arrr_matey

Yeah, because I'm really desperate to find these games!

I enjoy the fact that according to that Wikipedia entry, the only video game character to come from Vancouver is Damian Shade from Power Instincts, and he's also part of the first openly gay fighting team in gaming. Am I missing some stereotype about Canadians that the Japanese have?

Even though a lot of developers are based in Canada, I can't think of a single game with a Canadian setting or hero. Can anyone? And Canadian troops are never represented in any First World War or Second World War game... The closest I can come is one of the characters in Eternal Darkness is a Canadian soldier. One level of Sly 2: Band of Thieves takes place in Canada. And I remember hearing about some level in a Tom Clancy game that took place in Quebec, I think. Can anyone think of any? Why are there no Mountie games?

I'm playing Splinter Cell right now and I'm getting really freaking annoyed by cutscenes that can't be bypassed, even after you've seen them twelve times since you keep getting killed by freaking Georgian terrorists. Why? Why would any designer do this? Why not just make them skippable? It made me think that it seems like some designers just don't pay attention to what other games have innovated. There should be some kind of standard feature list that gets added to every time a game figures out something cool. Here's two that I think should be implemented in every game right away. 1) Always make cutscenes skippable *and* pausable. I hate having to choose between answering the phone and watching a crucial plot development scene. Why not make them pausable? Is that so hard to do technologically? 2) Every game, but especially stealth and horror games, should have a "look behind you" feature like the GTA games do. It's simple. On pS2 it would just be clicking L3 or R3 like in GTA. Most of the time, those buttons aren't used anyway. How hard can it be? Anybody got others?

I think it probably has a lot to do with the age demographics too. But there's not that many songs about killing US Marines. Even the 60s protesters didn't sing about that. Your point about plot in video games being pretty unimportant and how that's similar to the lyrics in music being ignorable is really interesting. It amazes me, though, that there's no outrage in the States over games where the government is the enemy, given the freakish political climate over there. I think it's because games largely slip under the radar of the usual pro-government freak-out types, which possibly makes it a really subversive art form. I mean, in Half-Life you spend a large amount of time slaughtering US Marines who are working on behalf of their government. Could you imagine the uproar if a James Bond movie (which, arguably, has as little interest in a good plot as a video game) featured the US military as the bad guy. And not a corrupt branch of the military, as is usual in movies (like X-Men, say), but the entire military acting on behalf of its government. I just don't think that movie would ever get made, but video games like that do all the time and are best-sellers (Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid 2).

I've just been playing Rise to Honor and some of the security guards in the really annoying and pointless stealth missions scratch their butt when they stand still. A yoyo would be pretty damn funny. Makes me think of the Goonies game for NES. Man, I loved that game, but I could never beat it.

Man, these two laws rank you right up there with Einstein and Newton. That's such an awesome idea. I heard in the new GTA game, your character will get fat unless you exercise, making him run slower and stuff. They should totally implement a piss-your-pants mode!

Yeah, I guess it's the singleplayer that makes me yawn. I don't know. Blowing people into pieces *is* pretty fun. It's just that I'd rather play a cutting-edge technology game if I'm going to blow people to pieces, not a ten-year-old game with no story.

Hang on... Mario? Please explain... And yeah, I realise that the list may be a bit obvious, but there's lots of games that don't have this theme--Silent Hill, Syberia, Doom, Police Quest, etc. I'm talking games where you actually are supposed to kill members of the American military. I'm interested because it seems like video games are the only mainstream entertainment where normal US soldiers can be portrayed as the villains. I don't see that in many Jerry Bruckheimer movies or Tom Clancy novels. Not that I'd watch or read either if I could avoid it.

Does anyone play Doom or Doom 2 anymore? I know everyone's talking about how great Doom 3 is going to be, and I have fond memories of the original Doom, but I tried playing it the other day and it was boring as hell. Same with Quake. It made me wonder why I ever got addicted to it in the first place. Is this going to happen to Half-Life when Half-Life 2 comes out? Or is it just because Doom had absolutely nothing going for it at the time of its release except its graphics? Doom has no redeeming qualities now that technology has surpassed it. Compare to, say, Monkey Island where the technology is totally dated, but the game is still totally playable.

In light of a couple of other threads, I'm trying to come up with a list of games where the government is portrayed as the enemy and you actually get to kill government agents. Grand THeft Auto would qualify since you get to kill police officers, but they're not really presented as "bad guys" so much. I'm thinking more along the lines of Half-Life where you get to kill US Marines not just for fun (though it is fun) but because they're the "bad guys" (i.e., they're killing innocent scientists). Red Dead Revolver is another--the US troops are the villains. Beyond Good and Evil is kind of one--the government cannot be trusted. Resident Evil maybe is one--with a corporation and the government in evil cahoots. Is this a video game trend or am I connecting random dots?

Yeah, yeah... I think that's it. I looked it up and sure enough... here's the synopsis from the website: "The Race War has begun. Your skin is your uniform in this battle for the survival of your kind. The White Race depends on you to secure its existence. Your peoples enemies surround you in a sea of decay and filth that they have brought to your once clean and White nation." http://resistance.com/ethniccleansing/

Has anyone else played Red Dead Revolver? Anyone think it's mildly controversial that you get to play as a Mexican soldier fighting against the corrupt and evil American army at one point? I thought that was pretty bold. Really rubs it in the face of those makers of that crapfest Alamo propaganda-movie.

There's a computer game my girlfriend used to play called Ghost Master. It's like a strategy kind of game, where you're given a map--say, a sorority house--and you have to choose the best ghosts to scare all the college girls out. It's pretty funny. So, I guess in that regard it's more like comedy-horror, not survival-horror. They should have let people play as zombies for the entire game in Resident Evil Outbreak multiplayer. Not just for two seconds after you die, or whatever. I agree with you though, the concept of an inverted survival-horror would be quite fun.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/06/13/news_6100558.html This is an interesting article by GameSpot about whether high-res realism in graphics makes for a better game. I like this part at the end: "Wright encouraged the audience to recall that "a level of physical abstraction invites the use of imagination" and to put that knowledge to good use, in tandem with the newfound tools of computer graphics technology."