Monday, March 25, 2013
December’s school shooting in Newtown, Conn., reopened the debate on whether violent video games lead to violence in real life. Tell us if you believe such games have a real-world impact.
In the wake of December’s Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., one of the habits of alleged shooter Adam Lanza came to light. The 20-year-old reportedly owned “thousands of dollars worth of violent video games,” MailOnline reported, adding that he was believed to have played games from the Call of Duty series “for hours on end.” The games are classified as “shooters” that have players using weapons against human or computer-controlled characters. Weeks after the shooting, the White House “pressed start” on talks with video game industry representatives, as Vice President Joe Biden took the lead to find legislative remedies to problems associated with gun violence. Among those taking aim at the games has been The …
Sunday, June 3, 2012
The hit series makes a huge comeback with this great installment.
They say New York is the city that never sleeps. That’s probably because it can’t seem to go more than a few days without an apocalyptic disaster dropping in to ruin everyone’s week. Between giant monsters, sweeping plagues, foreign invasions, alien invasions and attempts at domination by supervillains it’s a wonder that the citizens of said city even bat an eye anymore. So here we have Prototype 2, a game about an apocalyptic disaster in New York City. This particular series has decided to go the way of sweeping plague, but it threw in a few superhero elements as well (although the protagonists are anything but heroes; more on that later). Plot and Characters In case you’re an idiot, Prototype 2 is the sequel to the hit game Prototype …
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Worse than a city full of raccoons.
Pre-rant clarification: I am not a Resident Evil fan. I’ve actually never played one before this because I never owned an original Playstation and even when I had a PS2 I quickly traded it in for an Xbox at the persuasion of a friend. The first one to become available on the 360 was Resident Evil IV, and I didn’t see the point of playing the fourth installment (or rather something like the fifteenth if you count all the remakes and spinoffs and side stories and crap). So anyway, yeah, I’m not a fan or even a vet. It probably stands to reason, then, that I have no right to critique the latest installment in the series without knowing anything about the previous titles. But, I’m going to do it anyway. Like I said, I know nothing about the…
Monday, March 26, 2012
A look at five games that set the bar higher for the entire industry.
This week I’m not going to talk about a particular game. I’d like to venture into something a bit more broad and important. I’d like to talk about games which made me marvel at the direction the industry is headed. So instead of a review, I’d like to take a quick look back at some of my favorite games over the past several years. 5. Saints Row II While we’re all about Saints Row the Third nowadays, it’s worth remembering where that drunk, foul-mouthed, psychotic blob of whacky fun that didn’t make the slightest bit of sense got its roots, and that was with its predecessor, Saint’s Row II. Why not the first installment, you might ask? Well, it was alright, but that one was played very straight. It was a gangster game; you know, the kind …
Sunday, March 11, 2012
You've probably played it, but read this anyway.
I know, I know, it’s old news. But you know what? They’re still updating this game over at Mojang and there’s still talk of a console release, so I’m going with it. That and I still need some time to do Mass Effect 3. For those of you who are not aware (although I’m not sure how you couldn’t be at this point), Minecraft is an indie game made by the Swedish company Mojang, which was founded in 2009 by one Markus Persson. Since then, it has gone on to become one of the most popular Indie Games of all time, so much so that it was selected to be featured at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “The Art of Video Games” exhibit in Washington. So, just what is all the fuss about? Well, let’s take a look. Plot and Characters None. You play a …
Sunday, March 4, 2012
This week is an example of extremely exaggerated extreme sports.
I don't think I can reasonably claim to be the extreme sporting type. When I was a kid I had a skateboard that my cousins and I would use to luge down my parents’ driveway, but at present the most extreme activity I partake in is driving a few miles over the speed limit. It’s not that I don’t like extreme sports; I watch the Winter Olympics and the X-Games most years. It’s just that I’ve never been one for putting life and limb on the line for cheap thrills. A rollercoaster serves that purpose well enough for me, or indeed playing a game where I’m allowed to simulate some fool putting his life on the line etc. So if you haven’t heard or guessed at this point, SSX is a game about extreme sports. More specifically, it’s about extreme …
Sunday, February 19, 2012
A first-person shooter with an interesting twist.
Some of you may be thinking, "What is The Darkness?" Well, by most standards the darkness is what you're plunged into when you turn the lights out. In terms of this critique, however, it's the name of a video game series available for the PC, Xbox 360 and the PS3, based on a comic book I've never read nor heard of before I picked up The Darkness II from Redbox. Before I begin this week's rant, let me make something clear: I didn't play the first game, mostly because I had heard almost nothing about it; and two, the little bit that I did hear about it was pretty negative. So just keep in mind that I'm examining this game from an everyman's perspective, not from that of a fan or even someone who's familiar with the series in any way. No, I…
Sunday, February 12, 2012
A free online series that's better than a lot of mainstream titles.
This is a new one for me. So far I’ve done mainstream games, Arcade Market games, and iPhone games. I actually considered doing another spiel about a few more smartphone games this week, but I think I’ll allow some more space to gather between it and my last one. Nay, this week I shall explore what I believe to be the most underappreciated medium of modern gaming: free online games. If you don’t know, there are literally thousands of simple games available for free. All they take is a Google search. My personal recommendation: ArmorGames.com. Funnily enough, game developers have managed to swindle people into paying to have them on their smart phones (guilty). Example: the casual gaming phenomenon known Angry Birds, which to date has …
Sunday, February 5, 2012
It's time to chop chop, slash slash, grind grind.
I think I’ve made it pretty clear up to this point that I don’t trot around in public in an “I heart First-Person Shooters” T-shirt. That’s not to say that I hate them, though. They’re fine, it’s just that there are way too many of them out there and not even close to enough variety between them to excuse the monstrous tidal wave of them clogging up the market. In light of my disappointment in recent shooters, I’ve been keeping away from shooters for the past few weeks. I think I’ll keep that up this week; instead of shooty-explody, I’m going with hacky-slashy with Soul Calibur V, a game about a bunch of anime characters whacking each other with what appear to be swords but must not be considering they can’t cut anything and only knock …
Sunday, January 29, 2012
A look at three iPhone games that you might have missed.
All of my columns so far have been geared towards the hardcore demographic of the gaming community; people like me who are willing (if not necessarily eager) to pay $60 for a new game. Having spent many a recent night over the past few weeks begrudgingly playing Just Dance 3 for the Wii with my college buddies, I've realized that I must work towards dropping my bigotry against motion sensor gaming and learn to embrace that cesspool of repetitive casual games that appeal to bored housewives and college students who have no interest in games. Yeah, my prejudice is going to take some time to get over. Still, to be fair, mainstream gaming has become a cesspool of repetitive, testosterone-overloaded, manly-man shooters that appeal to anxious …
Thomas E. Andre, MA, NCC, LAPC
9:24 am on Thursday, March 28, 2013
Certainly playing these types of games either at a very young age (or even an older age) can lend itself to some correlated issues, at least, with violence, planning, strategy, use of weapons, desensitization, etc... The military uses these types of games for many similar training related reasons. There are plenty of people who engage in these games and never go onto replicating scenarios in … more ›