Wargame: Airland Battle trailer details dynamic campaign
Halo 'Bootcamp' confirmed by Microsoft
Weekend PC download deals: Tomb Raider for $14
Game Dev Tycoon studio outlines future plans
Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced already has 350,000 words of new content
Weekend Confirmed Episode 55
by Garnett Lee, Apr 08, 2011 11:00am PDTScheduling challenges make it a three-chair show this week. On the upside, that means there's plenty of room to spread out for Jeff, Garnett, and this week's guest Andrea Rene, host of Mahalo Video Games Today. They get right in to Whatcha Been Playin? with The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, Ratchet and Clank All 4 One, and more. An unexpected debate on whether survival horror games must be scary spills into the Warning before taking up the question of "narrative dissonance" raised by the Sword and Sorcery developers Superbrothers, who also drop a tune from the game's soundtrack on us for this week's featured music. We wrap it all up with videogame news in the Front Page and Finishing Moves.
Weekend Confirmed Ep. 55: 04/08/2011
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If you're viewing this in the GameCenter application, you can play Weekend Confirmed Episode 55 directly.
Weekend Confirmed comes in four segments to make it easy to listen to in segments or all at once. Here's the timing for this week's episode:
- Whatcha' Been Playin Part 1: Start: 00:00:00 End: 00:27:15
- Whatcha' Been Playin Part 2: Start: 00:28:061 End: 00:58:40
- The Warning: Start: 00:59:50 End: 01:31:40
- Featured Music "COM-64" by Jim Guthrie: 01:31:40 End: 01:32:58
- Front Page news: Start: 01:32:58 End: 02:14:44
This week's featured music is the track "COM-64" by Jim Guthrie from the iPad (and soon iPhone) game, Sword and Sworcery. Guthrie (jampants on Twitter) is a composer/singer/songwriter in Toronto with a legendary solo discography, he's a veteran of bands like Royal City & Islands and an acknowledged influence on other Canadian success stories like Broken Social Scene, Feist, Arcade Fire, and Owen Pallett (formerly Final Fantasy).
The Sword and Sworcery EP is available in digital form through iTunes and Bandcamp or as a 12" vinyl. Get all the details from the game's music page. And of course, the game is also out now on iPad and should be soon for iPhone/iPod Touch.
Big thanks go out to Craig (the1console on Twitter), artist, animator, and writer on Sword and Sworcery, for connecting with us.
Original music in the show by Del Rio. Get his latest Album, The Wait is Over on iTunes. Check out more, including the Super Mega Worm mix and other mash-ups on his ReverbNation page or Facebook page, and follow him on twitter delriomusic.
Jeff can also be seen on The Totally Rad Show. They've gone daily so there's a new segment to watch every day of the week!
Remember to join the Official Facebook Weekend Confirmed Page and add us to your Facebook routine. We'll be keeping you up with the latest on the show there as well.
Comments
I would also like to thank Garnett as an African American gamer for talking about the 800 pound elephant in room: how race is portrayed. I can't believe that every missed on Trane from Marc Ekco's Getting Up who is another great Black Male lead character.
To add my two cents on the discussion of how women and man are portrayed in video games. Andrea is right the gaming community may not be mature enough to handle such a subject matter. Who it falls to you all the journalist and us the fans to push for a better representation of all races, genders, and religious beliefs in games. Now the issue of how woman are portrayed is a bit more than the basic "14 yr old male Fantasy" One of the wrinkles in this subject is that a female(lets take Bayonetta exp.) that she is overtly sexually for the purpose of drawing a male audience. Right there is the issue not just in video games but across the board that we view female assertiveness sexuality etc as being about the man and not the woman.
I do think that as reader comics books that you all did sell comics short, first one has to take in to consideration who is drawing the comic. Ed Benes is going to draw X comic heroine differently from Greg Horn who will draw her differently than Stjepan Šejić. What is more consent is the character themselves three examples come to mind.
Susan Storm-Richards married to Reed Richards, mother of Valaria and Franklin Richards who are both about 11 or 12 at this point.
Jessica Jones - Cage, married to Luke Cage(Black Male Leader of the New Avengers) mother of Danielle Cage who I believe is a year old.
Sara Pazzani single mother, NYPD police detective and one of the wielders of the Witchblade who have all been women.
Now these are all fictional characters in fictional universes so its not super realistic but I do think they are 3 good examples of the three characters trying to juggle the aspects of their lives. Much like a women today would juggle, being a wife, a mother and her career. Videos games have to yet at this point make head way but there is some. Characters like Lightning and Fang from FF 13, Elena Fisher and Chloe from Uncharted , Aya Brea Parasite Eve, Aegis Final Fantasy Tactics, Beatrix Alexandria Final Fantasy 9.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 14 replies.
As a Black video game player, it's somewhat frustrating seeing that in 2011, only a handful of lead characters were of another race. Off the top of my head, there was CJ from GTA: San Andreas, Trane (voiced by Talib Kweli) in the underrated Getting Up game, and Faith from Mirror's Edge. These are some of the more recent characters, but they weren't as wildly popular as the Solid Snake's or Nathan Drake's of the world.
That is not to say that I don't enjoy Uncharted or MGS from a gameplay standpoint. What really irritates me is that it is almost expected that the male protagonist be a generic looking white guy. Even if he doesn't speak, he has to be white?
You mean to tell me Issac Clarke from Dead Space (apparently not everyone's fav game on the podcast) couldn't have been Asian, Black, or Latino, and the game wouldn't translate to the audience in the same way? Heck, I love Half-Life 1 and 2, and Gordon Freeman, silent protagonist, is white. Doom 3 the same thing.
Even the games where you can alter your character's appearance has a "stock" image of a white male.
I know statistically speaking, whites are a majority in the US. So by that alone, there are going to be more white gamers than other groups. I feel the video game industry caters to that way to often, so it's off-putting at best when I'm subjected to the same connotation that movies and other mediums have held against the minority groups for what seems like forever.
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