Everything of game: December 2012

Monday, 31 December 2012

Jay-Z Will Score The Great Gatsby

Wow, this is crazy but could be cool if they can pull it off.

Hip hop icon Jay-Z and The Bullitts will provide the score for director Baz Luhrmann's upcoming adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

The Bullitts revealed the news via Twitter today: "Jay-Z and myself have been working tirelessly on the score for the upcoming #CLASSIC The Great Gatsby! It is too DOPE for words!"

As the trailers for The Great Gatsby have revealed, Luhrmann will stick with a similar approach he used with Moulin Rouge! of using contemporary music in a period film.

Source : ign[dot]com

Jay-Z Will Score The Great Gatsby

Wow, this is crazy but could be cool if they can pull it off.

Hip hop icon Jay-Z and The Bullitts will provide the score for director Baz Luhrmann's upcoming adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

The Bullitts revealed the news via Twitter today: "Jay-Z and myself have been working tirelessly on the score for the upcoming #CLASSIC The Great Gatsby! It is too DOPE for words!"

As the trailers for The Great Gatsby have revealed, Luhrmann will stick with a similar approach he used with Moulin Rouge! of using contemporary music in a period film.

Source : ign[dot]com

Samuel L. Jackson Criticizes Lincoln's Ending

He's made a lot of headlines in the past taking his Hollywood peers to task, and now Django Unchained's Samuel L. Jackson admits he wasn't a fan of the ending of Steven Spielberg's acclaimed biopic Lincoln.

"I don't understand why it didn't just end when Lincoln is walking down the hall and the butler gives him his hat," Jackson said, according to the Los Angeles Times. "Why did I need to see him dying on the bed? I have no idea what Spielberg was trying to do."

Jackson, who was directed by Spielberg in Jurassic Park, added, "I didn't need the assassination at all. Unless he's going to show Lincoln getting his brains blown out. And even then, why am I watching it? The movie had a better ending 10 minutes before."

Do you agree with Jackson that Lincoln should have ended without depicting the fate we already knew was in store for Abe? Sound off in the Comments below.

Source : ign[dot]com

Batman: Is This the Perfect Bruce Wayne?

One Batman fan has morphed every modern Batman actor -- Adam West, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney and Christian Bale -- into one man. Is this the perfect Bruce Wayne? Sound off in the Comments below!

Via Reddit and io9.

Source : ign[dot]com

Sunday, 30 December 2012

Skyfall Passes $1 Billion Mark Worldwide

The new James Bond film Skyfall has passed the $1 billion mark at the global box office, making it only the third film this year to join that club behind The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises.

The film is now in 14th place at the all time worldwide box office, right behind The Dark Knight. Skyfall is also the highest-grossing Bond film of all time (not adjusted for inflation).

In addition, Sony Pictures announced that Skyfall is the highest-grossing film at the worldwide box office in the studio's history. It's also the highest-grossing UK release of all time.

Skyfall has so far made $289.6 million domestically and another $710.6 million internationally for a current total of $1,000,200,000.

Source : ign[dot]com

Opinion: Games As Art - Another Perspective

As the ‘Hollywood’ era of the video game pushes our hobby further and further into the public consciousness, there’s a tendency within our community to champion the idea of games as ‘growing up’ – gaining the ability to be something serious, something meaningful or productive, something that can rival the cultural importance of film or literature.

Games are increasingly regarded as worthwhile relative to how well they can match or exceed the proficiencies of older media. Gaming magazines, blogs and websites regularly point to modern games telling grand sweeping narratives in Mass Effect, exploring deeply emotional themes in Braid and political themes in Spec Ops: The Line, provoking legitimate aesthetic responses in millions of people daily. The aspects of graphical fidelity, sound design, dialogue and rhetorical messaging are also well-discussed in terms of whether a game is progressively worthwhile.

But games are not comparable to older media. They are not interactive stories or a technological new way to present old ideas. They are not art. Games are games. The practice of imaginative play, from which games are descendant, is ancient. It predates all media. Its history is weaved throughout the history of society itself. It became chess. It became Monopoly, Battleship, Cowboys and Indians, Dungeons & Dragons. And now it’s become Mass Effect. As such games seem to resist the application of analytical rules and tropes that we’ve designed for the study of narrative media like films and literature, as well as for art media in general.

At their core, games are about 'imaginative play'.

In fact, it can be easily seen that the aspects integral to those older media – narrative, character motivation, visual style and so on – are merely arbitrary in video games. They’re a shell that houses the true core and worth of games – the playful interaction. The imaginative application of our minds to a system of rules. Games are about the play, and in most cases the play of a game would remain exactly the same throughout even if you scrapped the narrative entirely and replaced it with something different.

As renowned games scholar Markku Eskelinen once wrote: “If I throw a ball at you, I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories”. Games are conceived and created as objects to play with, not to draw meaning from. An emphasis on their non-gameplay parts is not representative of the joy and sensation that results in actually playing a game, in the same way that studying the mechanics of tennis ball construction, gravity and energy transfer to understand what happens when a man throws a ball cannot convey the sensation of playing catch.

There seems to be many reasons the playfulness or ‘gameness’ of video games is often underplayed in favour of those attributes that have been appropriated from older media. Game companies want to hype the idea of graphics, sound and narrative as worthwhile because it’s much easier to sell than gameplay, which requires the user to actually grab the controller and feel the feedback loop between input and output. Gamers themselves want to draw focus to these aspects too, to use the language of older media that even non-gamers understand; in an attempt to prove their favoured medium is worthwhile.

Yet the danger of all this is a trivialisation of video games that do not meet old media standards in visuals or narratives. Does the visual verisimilitude and beautiful soundscape of Flower make it more worthy a game for study than the jaggy pixel worlds of VVVVV? Does the far-reaching narrative of Mass Effect mean it should be made a showpiece of the modern video game ahead of New Super Mario Bros?

Think of The Unfinished Swan. The game is beautiful and minimalistic in both visuals and in gameplay design. The interactions between the game world and the player are surprising and entirely joyful. At one point the player will come to a realisation that the orbs of water they’ve been throwing around can actually be used to manipulate the growth of surrounding climbable vines, and this produces a strong aesthetic response – a ‘wow’ moment – that one could point to as containing some spark of the sublimely artistic.

However it’s the moment following this that most completely represents the very core of the video game and its unique nature – the moment that the player understands this new rule and thinks ‘I wonder if I can get those vines to wrap around that bridge so I can cross this chasm’. That moment of player agency defines the amazing experience of playing The Unfinished Swan well above anything inherent in the visual style or narrative.

The Unfinished Swan is driven by constant gameplay evolution.

Or consider Braid – a game that weaves its narrative theme throughout its gameplay in a manner so pretentious you may be inclined to think ‘this must be art’. Yet the second-to-second gameplay, consisting of running, jumping, climbing and rewinding time, would feel the same even if the narrative was about a chibi Albert Einstein on a quest to find his missing toaster.

The blockbuster AAA games of recent times have been pushing ever closer towards parity with films and other media in just about every way including production value and writing. These games are the ones featured on billboards and buses, and the ones touted by publishers and console manufacturers as the height of the medium. Some of these games also provide great gameplay, but it’s very clear those older attributes have little to do with whether a game is actually fun or not, beyond serving as a vessel to help explain and carry gameplay ideas.

Concepts of the traditionally artistic in games are limited to a supporting role. There will never be a documentary game, and despite the most desperate efforts of well-meaning researchers and academics there will never be a game that can effectively teach history or be journalism or be art. Nor should there be. Such an aim, which requires a straightforward communication from creator to player, would degrade the possibility for playful interaction to such an extent that the end experience would be an interactive experience but not a game.

One might be led to argue that the creation of gameplay could be viewed as a new form of art, yet the fact that gameplay is inexorably tied to the idea of concurrent creation and definition by the system of rules and the player’s interaction seems to imply that such labelling would require a fundamental rethinking of the place of authorship in art, and at that point the debate has entirely dissolved into semantics.

Nobody ever bothered to consider whether the rules of chess constitute art. This is because the system of rules in chess is nothing until understood and applied in a creative way by the player. It is a playful phenomenon that subsumes ideas of war and battle but is not a representation of them; it uses them to imbue the system with just enough meaning to send the player on their way.

In video games, the graphics, narrative and trendy rhetorical metaphors that are rife in today’s blockbusters could conceivably be called art, but then so could a really well-crafted and ornate wooden chess set.

What do you think? Should games stand proudly apart from other forms of media, or do you think the debate over games as art plays a valuable role in the discourse around our fantastic pastime?

Tim Biggs is a games writer based in Melbourne. You can catch up with him on Twitter or here at IGN. And why not join the IGN AU Facebook community while you're at it?

Source : ign[dot]com

The Year in Video Game Sex 2012

Editor's Note: this piece contains adult content, as well as plot spoilers from Dishonored, Far Cry 3, and Darkness II.

If violence is inseparable from video games, sex may never have a major place in them. We can luxuriate in their animated encyclopedia of fantasies, but directly referencing sex apparently risks ruining the whole illusion. In 2012, games were less shy about introducing sex into their worlds, and yet most of the times it was left off in margins, something to catalyze a character's motivation or animate a bawdy background. But even as an intermittent presence it has a powerful and surprisingly broad range of effects.

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Max Payne 3's sense of sexuality was inseparable from its protagonist.

Max Payne 3's sense of sexuality was inseparable from its protagonist, a depleted stag who has traded his sexual optimism for alcohol and painkillers. His true love long dead, Max has migrated into a stage in his life where sex is something other people do. This is reinforced in a mid-game level where Max wanders into a brothel in a poor Rio neighborhood. The place is old and dirty and as Max works his way out of it, shooting at local gangsters, you'll see customers enjoying sexual play in the background. Even when surrounded by sex he is disengaged from it, resigned to the fact that human comfort and closeness are no longer possible for a man with his history.

There are a lot of games with brothels, but it's rare that players are allowed to do anything sexual in them. You can't have sex in Dishonored's brothel level but you can participate in some homosexual kink on your way to assassinate a pair of corrupt brothers in its upper chambers. In a side area you may or may not find, there is a rich government official blindfolded and strapped into a chair with electrodes attached to his body. When you enter the room he'll expect you to be a prostitute and not a masked assassin.

You're free to send painfully erotic bursts of energy through the old man's body, exploiting the time-honored tradition of powerful men becoming chatty gossips when in the company of their concubines. The scene is mean-spirited and seems to bait the player's disgust for this indulgent fetish that should be taken as an indictment of the ruling class. The bad guys are always the ones who take pleasure in being bad.

Hitman: Absolution's publicity campaign seemed to provoke anger at every turn this year, and a recent Facebook game to promote it was subject to intense criticism. The simple text game had players pretend they were assassins who could send brief messages to people in their friends list, choosing from an absurd list of hyper-superficial reasons to mark a person for death, including having small breasts, a small penis, or a flabby belly. Worrying about one's sexual or physical inadequacies undergirds huge swathes of American culture.

Hitman: Absolution

The game was live for less than a day before Square-Enix withdrew it for having underestimated the extent to which it might become weaponized in a culture as reactionary and competitive as America. Yet, the game is a reminder of just how much power and meaning we attach to other people's views of our bodies and sexuality.

The Wii U is probably not the first device that comes to mind when people think about sex in video games, but the Miiverse's ability to post messages and hand-drawn pictures is just as much a space for bathroom wall sex graffiti as it is a trading post for hints about the Level 5 boss in Mario.

Nintendo has gone to great lengths to ensure their machine is "child-safe," with a 2-step approval process for friends lists and vigilantly monitoring all Miiverse messages for "appropriate" content. While the company once made playing cards with naked women on them and operated a chain of "love hotels," the key to multinational success has been marketing to children, which means pretending sex doesn't exist.

Yet there is huge possibility between advertised uses and actual uses of a device. To wit, the Wii U's attached camera and video chat functionality can also be used as handy alternatives for Skype sexers. Nintendo is not promoting these qualities but they're certainly possible, and there really aren't any good reasons why two consenting adults shouldn't be able to use an entertainment device in a sexual way. The bigger cultural mystery is why we feel that sexual use of entertainment technology is inappropriate.

Wii U

Polymorphous Perversity is a 2D role-playing game made by Brazilian psychologist and sometime developer Nicolau Chaud. The game was built using RPG Maker 2003 and tells the story of a sexually disturbed hero who's been kidnapped into a strange world, where he must try to discover what is causing his sexual disorder.

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Polymorphous Perversity takes scandal and unease as its starting point.

Polymorphous Perversity applies the traditional structure of RPG combat to sex, with the man thrusting himself into naked women to deplete their hit points, while also draining some of his own. After successfully draining a woman's HP, she disappears from the game world, having "fulfilled her destiny," while the man levels up, allowing him to take fewer turns to successfully complete the sex act. Polymorphous Perversity takes scandal and unease as its starting point, rendering a view of sexuality -- male sexuality in particular -- as an inescapable obsession that transforms everything else in the game, even background shrubbery, which are disembodied penises swaying in the breeze.

Far Cry 3 dove into its own Freudian abyss with two sex scenes, the most bizarre of which comes at the game's end. After climbing into a hallucinatory island temple, you're given a mystic knife and told to kill your girlfriend, Liza. If you choose to kill her, players are magically transported from the corpse of one woman and into coitus with another, Citra, the local mystic, intent on bringing a horned demon god back to life.

Far Cry 3

As the player orgasms she claims his sperm has impregnated her with the demon's seedling. Then she kills our now useless hero. The events are nonsensical but they resonate with a Freudian model for fear wherein men mistrust their relentless sex-drives that will make them vulnerable to bestial succubi who only want to drain them of their precious life force.

It's easy to forget about the sweetness in all of this, but The Darkness II offers a simple and beautiful summation of why sex and -- more specifically -- physical intimacy in games are worth pursuing. In a mid-game flashback, the be-tentacled Jackie remembers an early moment in his relationship with the now-dead Jennie, visiting her at an empty diner where she was working the night shift. After a short conversation the two spend a wonderfully languorous three minutes dancing to the Flamingos' "I Only Have Eyes for You."

Jackie's involvement with the mafia, and his demon tentacles, would later lead to Jennie's murder, which frames the scene in postlapsarian gloom. Yet, interrupting the flow of blood and violence for a few quiet minutes of simply being close to another person without the need to fight or defend one's self is an excellent use of downtime. Minutes pass with players looking at the top of someone else's head as it lays against their chest. "I think about you every day, Jennie," Jackie says. "Every minute of every day." Ultimately it's not the ecstasy or the contorted pyrotechnics of sex that make it so unforgettable, but its role in holding two people together in time and place, each wanting to be as physically close to the other as possible.

The Darkness II

It can be so difficult to depict sexuality in video games. Games are supposed to carry us away from what we share with everyone else, creating a personal cocoon of experience built around someone else's creation. Sex makes the artifice of games apparent because many of us have some firsthand inkling of what is being depicted. We can see all the minute ways the simulation gets it wrong, flaws that are much less perceptible when the subject is tanks or creatures. It's still easier to animate a gun than a kiss.

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It's still easier to animate a gun than a kiss.

In 2012 it became slightly less absurd to imagine a time when developers might at last be able to render sex with the same care, thought, and creativity that they apply to violence. While we wait, you can head back out onto the battlefield. I'll be in the diner, slow dancing. Or maybe taking dirty pictures with my 3DS camera.

Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York. Pictochat with him at your own risk or follow him on Twitter at @mike_thomsen.

Source : ign[dot]com

Quentin Tarantino Reveals Plans for Killer Crow

While doing press for his new release Django Unchained, director Quentin Tarantino revealed plans for a future project titled Killer Crow, an Inglourious Basterds spin-off to be set in 1944 after Normandy.

"I don't know exactly when I'm going to do it, but there's something about this that would suggest a trilogy," Tarantino told The Root (via Salon). "My original idea for Inglourious Basterds way back when was that this [would be] a huge story that included the [smaller] story that you saw in the film, but also followed a bunch of black troops, and they had been f--ked over by the American military and kind of go apes--t. They basically -- the way Lt. Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) and the Basterds are having an "Apache resistance" -- [the] black troops go on an Apache warpath and kill a bunch of white soldiers and white officers on a military base and are just making a warpath to Switzerland."

The filmmaker continued, "So that was always going to be part of it. And I was going to do it as a miniseries, and that was going to be one of the big storylines. When I decided to try to turn it into a movie, that was a section I had to take out to help tame my material. I have most of that written. It's ready to go; I just have to write the second half of it."

Tarantino added that Killer Crow "would be [connected to] Inglourious Basterds, too, because Inglourious Basterds are in it, but it is about the soldiers."

Source : ign[dot]com

Saturday, 29 December 2012

Serialised Storytelling: A Changing Landscape

The games industry is built on sequels. They have been around since before a sequel meant adding a bow to the main character and changing its honorific – I’m looking at you Ms. Pac-man. Traditionally, two types of sequels have existed: franchises with stand-alone entries (Grand Theft Auto) which focus more on advancing gameplay and world building with each subsequent entry; and franchises with traditional sequels (Halo) which treat serialised storytelling in a similar way to movies or books.

As the way games are produced and sold has changed, however, so too has the creative side of the industry. This has resulted in some exciting projects which toy with the way games can be used to tell stories. A number of recent titles highlight these trends within the industry, showcasing how developers are tackling the issues involved with serialised stories in gaming.

Episodes from a Zombie Apocalypse

Telltale Games has been at the forefront of the episodic trend. In recent years the studio has launched new chapters in the Sam & Max, and Monkey Island series’, while also adapting Back to the Future as an episodic point and click adventure game. While these titles were modest commercial and critical successes, Telltale hit a corpse-filled goldmine in 2012 with its take on The Walking Dead.

How much of the success of The Walking Dead is due to its episodic format? Would it work as well as a single, larger game? For television series’, episodic storytelling relies on the momentum of the story to bring the audience back for each new episode. This is certainly the case for The Walking Dead, but other factors are also at play. The interactive, branching narrative structure of the series, combined with the long gaps between episodes has allowed for a collective conversation between those who have played it – comparing and contrasting choices and consequences. While a single, larger game would have come and gone, the buzz surrounding this series has grown with each new release, building throughout the year.

Is the success of The Walking Dead lightening in a bottle, or is it a sign of things to come? It’s going to be interesting to find out.

The Branching Narratives of Mass Effect

Player choice is a defining feature of gaming. While many games allow a player’s actions to influence the story, these choices and their consequences have traditionally been confined to a single game. The Mass Effect series famously (and possibly infamously) touted an approach to storytelling whereby player choices would be reflected across a trilogy of games. Mass Effect tracked a host of variables; from alliances, deaths, and romantic entanglements in a galactic war spanning planets and species. The only thing the game didn’t track was the spread of space-STIs.

Mass Effect was loudly criticised for its conclusion, which many felt didn’t adequately or effectively live up to the potential of its branching narrative structure. Previously important plot threads and characters were short-changed in the final game, and previous choices had little bearing on the ultimate conclusion. But was Mass Effect a victim of its own hype and ambition, or are these shortcomings inherent to this style of serialised story-telling?

Branching narratives mean that each subsequent game grows much more complex in terms of how the choices made by players influence the game. And the more choices players are able to make, the more attached they invariably become: it becomes their game, their story anchored by relationships they’ve formed.

When so many story points can diverge, and millions of players each have their own expectations, is it even possible to keep everyone happy? I’m sure this question is keeping many a developer awake with Blue/Red/Green nightmares.

Like Mass Effect, The Walking Dead focuses on branching narratives and player choices. Unlike the expansive scope of Mass Effect, The Walking Dead is a lot more intimate, concentrating on the collective fate of a handful of survivors in an increasingly bleak world. This limited narrative focus lends itself more favourably to the branching narrative model resulting in a more tightly woven story where player choices (at least appear to) have greater weight and consequence.

These two games highlight how successful use of branching narratives can increase player immersion. Both, however, have inherent limitations. This style of storytelling is certainly in its infancy.

Assassin’s Creed and the Meta Story

Assassin’s Creed is one of the biggest franchises within the gaming world, and there’s definitely an argument to be made that a large part of its success as an ongoing series is due to its narrative structure. The bulk of each game serves as a standalone adventure, with its own narrative arc, locations and (often) time period. Tying the games together is an over-arching mythology told through a single protagonist - Desmond.

This approach means each game can radically change its central focus if it chooses to, leaping across both time and space, and keeping each entry fresh. The overarching mythology provides a thread that ties everything together and keeps the audience wanting more.

On the other hand, this style of storytelling has some potential pitfalls. Firstly, how and when the main mythology is presented needs to be finely balanced. Secondly, the meta story and central character need to be compelling. On both counts Ubisoft is straddling a fine line but mostly pulls off its balancing act.

This model combines the best elements of stand-alone games and traditional sequels – allowing each game to establish new and varied ideas, while maintaining a narrative through-line to create a story (hopefully) greater than the sum of its parts. How successfully this template can be employed by other developers remains to be seen. Expect many developers in the next generation to look closely at Assassin’s Creed as a template for serialised storytelling.

How do you see the state of serialised storytelling in games? In which areas can they improve, where do they currently excel? Hit us up in the comments section with your thoughts.

Scott Clarke is a freelance games journalist based in Australia. He's also a professional rabble-rouser. You can follow him on IGN or Twitter. Oh, and why not come and hang out with IGN Australia's staff on Facebook?

Source : ign[dot]com

The Year in Video Game Violence 2012

Editor's Note: this piece contains plot spoilers for Spec Ops: The Line and Halo 4.

In video games the subject of violence is often treated as monolithic, something which must lead us to moral truth. In reality, no such simplicity is possible. Just as the violence of an older sibling delivering a charlie horse is different from the violence of an armed robbery, violent video games must be taken each in their own context.

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It was a year of games that pushed back against us.

In 2012 many video games were cruel, horrific, surreal, and disturbing creations. It was a year of games that pushed back against us every time we pressed into them. Works whose meanings are obscured when taken as a whole, but when considered individually reveal the wild variety of experiences that can come from one seemingly simple word.

Hotline Miami was one of the purest examples of video game violence in 2012, luring players into a gauche world of stereotype with incessant spurts of gore and mid-tempo dance loops. The game, from the luminary Swede Jonatan Söderström, is a frenetic, top-down action game with almost immediate respawns after death, turning the experience into a kind of violent hypnosis.

All of this is built around the ingenious mechanic of using the mouse to spiral one's aim around the screen like a weaponized clock hand. The game's visuals, inspired by the hyperreality of 1980's action movies, initially give it a satiric effect. But the longer you play, the more the visual elements recede, leaving an obsessive vortex of blood spatters and corpses, which briefly animate death like Tetris blocks atomizing into empty space.

Papo y Yo made an interactive parable out of developer Vander Caballero's childhood growing up with an abusive and alcoholic father. The game's boy hero, who enters a magical favela fantasy world after hiding in a closet during one of his father's belligerent outbursts, has no destructive powers of his own. He must instead bait a snuggly monster to crash through walls and help him reach high-up places, though when the monster gets high on toxic frogs the boy's beloved helper becomes the game's only real enemy, chasing the boy and slamming him into the ground again and again. The game is an experience of puzzle solving that interrupts the player with violent betrayal from your most trusted ally.

ZombiU

ZombiU turned the fight against the undead into a strangely personal experience. As you play, the game will populate the fallen corpses of other people on your friends list into your experience. Even if you can't play together, there is a sense that their death is given some small purpose by allowing you to loot their bodies for weapons and ammunition.

When you're taken by the clasping arms of the infected, you will respawn as a new character whose first order of business is to return to find your former character -- now transformed into a lumbering and lost zombie -- who you must kill to retrieve your former belongings. It's an incremental reminder, however transparent and mechanical, that each of those zombies were people, and surely each of them struggled to escape before they, like you, proved susceptible to failure through no fault of their own.

Spec Ops: The Line offered a seemingly familiar war shooter experience, but gradually revealed that its hero was a hallucinating wreck who was doing more harm than good on his quest to rendezvous with a mysterious Colonel Konrad. One of the first major turning points in the game comes when Walker decides to fire white phosphorous on what he thinks are troops loyal to the Colonel, overriding strong objections from one of his teammates.

Spec Ops: The Line

As you walk through the wreckage after, surveying the burnt bodies, you realize the phosphorous hit civilians the Colonel's troops had been trying to get out of the battle zone. Games have a way of always excusing violent action by asking players to perform it in circumstances where there was no other choice, and Spec Ops seizes on this classic construct to remind players that this is a formula for villainy far more than it is for heroics.

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Spec Ops is an elaborate set up to make players feel guilty.

Medal of Honor Warfighter offers the reverse experience, with one early level built around a car chase through an open air market in Somalia. The first-person experience significantly narrows your view as you drive, frequently smashing into stalls, killing innocent merchants. The game even offers a Trophy/Achievement ("Vendor Bender") for players who destroy 90 stalls or more during the chase.

If Spec Ops is an elaborate set up to make players feel guilty for their propensity to destroy first and think later, Warfighter rewards it, creating a scene where the military imperatives of the United States take precedent over a poor Somali trying to support him or herself. Not only should you not worry about trying to sympathize with these bystanders, you should indulge in the pleasure of mayhem itself by trying to take out as many as possible.

Halo 4

Halo 4 offers another strange twist of moral logic, a kind of anthropomorphic, object fetishism endemic to violent video game fantasies. The story revives Master Chief and his imaginary friend Cortana, who becomes periodically visible as a semi-nude hologram telling players where to go next. The story centers around the growing instability at the heart of Cortana's AI. As you sprint through the game's eight missions you'll kill all manner of living creatures, each with their own warlike motivations. But the biggest personal imperative for Master Chief is to save the computer that matters more to him than any other living thing. When you reach the sentimental conclusion, Halo 4 encourages you to mourn for a corrupt piece of software, whose companionship was worth more than the mountain of corpses that lead you to that climactic point.

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Halo 4 encourages you to mourn for a corrupt piece of software.

Video games are not simply violent, as if violence is an objective and singular condition. They simulate one of the most inescapable and disturbing aspects of human life and allow us to consider it in a near infinite number of contexts, each of which dramatically changes the nature and meaning of a simulated act of violence.

Like every other form of human creativity, games are not guide posts whose behavior must be modeled, but prompts for personal inquiry that can either be taken up or left behind. Many believe we will become less violent by leaving these violent tendencies unexamined. But we have only just begun to discover how many different meanings we can see in them, each unique in their own way.

Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York. He killed a chicken once. Follow him on Twitter at @mike_thomsen.

Source : ign[dot]com

The Year in Video Game Violence 2012

Editor's Note: this piece contains plot spoilers for Spec Ops: The Line and Halo 4.

“

It was a year of games that pushed back against us.

ZombiU

Spec Ops: The Line

“

Spec Ops is an elaborate set up to make players feel guilty.

Halo 4

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Halo 4 encourages you to mourn for a corrupt piece of software.

Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York. He killed a chicken once. Follow him on Twitter at @mike_thomsen.

Source : ign[dot]com

Friday, 28 December 2012

IGN's 2012 Wrestling Year in Review

Well, here we are. We set our course straight for oblivion and managed to come out the other side unscathed. Stupid Mayan attention whores. But having come so precariously close to the edge, so damnably near mass extinction, I've decided to streamline this Year in Wrestling piece a bit. I used to separate this thing into a news section, a "FTW" section and a "FML/FTL" section. But due to the fact that most readers/skimmers didn't even notice that there were sections, and the fact that using "FTW" these days is akin to doing the Arsenio Hall dog pound "whoof whoof whoof," I'm going to just prattle off a bunch of "things that happened." Some good, some bad, all ridiculous. Because it's freakin' wrestling.

BTW, if you don't get the Arsenio Hall reference you've managed to make me feel incredibly ancient while also hyper-illustrating my point.

IGN's Top 50 Wrestlers of All Time

Oh, and since I'm wallowing in my laziness, I should also point out that most of the pictures used here are pictures from the past year's Wrap Ups. So consider that part of the retrospect too. A year in dumb cat pictures. With a smattering of Phone Dog. Ah yes, Phone Dog. The magical dog who politely answered the phone without fail. Many wondered why I retired him, despite the fact that there were still thousands upon thousands of pictures of people on the telephone out there ready to be cropped next to a picture of the dog on the phone. Well, let's put it this way. By the end, I was posting things like this...

Yup, that's pretty much the tipping point, folks.

No, there won't be an official Wrap Up for the dreaded Christmas-themed RAW from last Monday. Shows like that just make me sad that all the boys and girls have to work shows like that. Of course, it was pre-taped from the previous week, but still. They could have just NOT done that show and given us a "Best of 2012" episode. But then they would have violated their no "rerun" policy, which would have then eliminated RAW from that weird race that only they seem to be running. That being said, Cena rolled a bowling ball into Alberto Del Rio's d***. So it wasn't a total loss.

Disclaimer, y'all. My New Year's resolution is to watch more ROH. I have a palpable dislike for watching things online and so I haven't really kept up with ROH since it stopped being on HDNet. The thing is though, even if I still kept up with it regularly, there's never all that much to write, Wrap Up-wise, about ROH. Or DGUSA. Aside from just saying things like "great match," "great match" and "great match" over and over. I'm better off addressing the lunacy of the WWE and TNA. The more "story" there is, the more I can kvetch. The more material I have to draw from. A few TNA fans wonder why I don't write as much about TNA as I do about the WWE and the fact is...TNA doesn't give me as much to work with. Also, I'd probably, almost immediately, chug a bottle of rust remover. TNA has two hours of TV a week and not everyone makes it onto TV. Simply put, there's just not as much going on. They're also still facing the same problems they've always had, but now their ratings are down 18% year over year and their attendance is down 40%.

Okay, Picard "WTF?" meme base image. Engage!

Now we can get into all the insane and crazy...

Um...Picard?

Dammit, sexy snuggly Picard! Knock it off! It's time for a look back at 2012!

AyaTROLLah of Rock 'n" Rolla

Wayward son, Chris Jericho found his way back to the WWE this year, complete with a Lite-Brite "Dynamo from Running Man" jacket that made him look even more awkwardly naked when paired with his tiny trunks. The videos that harbingered his return had little to do with the man who actually showed up (something something post-apocalyptic detention hall) and then, when he did finally arrive, he trolled everyone by not speaking for weeks. Other than a 'Mania feud with Punk, it seemed like Jericho and the WWE didn't really know what else to with his character, and by the end he'd turned babyface again to face Ziggler at SummerSlam.

Oh, and let's not forget the 30-day suspension Jericho had dumped on his sparkly shoulders for stomping on the Brazilian flag during an international tour. At this point, negotiations for Jericho's upteenth return have fallen apart due to Jericho wanting more freedom to do non-wrestling things. No word yet on how negotiations with the jacket are going.

SidewaysBootAssShovePieCookin!

"Pow! You're pregnant!"

The Rock made his hotly-anticipated return in 2011, stretching out a year-long war of words with Cena leading up to an epic showdown at WrestleMania 28 in 2012. Leading up to the big battle, The Rock ramped up his TV appearance schedule, even getting in the ring with Cena a few times to trade barbs and scribble out a bunch of Brian Gertwitz notes on his wrist, like he was cheating on a middle school geography test.

The Rock beating Cena at 'Mania was surprising since, plainly, The Rock didn't need the win. He's so massively over, and not a full time member of the roster, that most everyone expected a Cena victory. And a Miami riot. But "The Great One" was given the Rock Bottom victory. And then another headlining spot at WrestleMania 29.

But here's the thing. Even though Cena, and others, criticize The Rock for A: leaving the WWE, and B: only coming back every now and again to steal the spotlight from the boys in the locker room... we don't give a s***. Nope. Not one s***. In fact, none of the guys ever seem to turn that whole equation around and look at themselves. What does it say about the modern WWE wrestlers if, say, a guy like The Rock, can come back and overshadow them ten times over? Man, I can't wait to see what happens when MVP, John Morrison and Shelton Benjamin return in 2013. We'll all be like primitive apes at the foot of the monolith from 2001.

Bork Laser

2012 marked the return of wunderkind Brock Lesnar, back at the (storyline) behest of John Laurinaitis to destroy John Cena and "legitimize" the WWE. But Lesnar seemed to have, given his very limited amount of contracted TV appearances, only three PPV matches in him. One with Cena (which was pretty good and gave us our first real taste of WWE blood in years), one with Triple H and one more yet to come - presumedly a rematch with Triple H at 'Mania. So, because of this, Lesnar had to be off TV a lot. Be it a firing or a quitting. Which means that the best thing that came from Lesnar's big return was the return of Paul Heyman.

Paul Heyman, AJ Lee and CM Punk on page 2...

Source : ign[dot]com

IGN's 2012 Wrestling Year in Review

BTW, if you don't get the Arsenio Hall reference you've managed to make me feel incredibly ancient while also hyper-illustrating my point.

IGN's Top 50 Wrestlers of All Time

Yup, that's pretty much the tipping point, folks.

Okay, Picard "WTF?" meme base image. Engage!

Now we can get into all the insane and crazy...

Um...Picard?

Dammit, sexy snuggly Picard! Knock it off! It's time for a look back at 2012!

AyaTROLLah of Rock 'n" Rolla

SidewaysBootAssShovePieCookin!

"Pow! You're pregnant!"

Bork Laser

Paul Heyman, AJ Lee and CM Punk on page 2...

Source : ign[dot]com

Avengers, TDKR Among 2012's Most Scientifically Bogus Films

Some of the most popular genre films of the year have also been cited by science buffs as the "most science-distorting movies" of 2012.

According to PopSci, the year's seven worst offenders are as follows, from the mildest violations to the most severe:

The Amazing Spider-Man for "blatant disregard for the conservation of mass."
Looper, because backward time travel is impossible.
Skyfall, for some of Q's computer hacking and for Bond's amazing ability to endure freezing water as long as he does.
The Avengers. One word: Helicarrier!
The Dark Knight Rises, for every spoilerish thing from the ending as well as Batman's spinal recuperative skills.
Total Recall's "gravity elevator" that allows workers to travel through the center of the planet.
Prometheus is deemed the most egregious violator of science ... for pretty much everything in it.

Via io9.

Source : ign[dot]com

The Final Year of Xbox 360

The original Xbox went out with a bang in 2005, delivering some of the console’s best games ever like Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, and Psychonauts. It seems history may repeat itself, as the Xbox 360 is also set to get a spectacular sendoff in 2013 in advance of the so-called Xbox 720/Durango next fall. Yes, of course, plenty of games will find their way to the 360 in 2014 – good ones, too! – but 2013 marks the final year that the current Xbox will be the flagship of the brand, with the entire world’s eyes (and dollars) fixed upon it.

If you don’t see a game on the list below, odds are we either A) Didn't think it was good enough to make the cut, or B) Have reason to believe it will be an Xbox 720 game (i.e. Rainbow Six Patriots, Doom 4, Watch Dogs, Star Wars 1313, etc.).

Oh, and one final note that’s equal parts exciting and terrifying: every single one of the games below is due out in the first half of the year, due entirely, in our opinion, to publishers not wanting their games to get lost in the next-gen hype/news cycle. That’s a lot of gaming to be done between now and E3 2013. Wow.

With all that out of the way, let the Xbox 360’s swan song begin!

Grand Theft Auto V

Release Date: Spring

Why it’s Hot: You know why. Besides the fact that Rockstar has a better handle on creating beautiful, open-world sandboxes rife with humor and personality than anyone else, they’ve kept everyone waiting a long time. By the time GTA V releases – and it’s almost certainly going to be April or May, as 2K’s own BioShock Infinite was moved to the end of March in order to still make the company’s fiscal quarter, opening the door for GTA to pad the shareholders’ pockets in the following fiscal quarter – it will have been five full years since GTA IV came out. And we kind of like that. It simply wouldn’t be as much fun – nor would the game design evolve as significantly – if a new GTA was stamped out every other year like clockwork. As for the game itself, it’s giving off very San Andreas-y vibes, and not just because it happens to be set in San Andreas. Between tennis, dirtbiking, and myriad other activities, we might not even want or need any other games until the Xbox 720 releases.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Fantasy and an epic tale meet in Starbreeze's incredible Brothers.

Release Date: Q1

Why it’s Hot: It’s no secret that we love Journey. It was our Game of the Year for 2012, after all. And we quite love Fable too, even though the haters on the Internetz are quick to mock the franchise. So to combine the two into one cinematic, story-driven experience – one written and directed by a decorated Swedish filmmaker – meant our interest was piqued. And after we saw the game, we knew: this is going to be good. Really, really good. Brothers is expected to clock in around 3-4 hours, so like Journey before it, it’s one you’re going to want to start and finish in one sitting.

Can you find the hidden pair of eyes in this image?

The Cave

Move along folks, nothing to see here...

Release Date: Q1

Why it’s Hot: Two words: Ron Gilbert. If those two words mean nothing to you, then go play Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2, the two timeless classics that put him on the map. The Cave is Gilbert’s new baby, and it’s got his trademark dry wit, headlined by The Cave itself – a sentient character who narrates your quest. Unlike most adventure games, The Cave features platforming in addition to puzzle-solving, and it’s going to be highly replayable thanks to a large cast of characters – only three of whom you can play with at any given time. Did we mention that it’s an adventure game by Ron Gilbert?

Splinter Cell: Blacklist

Release Date: Spring

Why it’s Hot: Let’s be realistic here: it’s unlikely that Splinter Cell is going to return to the hardcore stealth ways of 2005’s classic Chaos Theory anytime soon. Instead, the “action-stealth” mash-up introduced by 2010’s Conviction is the future of the franchise, for better or for worse. Fortunately, Blacklist seems to operate somewhere between those two games, retaining action-y options if you want them but offering a wealth of silent, nonlethal tactics as well. We’re still upset that Michael Ironside is no longer voicing Sam Fisher, but we’ll get over it if the gameplay is awesome.

Gears of War: Judgment

Release Date: March 19

Why it’s Hot: We’ve already played lots of multiplayer – specifically the new OverRun mode, which is essentially a glorious mating of Horde and Team Deathmatch – but now we’ve rolled through some campaign as well, and we’ll tell you this: Judgment is going to be a very different Gears of War from the Marcus Fenix trilogy you’ve spent the last six years getting wrapped up in. Skill kills, brutal challenges – it’s going to remind you a bit of Bulletstorm in all the best ways. Not a surprise, given that Bulletstorm developer People Can Fly is behind the wheel for Judgment.

Source : ign[dot]com

Tomb Raider Multiplayer Announced

Square Enix's upcoming Tomb Raider game will feature Mulitplayer, confirmed Crystal Dynamics Global Brand Director Karl Stewart today via Twitter.

No other details were given, only that the upcoming issue of Official Xbox Magazine will have details on "new modes and info on who you’ll be playing as".

IGN has reached out to Crystal Dynamics and will update once we have more details.

What do you think about adding multiplayer to the Tomb Raider mix? Is it a good thing? A not so good thing? Let us know in the comments below, and let's have a chat about it on twitter!

Casey Lynch is Editor-in-Chief of IGN.com. He is eager to see how Lara's new adventure turns out, but he's not sure what to think about Tomb Raider Deathmatch. Tell him what you think on IGN and on Twitter at @Lynchtacular.

Source : ign[dot]com

The Best Sequels of 2012

Source : ign[dot]com