Shifty Thoughts
Josh Larson has been let go. For those that don't remember, Larson is one of the stuffed suits that decided that Gamespot should be run by the marketing department, and gladly shot the site's journalistic integrity through the head for the promise of cozy (and lucrative) relationships with advertisers. He's one of the people responsible for firing Jeff Gerstmann for not falling in line with handing the keys to GS over to Eidos and other advertisers.
Now he's gone, so this is a return to a worthwhile GameSpot, right? A GameSpot run by the editors? Maybe, but I'm not holding my breath.
When the Gerstmann firing first happened and it became obvious that GameSpot was no longer being run by the editorial staff--the people that made GameSpot what it was--I saw the only road to redemption for the site being the firing of whomever was responsible (which definitely includes Larson) and a public statement by C|NET that there had been very bad and harmful decisions made by people who had been removed from their posts as a result, and that every effort would be made to correct the wrong and bring integrity back to GameSpot.
This has not happened. Larson was let go due to "downsizing," and was probably given a healthy severance package and glowing references so he can go drag another company down to his level. C|NET has still failed to take responsibility for the mistakes that were made or take any real steps to rectify them. Larson being given a graceful out with no accountability for his participation in the ruining of GameSpot is hardly the apology and guarantee of the GS editorial staff never being put in such a position again that was needed to address the tarnish that was stamped on GameSpot's reputation.
It's good that Larson is gone, certainly, although I feel sorry for whatever company he decides to ruin next. But the way this was handled simply isn't enough, and is too late. Larson should have been fired, and it should have been in the weeks following Gerstmann-gate. With him should have gone any other personnel complicit in selling GameSpot to advertisers and whoever at C|NET let them do it. C|NET should have fallen over itself showing that they recognized their mistake and that they would never allow it to happen again.
With the loss of their integrity first, and most of the standout talent they had afterwards (who can blame the editors from wanting to work somewhere that didn't make them feel dirty?), I still have little reason to visit GameSpot, and don't wish to show support for C|NET when they have so mismananaged a situation they should never have let occur in the first place.
I remain sympathetic to the editorial staff at GameSpot, who have been caught in a firestorm not of their making, but my distaste for the place has not altered. However, I did make a realization recently--that one more ill to come out of this whole situation has been the loss of contact with some of the good people who have remained here. Its hard to balance my desire not to support C|NET in any way until they take some real steps to correct the errors that lead to Gerstmann-gate with my desire not to allow bad management by C|NET to make me lose touch with awesome people. I still won't be visiting any other C|NET site, and even most of GS is dead to me (I certainly won't be subscribing any more!), but I've decided I will be poking my head in on the GS community from time to time. They're not the ones that caused this mess; they were just unfortunate enough to be along for the ride.
You know, if you read up on Communism, it's actually a pretty good idea. It looks quite sensible on paper, but somehow in practice, it never works. Why is that?
Because, invariably, someone gets greedy.
Once human nature is introduced to the equation, the whole thing falls apart, because someone or some group decide that the only important thing is how they're doing, and the whole can go off and die somewhere as far as they're concerned.
This same theme is repeated across a wide variety of situations. There will be a promising idea or instituion that is suddenly and completely gutted by the money-before-all-else attitude our society has come to promote as "healthy." This is why there's no pride in craftsmanship any more--the contractor just wants to slap something together as quickly and cheaply as possible and get paid, regardless of whether it looks or functions right.
Executive management generally live by the money-first credo. I've worked in the corporate world for long enough to see (many times) execs absolutely destroy a company to drive up short-term stock prices. They get a 6-figure bonus for raising the stock price, despite the fact that they cannibalized the company to do it. After their bonus comes through they move on to do the same thing to another company or sail away on their golden parachute, never having to deal with the fallout of what they wrought.
The poor schleps left are stuck with that fallout, and with the knowledge that the company they once believed in, sacrificed for, helped build from nothing, is just a shell waiting to collapse, taking their dreams with it. Those blameless employees are left to wander amid the rubble until they, too finally give up and move on.
Especially if the execs that ruined the company haven't left yet, the remaining employees are in trouble. Because if that corporate filth hasn't scurried like rats off the ship they set to sinking, it means they're not done doing damage yet. There will be further affronts to integrity and justice.
I have no desire to see those unfold. Though I feel for the employees left under the thumb of such corrupt and morally bankrupt tyrants, I can't continue to do anything that supports the parasitical management that is so intent on smothering everything worthwhile about their host company.
It is over. What it was it is no longer, and what it has become is less than nothing.
O World! O Life! O Time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more -Oh, never more!
Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight:
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more -Oh, never more!
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
I'm sure many of you have heard of Roger Ebert's latest offering in the games-as-art debate. If not, please read up now... I'll wait.
*humming, soft sounds of items being idly moved around*
Ready? OK, so I could just start asking pointed questions about which games Mr. Ebert has played (himself, to completion) on which to base his sweeping comments about the medium as a whole (I'm betting that it would be a short list and end in "-tris"), but I'm not going to do that. Instead, I did a little digging and found another expert with views Mr. Ebert may find interesting:
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Hello, I'm Rob Egert, well-known video game reviewer. Although I have never watched an entire movie, have never paid attention when someone tells me about a movie they've seen, I've decided that movies are not art. They're just popular entertainment, incapable of doing more than giving us something to look at while we eat popcorn. Movies can never aspire to the artistic heights of Rez or Okami, never write as compelling a script as Soul Reaver or The Longest Journey, never exhibit such moral dichotomy as Knights of the Old Republic.
Many people--so called "moviegoers" or "cinema buffs"--disagree with me about the non-art status of movies, but they're all wrong. I know this because I am regarded as an expert in a completely different field, while anyone who watches movies is obviously a witless teenage layabout. I can now prove my detractors wrong, though.
I recently played a game based on a movie, thus giving me vast insight into every movie ever produced. The game I played is called Catwoman, based on the movie of the same name. The game, developed by EA Games, was inspired by a high-profile movie and serves as an excellent illustration of my conviction that movies will never become an art form -- never, at least, until they morph into something else or more. Since this particular game based on this particular movie was poor, logic necessitates that all movies are therefore pointless and will not become art until they are more like a medium I personally see value in, such as video games.
I'm glad to have been able to settle this issue for everyone, and expect you all to discontinue any association you have with this artless medium of "cinema".
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There, using the foolproof theory that one individual game or movie based on the other medium is indicative of every game or movie ever produced, Messrs. Ebert and Egert have proven that neither video games nor movies are art. ...Unless, I suppose, it were possible that not all movies are the same and not all games are the same, that some may be made with more care than others. But nah... that wouldn't make any sense.
Worthwhile Reviews: Prey (Collector's Edition) | X360 | $24.99 | New
Prey is a first-person shooter built on Id's Doom 3 engine. While I didn't care for Doom 3's gameplay, the engine was solid and is used to great effect here. There are still a lot of hallways and confined places, but Prey adds enough into the mix to keep it from feeling as repetitious. More on those additions later.
You'll experience the game through the eyes of Tommy Hawk, but just forget the last name and think of him as Tommy, because his full name must have been decided by the developers during happy hour. Tommy is a disaffected Cherokee man who's fed up with life on the reservation and wants to go somewhere--anywhere--else. The problem (or at least the excuse, if you pick up on the implications that Tommy is as scared of the unknown world as he is sick of the familiar one) is that he can't convince his girlfriend Jen to leave with him.
During all this angst, aliens suddenly invade Earth and capture Tommy, Jen and Tommy's wise old grandfather. Hung up and hauled around like a side of beef, Tommy sees his grandfather killed gruesomely before his eyes and receives covert aid from an unknown source enabling him to escape. Loose and pissed-off, Tommy begins to search through the alien ship/station for Jen and for answers.
Grandfather isn't out of the picture yet, though, and counsels Tommy from beyond the grave a la Obi-Wan. The first thing Grandfather's spirit teaches Tommy is how to separate his own spirit from his body. This Spirit-Walk mechanic allows you to leave your body at will and scout ahead or pass through barriers that would stop you physically. It also makes you immortal, since taking too much damage will merely send you to the spirit realm, where some quick target practice will restore you to health.
Being alien in origin, the level design is unusual. First, there is meat and tissue everywhere. The walls are as likely to be made of pulsating flesh as metal, and the aliens' entire reason for abducting humans is to process them into food. The aliens in Prey also have a very different take on interior design, with walkways that wander up walls and across ceilings (similar to the magnetic walkways in the Ratchet and Clank series), switches that can change the direction of gravity, and portals that may also change which way is down when you walk through them.
These are my favorite elements in Prey. A few times while teleporting around, spirit walking to flip a switch that would carry my body over a chasm, and changing gravity as if I were rolling around on the inside of a giant Rubik's cube, I felt slightly dizzy and disoriented. If you have motion-sickness issues, I very much doubt this is the game for you, but overall I enjoyed the feeling. I think I gave whatever parts of the brain handle spatial perception a much-needed workout, too.
I wish there had been more of that kind of thing that there was, though. Most of the game is walking down narrow hallways and shooting aliens. There's certainly nothing wrong with that idea, but the execution here is a little dull. Not Doom 3 dull, but not tremendously exciting. None of the weapons really stand out, the enemies aren't very challenging, and even if you get overmatched, you'll only have to spend a few moments in the spirit world before returning to the fray.
The visuals, as could be expected from a game running the Doom 3 engine, are quite good and the art style is consistent and interesting. Aside from some very forced-sounding swearing from Tommy, the dialog is done well (including some great cameos by Art Bell as himself), and the story is interesting enough if you're a sci-fi nerd like myself. Also, as a vegetarian, I couldn't help see the implications of human meat-harvesting. Being hung immobilized and watching the people ahead of you brutally slaughtered, knowing that your turn is coming, is a terrifying fate--no less so whether it is a human or another animal being treated thus. Perhaps seeing humans treated like farm animals will get people thinking about how they treat farm animals. But probably not.
My Collector's Edition also came with a metal case and a pair of pewter figures. The figures are fine, but uninteresting enough that I've never removed them from the plastic tray they're in, and the metal case is not the sleek, nicely hinged affair you get with the collectors editions of Halo 2, Doom 3, or Perfect Dark Zero, but rather an unwieldy and oversized job with a peg sticking out of the bare metal to hold the disk in place. I got it for the same price as the regular edition, which is good, because I certainly wouldn't have paid anything extra for it--and I'm usually a sucker for a metal case.
So was it worth my $25? Yes.... but its very close. Prey isn't a bad game at all, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend that someone play it, but it might be one of those games you're better off renting. The experience is relatively quick and unchallenging, and its not something I'm sure you're going to want to play through again anytime soon. My predilection for sci-fi pushed it over to the sunny side of worthwhile for me, but only just.
However, with all this recent to-do about what is and isn't torture, I have a very humble suggestion that should straighten it all out. At issue is whether nonlethal interrogation techniques like keeping someone awake for days at a time, stripping them naked and subjecting them to cold temperatures and water dousings, or making them feel as if they are drowning (so-called "waterboarding") should be considered "torture."
According to Dictionary.reference.com, the word torture includes the following: extreme anguish of body or mind; agony. I would suggest that the feeling that one is drowning, losing one's life, would cause extreme anguish of the mind, at the very least. If subjecting someone to such a process doesn't make one a torturer, it seems it at least satisfies another definition: terrorist. I know that if I was strapped down and made to feel as if I were drowning, I would be terrified.
In a conveniently nebulous "war on terror," should we be employing the same tactics the terrorists do? Should we find the most insanely fanatical extremists and match their inhumanity, or should we hold ourselves to a higher standard? If through "winning" the war on terror we become the same as our enemies, have we truly won?
President Bush has unflappable faith, though, that these interrogation methods are not torture. His reasoning seems to be based on the rather simple argument that his administration does not torture, therefore nothing they do can be considered such. Waterboarding can't be torture (despite it being previously prosecuted as a war crime by the US), since the US practices it. Mr. Bush's candidate for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, has refused to say whether waterboarding constitutes torture in his opinion. Many Democrats and some Republicans in the House and Senate, however, feel that these techniques are torture, even if they don't leave marks.
To resolve this apparent impasse in Washington, I have a simple suggestion for Mr. Bush: to prove that these techniques of interrogation aren't torture, he should voluntarily undergo them himself. If he can be kept standing in one place for over 40 hours, naked, bound, and doused in cold water in a freezing cell, then be forced to feel as if he is drowning--if he can do all this and keep a smile on his face, I know I'd be a lot more willing to believe his take on the subject.
Mr. Bush has it within his power to end all this debate and show us all just how harmless and dare I say... invigorating these techniques are. If Bush, of all people, was able to easily undergo these interrogation techniques and afterwards assert that they are not torture, his words would carry a lot more weight. Perhaps this way, too, we'd get some straight answers on the illegal wiretapping operation he's been running.
For quite some time, I've been buying PSP games out of bargain bins because I knew that I'd eventually own one. Well, that day has come. With the release of the Dracula X Chronicles and the slim PSP (PSPee?), I couldn't resist any longer. I had to debate for a bit between the Daxter edition and the Star Wars edition, but chose Daxter. The Vader pic is sweet, but the Daxter edition is the better deal, with a 1gb Memory Stick Duo included. Daxter was one of those games I had already picked up cheap, so I gave the pack-in copy of Daxter to a friend, along with the Family Guy UMD, since I can't stand Family Guy.
I like the silver color, and while the finish is still glossy, fingerprints aren't as obvious as they were on the old black models. The screen is already starting to pick them up near the d-pad and square button, though, from the edges of my thumbs. Minus the finger smudges, that screen is really pretty, even without anything on it. I never had an original PSP to compare it to, but this slim model really is very light.
Like any handheld, I find it awkward to play no matter how I hold it... holding it like a controller and looking down fatigues my neck, while holding it up where I can see it creates an uncomfortable angle on the controls. The analog nub feels awkwardly placed no matter how I hold the thing. Even using it as a controller while using the TV out cables doesn't feel quite right somehow. Like I said, though, I find all handhelds somewhat uncomfortable for the same reasons.
After I got my PSP out of the vault--er, packaging, and admired it for a bit, I went to the box I'd been stashing PSP games in as I picked them up, and I'm rather surprised at how many games I had in there. With my recent acquisitions of Dracula X Chronicles and Guilty Gear Judgement I have over a dozen titles ready to play. Of course, one of themis a $2 copy of Death Jr....
I've tried a wireless co-op game of Judgement, and it worked very nicely. I'm still looking forward to trying out some wireless versus play and seeing what can be done with a PS3/PSP tag team. I'm also looking for game recommendations, as I haven't been following the PSP library too closely before now, and may have missed some good stuff. I also need to hear about good accessories... right now, my PSP is swaddled like an infant in a soft cloth, and I'd like to find a good case to keep it safe. Existing products may not be designed with the slim PSP in mind, though, so I'll have to watch out for that.
Comment/suggest away!
