Mega Man X video game series re-imagined as an existentialist thought exercise about the capacity for super-intelligent machines to think or feel, this review seemed like kind of a downer. Not because I disagree, but because I think the gulf between a theoretical advanced android and a human person might not be so vast as we'd like to think. And if that did turn out to be true, then a review like Ebert's, whether he intended it or not, says more about humanity than it does about machines.

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~A.H.

Play For Japan

Farting penis monster for charity.

No, seriously. This was going to be a post on Operation Rainfall until I saw that. Somebody thought that was a good idea for an album cover for music that's supposed to(somehow) help Japan after it's devastating hat-trick. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like the kind of thing people would look at, and then pay Godzilla to wreck Japan even more, just to prevent art like this from happening again. Which seems like the opposite intention for disaster relief, doesn't it?

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~A.H.

Classic Friday: "We Summon Rock"

Square-Enix is releasing a rhythm-based music game based on music from the Final Fantasy franchise. Sounds interesting to me, since I'm a huge Nobuo Uematsu dork. Today's Friday, Classic was written before the keytar was added to these games, and before the Rock Band/Guitar Hero plastic instrument franchise fad died off(or was it murdered?). That said, I still prefer my idea: