Author Archive

When Big Daddies Cry Rape


This Penny Arcade strip, while aimed at the current Big Evil Boss of the gaming industry, accurately sums up my feelings about the new Bioshock game that Irrational have just announced. Bioshock started out as a spiritual successor to one of the most claustrophobic, terrifying, brilliantly written FPS/RPG hybrids in PC gaming. Yes, it had to come out on 360 to be financially viable. Yes, it pulled back from showing the consequences of the most important moral action in the game. But it was a solid, well put-together shooter, with well written characters and, until the finale, an interesting antagonist.

And it should have stopped there.

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2010
08/13
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CATEGORY
Gaming Observations
10 comments

A Terrifying, Dystopian, Communist Future


Yeah, that’s right. That’s what PC gaming is heading for.

Okay, I’m kidding, but let me make it clear where that joke is coming from. The US health reforms that are still slowly being pushed through to American citizens have been widely derided by the far right, Glenn Beck and Tea Party types, as socialism or communism because, according to them, it’s poor people being given stuff for free, which is evil and dirty and NOT THE AMERICAN WAY. That’s ridiculous, of course, the money for those reforms is being taken from other taxes (at which point those same right-wingers cry “TAX AND SPEND! TAX AND SPEND!” until you remind them most taxes are at their lowest for 40 years in America…). And the same thing is happening with a fairly hefty chunk of PC gaming right now: from “free to play” games with optional buy in extras, to the giving away of freebies in order to entice people on to your service. Poor people (you lot) being given stuff! For free! But, uh, if you want to get anywhere, or validate your use of this service for more than one game, you’ll need to buy this, this, this, and this…

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2010
07/16
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CATEGORY
Gaming Observations
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They Just Don’t Tell ‘Em Right Anymore.


I uninstalled Bioshock 2 today. I haven’t finished it, I got roughly (if the list of story-related achievements on GFWL is anything to go by) 65/70% of the way through. Why did I uninstall it? Because I was bored. Not with sticking my massive drill through another poor splicer, or with launching fire bombs and telekinetically manipulated boulders at Brute Splicers and Big Daddies, no, that was all well and fine: I was bored with the plot.

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2010
07/07
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Gaming Observations
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17 comments

Steam Sale: Day 10


A new round of summer sales on Steam, although, depressingly, most of today’s offerings fall under “buy elsewhere cheaper” or “buy the much shinier sequel”. Perhaps we’ve just been spoiled by the excellent one-day offers from the last few days. Ho hum. I’m sure there’ll be some more, equally wonderful offerings soonish.

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2010
07/03
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CATEGORY
Cheap Games
Steam Sale 24/06 - 04/07
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1 comment

Video Game Violence – Do We Even Need A Debate?


This article, combined with Leigh Alexander’s comments on it, have provoked this post. The article is factually fine – some children are impressionable, and watching Modern Warfare 2’s sanitised, Hollywood War On Terror is, inevitably, going to create a small – and I cannot stress this enough, a very small – proportion of people who are going to look at it, think “Wow, this is awesome!” and walk into their local gun store the next day to load up.

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2010
06/25
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CATEGORY
Gaming Observations
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8 comments

The Other E3 Post


You’re right, I’m not going to forgive you for that. My views on E3 are well documented (well, Tweeted), but much like car crashes, you do end up slowing down to take a look, even if only through the eyes of the people who have actually dragged themselves out there to excitedly tweet about all the shows they’re going to that you’re not.

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2010
06/18
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Gaming Observations
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6 comments

Right. Yes. Hello? Hello.


So, as the utterly nonsensical,  grammatical minefield of a title may or may not inform you, this is not DrugCrazed. Do not adjust your routers, or put your fist through your monitors in anger: all will be well, droogs. I am James Greene, a.k.a. Kid A, one-time writer of Sixty FPS or Bust – another gaming blog, which was recently shut down by an unscrupulous dog’s gonad of a man named Jochen Klobe. (Am I allowed to write that? I bloody hope so.)

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2010
06/08
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Blog News
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3 comments