Evening Reading
by Garnett Lee, Jan 25, 2011 5:00pm PSTOn Monday a bombing at Moscow's busiest airport took 35 lives and injured 110 more sending shockwaves through the international community. Listening to BBC World Services on the ride to work this morning I heard Russian President Dmitry Medvedev blasting security at the airport as "chaos" and blaming the tragedy on that.
But as proof I guess of how westernized Russia has become, the government financed Russia Today has pointed the finger at video games (seen on The New York Times). If you played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 you probably know where this is headed. In it, the infamous 'No Russian' level depicted terrorists walking through an airport terminal wantonly gunning down everyone in sight.
Forget the fact that it's fiction and the implication blaming this particular sort of fiction would create for the six seasons of 24 alone. The part that disturbs me the most is how these tragic, gut-wrenching events get sensationalized like this for the sake of generating news. It essentially turns the awful events into entertainment as if they were nothing more than the plot of a TV show, movie, or game. But they aren't. Real people lost their lives; real families were torn apart.
We're long past the grace period for pulling this sort of nonsense. Stop exploiting these situations to create news drama. Much as we might want to rationalize things and have them fit into our perceptions of what makes sense, the raw truth of it has to be faced. Bad people did bad things. And they didn't train with video games. They trained with real guns and bombs.
And now, highlights from today's video game news on the Shack:
Battlefield 4 producer says single-player should feel 'autonomous'
Indie dev to Microsoft: Be more like Sony on self-publishing
Call of Duty: Ghosts video compares graphics to Modern Warfare 3
Backward compatability is 'backwards' strategy, says Microsoft
Mortal Kombat 'Komplete' coming to PC
Xbox One rumors: confirmations and open questions
EA 'building titles for the Nintendo console'
Best of PSN collection coming in June for $40
Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon announced for PC and iOS
Demon Hunter is most popular Diablo 3 class, and other infographic stats



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It's Gears of War in first person, with terrible writing/voice acting (intentionally, I guess, but that doesn't make it any more tolerable). I bet Marcus Fenix would find it hilarious, but I kind of hated the game by the time the video explaining the game was over, HAR HAR.
While it's possible to be sort of creative, In practice, most of the combat boils down to grapple -> shoot/kick -> repeat, and for a game where the combat looks very active on video, it feels pretty slow when you're actually playing it.
It's not frantic like Painkiller. Were it not for PCF's logo, I would never have guessed the games were developed by the same studio.
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