Massacred Pen

Well, it’s not a new Blizzard title, but just my view on Hellgate London, some of the games in my pile of “Games that I’ll play during the summer” which includes a lot of titles, and I must say I don’t like Hellgate London, first of, they had made some really idiotic design decissions, just to name a thing which I saw in the start of the game: The tutorial, it doesn’t keep up with what you are doing, so if you get to far you still get alle the messages you where expected to see if you where going through the tutorial in the right speed, also it was hard to know what the different text messages in the tutorial where refering to, well, on to the next game then, Painkiller.

I passed Fictiontheory and analysis with my paper on Gears of War, which you now can download from here. I got an 7(a C) for it, it’s in danish, so that’s a good reason for you to consider to learn danish!

Yeah! Or maybe it was some studio that wasn’t named Halo that made it… The reason why you should care is that the developers now want to brand themselves instead of the games they are making. The tool to do this is to take advantage of social sites like Youtube, Flikr and Facebook to spread the words about new games. Over at Next-Gen.biz they have a 2-page article about that subject, which you can read here: Using Social Sites to Sell Games

I think it’s inspired by the movie business, how many movie posters have you seen without a line like: “From the producer of Glitter/Crossroads” or “From the director of Killer Clowns from Outer Space”, but actually I don’t think it’s a new phenomena, the first time I saw it was from the box shot of Freedom Fighters:

Also I think there’s another reason why the developers want to brand themselves, to make it easier for them to choose publisher, instead of them being dependent on the publisher, they can now instead easily switch publisher because it’s not important who published but the game, but instead it’s important who actually developed the game, and thereby getting more control over the production of the game, instead of the publisher who tell them what to do and what not to do. Specially Bungie has a problem, that people think that Microsoft made the Halo games, and when they recently left Microsoft, they are really in a need to brand themselves. Personally I know who had made most of the games I have on the shelves at home, but The Common Man™(Or woman) might not know who made the last Halo game, or The Sims game.

Looking at the calender, I thought to myself it was about time that I came up with a thesis statement, because the paper should be handed in on May the 30th, which is only a few weeks away, and the paper needs to be between 20-25 pages, so there is a lot of work to be done in the next few weeks. I think I had made a good start on the paper, because our teacher requested that we all handed in a 7-papers version of the paper, which only 2 of us did

I choose to write about Gears of War, but I used all my energy on getting a grasp on how to a analysis about the narrative and space in Gears of War, that I totally forgot something very important, the thesis statement. So in the middle of the night, before I should turn in the 7-page paper I came up with a thesis statement, that I only described in the introduction to the paper and the conclusion, which of course made my paper to a really mess, and the teacher was not that excited about my paper. So in that light, I think it would be a good idea to come up with a thesis statement… Now my problems is what the hell should me thesis statement be about, I’m having a really tough time coming up with any ideas for my thesis statement. I just know that I really like Gears of War, but from there to actually making up a academic problem that I can write about, well, let’s just say there is a really long way.

This may be a shocking statement for some of you guys out there, but if you gave up your Gym-card because of the Wii, and Wii sports, well, this danish doctor got some shocking news for you. If you haven’t already seen it, the news is in danish, which my limit some of you guys from reading the actual source of this news. But the danish doctor, Vibeke Manniche, are saying:

The active computergames is of course better than the alternative, where only the fingers are in motion. Children is burning more calories[using the Wii] if the alternative was to just sit in the couch and playing, but the question is how many calories the Wii-exercise help you burn.

First, I might add that it sound a lot like Vibeke only knows that there is a Tennis game in Wii Sports, also there is plenty of test that show how many calories you burn using the different Wii games. Also I think you should focus on that it can of course not replace normal sport, but if you can just made little changes, it could help in the long run, so instead of playing a normal game maybe you choose to play Wii sport game, and at the same time you enjoy a videogame you also burning some calories. It couldn’t be that bad after all.

Also I saved the best part to last:

“On the tennisfield you learn e.g. something about the rules of the game, fairplay and gentlemanship - how to behave around other people.”

The rules of tennis. Well, the rules in Wii Sports Tennis come quiet close to the real rules of Tennis, so I don’t think that’s a problem. Fairplay and Gentlemanship, I dont belive that she has actually seen a real tennis match, people cheat when judging if a ball is in or out, I’ve seen it several times when I played the double in tennis. Gentlemanship… No need to comment on that, it just shows that there is still someone out there who believes that computergames make us all Virginia-tech/Columbine High school killers… I just hope one day that we can all jump a step up on the evolution ladder so we can have some more clever discussions instead of the normal: “OMG! New technology is bad for you… Okay?”