Tag Archives: video games

Mystery Room: A Culture War Report

I’m actually being half-serious when I say that today’s post very well could have been “Re: Re: Do Western Christians Want Martyrs?”. It’s an extremely relevant topic, and I hope that you’ll take the time to read what Kat had to say, as well as Gordon’s response. No, instead what I have for all of you is another one of my rarely shared new life experiences, this time being the hour and a half I spent on Wednesday night trying to escape a series of dark locked rooms.

Now apparently this sort of thing is, and has been, all the rage according to a friend of mine, but the very concept was extremely foreign to me. Wikipedia’s entry for it is titled “Real-life Room Escape”, and describes it as being:

“a type of puzzle simulation games in which you are locked in a room with other participants and have to use elements of the room to solve a series of puzzles, find clues, and escape the room within a set time limit.”

It also mentions the fact that their existence stems directly from online video games, which is honestly the coolest thing. Whereas most video games are based on real life activities [stealing cars, shooting ethnically ambiguous terrorists,
running your own farm, etc.], this is an example of an activity that mimicks a video game. That is, and realize I don’t use this word lightly, neat. It’s super neat.

I should probably get to what my time with it was actually like, though. To help prime your expectations a little bit, the course my friends and I went through was titled “Haunted Hospital”.

Zombie nurses not included.

Continue reading

The Real Reason Assassin’s Creed Unity Has No Female Playable Characters

I don’t know a lot about video games nowadays, but I do know one thing: I love the Assassin’s Creed franchise. This may lie entirely in my simple love for stabbing and vaguely historically accurate settings, but I’m down with what they’ve got going on. In fact, I got thoroughly hyped for whatever game developer Ubisoft’s announcement was going to be at this year’s E3 without knowing almost anything about it.

Here’s the trailer they released:

The following tumblr post more or less sums up my reaction [after I finished gawking at the assassinations, of course]:

Continue reading

Fame Day: Alice and Kev

If you’ve been reading this feature for some time you’ll know that we typically laud things for being good and then some. Tom Morello is a great musician, sure, but he’s also an activist of the highest caliberIf I Were You is a podcast featuring a very funny internet duo, but it also has them tearing terrible people a new one. Today’s installment is a 60-part story that was created using the video game The Sims 3.

goodjobkev

It’s also a highly successful attempt at translating a game’s playthrough into a compelling narrative that discusses the realities of poverty. That may have been a lot to take in, I realize.

Alice and Kev was created by Robin Burkinshaw, a games design student at the time, in mid-2009. He describes the outset of this venture as starting out relatively simply:

“This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any of the game’s unrealistically easy cash routes. It was inspired by the old ‘poverty challenge’ idea from players of The Sims 2, but it turned out to be a lot more interesting with The Sims 3′s new living neighborhood features.”

Continue reading

A Rock in a Hard Place: Dustin Browder’s Interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I am clearly a guy who likes Blizzard games, if my opinion about certain other company’s products and their art direction is any indicationStarCraft II in particular was a game I began craving ever since its announcement in 2007. I waited a long time, people, and as those three long years passed I became fairly acquainted with Dustin Browder, the title’s Game Director.

Mr. Browder is a man who had some pretty positive opinions about destructible rocks, which the gaming community has had a fair amount of fun with. The guy’s got a sense of humour, too, if his battle.net moniker is any indication, and his enthusiasm for the whole scene is well-supported by how badly he wants people to agree with him. Nobody’s perfect, though, and the following exchange occurred over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun during an interview last week over the upcoming Blizzard game Heroes of the Storm: Continue reading

Fame Day: Sir Patrick Stewart

There are just so many reasons to love Sir Patrick Stewart.

He gets into the Halloween spirit, for one.

Continue reading

A Culture War Report: The 2013 StarCraft II WCS Finals

The 2013 StarCraft II World Championship Series Finals. How exactly does one sum up an eight hour event, one that largely consisted of staring at two South Koreans waging war against each other with virtual armies?

It was, in a word, great.

Yours truly opted to stand behind the VIP seats for the better part of the event. My legs were killing me.

A friend and I arrived at the Toronto Congress Centre a few minutes before 1:00 PM, and stepped into an immense room that was already largely full. There had to be at least 1,500 people there when we arrived, and hundreds more would wander in as things began. Everyone was concentrated either on the stage, if they had good seats, or five four-foot-wide screens on the left and right, or the huge screen you saw upon entering the venue, in front of which were seats for VIP members only. Continue reading