violence

Has anyone heard of the Wii game No More Heroes? It's an action game by SUDA51, which is a pretty meaningless statement if you haven't played Killer7 (GameCube/PS2). Killer7 is an ultra-violent, ultra-profane on-rails shooter with a distinctively garish cel-shading style and a near-incomprehensible plot involving terrorism, black market orphan organ trading, and death (mostly death). Is that sentence too clustered on hyphens? Sometimes I let hyphens get out of control.

By contrast, No More Heroes is an ultra-violent, ultra-profane button-masher action game with a cel-shaded style that looks deceptively like shitty PS2 graphics and a nearly non-existent plot. It's a little disappointing when cast in Killer7's shadow but it's worth playing just to be back in the wild world created by SUDA. I just finished playing it last night, and just like Killer7, the ending came complete with an out-of-nowhere plot twist. I'd worry that SUDA's writing himself into a Shyamalan-type corner where his work is ruined by an audience expectation of a twist ending, but I realized after playing that each twist brought something unique to each game.  read more »

Somehow in class Friday we managed to avoid the greater debate of video game violence, where the line is drawn, and how much video game violence affects youth violence. If you spend enough time talking about video games the topic eventually comes up, and maybe at some point we'll discuss it, but I worried about the recent shooting in Illinois affecting that kind of talk.

It seems kind of quaint that not so long ago Space Invaders had to be tailored specifically to avoid human vs. human combat. I remember spending a lot of time in middle school (around the N64/PSX generation) just dying waiting for the day when graphics were realistic enough to be on par with blockbuster Hollywood violence. I guess we're pretty close now, with games like Gears of War letting you take a chainsaw to your enemy and watch the blood spray all over the camera.  read more »

One of my first thoughts after playing Passage was "Wait, why did the girl die first?! Everyone knows that the lifespan of the average human female is longer than that of the average human male! Blasphemy! Ridiculous! [Assorted sounds]!" Well... something like that, at any rate. Which brings me to the point that 'video games aren't real life'. Which is an obvious point. Which is thus easy to overlook. But necessary to make.

This game isn't a substitution for actual reality - that much is made clear by the graphics alone. I know that I'm not some thing comprised of a very small and limited number of pixels, and so I'm not confused as to whether I'm the wonderful and amazing creature poking at the directional arrows on my laptop keyboard or if I'm the little pixel people on the screen. But what about games that -are- striving for a much higher degree of realism? It'd be a bit easier to accidentally/unconsciously read those games more literally. I guess that's where you can find some validity in the arguments of those lovely individuals who are quite concerned about violence in video games. (Think of the children!)  read more »