Mashing buttons since 1984
Just got back from the theater. Saw a little movie, you might have heard of it — King Kong. Wow.
Wow, was that movie visceral and intense!
Wow, was the action amazing (once it got started).
Wow, was that movie long.
Wow, was Jack Black out of his league.
Wow, were some of those sequences both breathtaking and heartbreaking.
Wow, was that an excellent movie!
I should start a running tally of bad vs. good portrayals of gaming in the media. Sure, the ratio would be 20 to 1 but it sure seems like the good ones are really good ones. The latest to go on the “Good Pile” is from the Washington Post, by Sebastian Mallaby, titled, “My son and I, Game to Learn.” (hat tip to BM reader Bobster).
The article starts off with everything we’ve heard before – studies can’t prove a link between violence and video games (even though they’re trying their darndest!) and all the benefits of playing games – better problem solving, you know the drill. But there’s more to it than that. It gets good when he starts talking about his son’s passion for RuneScape. I’ve never played RuneScape, but after reading this article, I’m intrigued. A little clip:
But the game’s main attraction lies in its business challenge. My son has been buying logs, making longbows and selling them at a profit; he says the margins in the bow business fluctuate around 10 percent. Lately he’s moved into buying magic herbs in bulk and retailing them individually. This is a dicier business, but the risk is balanced by reward. Herb-trading margins can be 100 percent or fatter.
Sounds fun. As a big fan of crafting, this sounds right up my alley. But the article is more than just the fluctuating markets of RuneScape. It’s about history and Age of Empires 3 and medicine and America’s Army.
All this coming from a confessed non-gamer. Keep the good publicity rolling!
Update: Joystiq has linked buttonmashing.com with this story. Thanks! Even with the wonky feed issue, I still dig the Joystiq crew.
I’m still looking for nominations for the Best Gaming Blog. You can nominate your favorite blog here.
Don’t forget the next Carnival stop, at Kill Ten Rats, is fast approaching. Get your submissions in to Ethic soon.
Santa was unable to procure me an Xbox 360, but that’s okay because I’ve got a bunch of other games to play anyway. My DS will keep me busy. I did get a copy of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
Here’s a Guild Wars wish for a Merry Wintersday. Like most people, I’ll be taking it easy, blogging-wise, for the weekend. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all you button mashers out there!
Glenn Reynolds, aka The Instapundit, has a great piece on the Clinton/Lieberman/Bayh legislation that would codify the ratings assigned to video games. While IANAL, Reynolds is, so when he says this law would be unconstitutional, I would have to agree. He makes some great points, including the fact that this is blatant posturing by Clinton to position herself with parents for the upcoming 2008 election. A couple choice quotes:
Politicians — and, for that matter, journalists — tend to think there’s a difference, because a lot more of them read books than play computer games. But that’s more a reflection on how behind the times they are
We’ve said something along these lines many times before here, but it bears repeating. It’s the rock-and-roll analogy. Our grandparents didn’t like that our parents were listening to Elvis Presley because it was foreign to them and that made them resist it. This is very similar.
And since it’s hard for me to believe that a rating system for books would pass constitutional muster, I have considerable doubt that it will do so here.
This is another point. Where does the rating of the media (and our hobbies/past times) end? Everyone already ignores movie ratings (including the theaters), the Parental Advisor sticker on a CD case is the path to instant success with teenagers, and supposedly no one understands the video game rating system. Rating systems work if they’re actually meaningful, not just empty gestures with “the Children” in mind. So far they all seem to be just that.
Needless to say, go read the whole thing.
I’ve bookmarked the opinion Reynolds references for future referencing. It’s a good read (if you can navigate the legalese) and it seems at least judge Posner “gets it”:
Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low. It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.
Maybe video games are different. They are, after all, interactive. But this point is superficial, in fact erroneous. All literature (here broadly defined to include movies, television, and the other photographic media, and popular as well as highbrow literature) is interactive; the better it is, the more interactive. Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own.
Indeed.
(thanks to Bobster for the link)
For the past few years in the blogosphere, there have been various “Best of” awards, including The BoB Awards (The Best of Blogs Award) and The Weblog Awards but as I’ve surfed the various categories, I see that Gaming Blogs have been left out in the December cold. I know Spike TV had their “Best Gaming Blog” Category, along with its whopping 3 nominees, which ended in a tie, but come on. I’m not saying the blogs weren’t worthy of their nomination, but there’s more out there than just those three. While I don’t consider Slashdot a “blog” per-se, Kotaku and Joystiq are both commendable blogs. Those three sites are great, but I think there’s more than just those guys.
So I’m thinking about doing a Best of Gaming Blogs poll here. Before we can have a poll, however, we need some nominees. Leave a comment here with a list of your favorite blogs. I’ll take nominations until Monday. If there’s enough interest, I’ll post a poll where the votes will be tallied. If not, I guess gaming blogs will have to wait another year for their own award.
As a courtesy to the Spike TV finalists (whether they’re proud of that distinction or not) I’ll start out with Joystiq, Kotaku, and Slashdot Games as nominees. I’ll also add my nominations: Dubious Quality, Wonderland, Kieron Gillen’s Workblog and 4 Color Rebellion are a few of the many blogs I thoroughly enjoy. (and how could I forget my favorite MMO-blogger, AFK Gamer!)
There’s a lot of good blogs out there, so nominate away!
Update: I also submitted a forum topic at Evil Avatar on this subject, you can read it here.
I know some buttonmashing.com readers prefer to use an RSS aggregator (I’ve said on more than one occasion the Bloglines is the best). I haven’t done any updating to my feed but I wanted to make available my feed to anyone who uses a feed reader.
If you use My Yahoo as your RSS reader, you can subscribe here:
My MSN (isn’t working at the moment. Fixed.)
Newsgator
Bloglines
If you use any other service, like to Google Desktop 2.0 sidebar, or Google IG, or Google anything or any number of other feed readers, you can use my Feedburner Feed, which gives me stats to how many people are using my feed and how they’re reading it. You can use this for the feed:
I’m a pretty adventurous guy when it comes to food. I’ll try pretty much anything. I’m not talking “Fear Factor” adventurous, but I’ll try anything reasonable at least once. It was this willingness that lead me to try Pulpo a la Gallega, Escargot, and my most recent finding, Wasabi Funyuns. They’re just like funyuns, only they taste good. The last time I got into trouble eating something new was the time I tried those nasty Harry Potter Jelly Beans (oh that I hadn’t tried the Sardine Jelly Beans!). That was until a co-worker brought in the Jones Soda Holiday Gift Pack. That’s when curiosity almost made the cat throw up.
If you didn’t already know, Jones Soda makes quirky soda flavors and bottles them with even quirkier labels. They also have a tradition of selling “holiday” flavored sodas around the Thanksgiving/Christmas season. We’d been joking about them at work and someone decided to buy the five-pack. On Friday we decided it was time crack them open and give them a try. Big mistake.
We ordered the taste testing how we thought they would taste, from the most tolerable to the most heinous. We started with the Cranberry Sauce. It was not the harbinger of doom that it should have been. It had a mildly tart cranberry taste with a bad aftertaste. Compared to what was to come, it was nectar of the Gods.
Up next was Pumpkin Pie. I had high hopes for this flavor but those hopes were dashed upon opening the bottle. Its smell was unappealing but I soldiered on. A little swig was all it took. This flavor should have been named Burnt Caramel with an overpowering hint of Nutmeg. Bleh! Such potential wasted. So we put that away and gave the Turkey and Gravy a try. One would think a turkey flavored soda would be horrible, but it was surprisingly not disgusting. It wasn’t good by any stretch, but it didn’t kill me, either. It tasted like a rather flat, stale orange soda. It certainly wasn’t as horrible as that pumpkin pie. I still shudder at recalling that flavor.
The next on the list was the Wild Herb Stuffing Soda. This is where things got ugly. This flavor didn’t past the smell test but the taste test was almost the death of me. Heck, it didn’t even pass the “look at the bottle test”. It looked like dirty rain run-off. It wasn’t going to be good. Imagine, if you will, straining chicken broth through a dirty gym sock. Gross, right? Then imagine straining that liquid through a gauze patch that had been covering a festering blister for a week. Still with me? Okay, now take whatever horrible taste you’ve imagined and raise it to the tenth power. It was worse than that. As soon as that drink of death touched my tongue I immediately gagged. Horrible. It took all I had in me not to lose my lunch. I could go no further. Brussel Sprouts would have to sit untouched by my hands. Others were brave enough to try it and paid the price. After a friend tasted it he uttered words that I had never before known to exist, so horrible on my ears. I later wafted the scent of Brussel Sprouts Soda to my nose and was ever-grateful I never tasted it. If the smell of rotten key lime pie doesn’t turn your stomach, you might like it.
So please, learn from my mistakes. Jones is doing this for a good cause, but is it really worth it to torture your taste buds in such a cruel manner?
While I am jamming away with some great DS games out right now, I’ve noticed there are some weird DS games, too. I was strolling the game aisles of Media Play, browsing the DS games when I came a across some games I hadn’t seen before. The first game that caught my eye was Elf Bowling 1 and 2
The next odd one I saw was Whac-A-Mole
These ponderings led to another thought. Remember Mark Rein’s comments about the Revolution controller? For those who don’t know, Rein (vice president and co-founder of Epic Games) commented that the Nintendo Revolution controller would lead to the development of a lot of gimmicky (read: crappy) games. (He was misquoted and/or misinterpreted by a lot of people who thought they heard him say the controller was gimmicky. He never said that. He said there would be a lot of crappy games built around it, for which he was pretty much spot on.) There will be a lot of forgettable, crappy games that use the Revolution’s new controller. Luckily, we don’t have to wait for the Revolution. We can see it now, with the DS. The touchscreen has a lot of possibilities and they are just now being developed. In the meantime, we get Elf Bowling. Wheee.
While thinking about the origins of Elf Bowling, I also realized that there also a lot of potential here. Elf Bowling, like so many games, has humble roots as a flash game. Games that put companies like Pop Cap on the map. Games I’d be willing to pay four or five dollars to download to my DS. I hope you see where this is going. With the run-away success of the Xbox Live Arcade, would it be that hard for Nintendo to implement a DS Wi-Fi Connection arcade? I’d love to download a version of Alchemy or Zuma to my DS. Oh, and lookie here! Those games were practically meant to be played with a touch screen. They were made for each other!
So while I’m content with Mario Kart and Animal Crossing, I look forward to what else may be in store for Nintendo’s little handheld.
While it’s barely the middle of December, it’s never too late to start thinking about the first Carnival of Gamers of 2006, held over at Kill Ten Rats. Ethic will be handling the Carnival duties and it should be another great stop. Hopefully the Holidays won’t interfere too much with your blogging and everyone will be able to submit something.
I also have some cool news for future Carnivals. Zonk, the Games editor at Slashdot has agreed to host the February edition of the Carnival. Zonk linked the original Carnival and has been following it ever since. I’m pretty excited about this. Having the all the Carnival entries listed on Slashdot is a pretty cool thing.
We also have Virgin Worlds signed up to handle the March Carnival. Virgin Worlds is a new-ish MMO blog that looks promising and has graciously volunteered his time for Carnival duties.
It looked like the Carnival was losing steam for a while, but it has really picked up as of late, which is pretty cool. Thanks to everyone who has helped out or participated. It’s been fun so far, here’s to hoping it continues!
