Lol, have you seen the movie Supertroopers? There's a bit about a bear in there that you could use.
No safe search. Never much believed in it. Definitely reconsidering that stance now.
I'd love to disagree, but I did share that story on the other forum about how I accidentally searched for "anal" a ton because I was too lazy to just type in "analytics." So... okay, fair.
Nothing to do with me. Given the "Racist" comment, I think he was talking about The Jungle Book?
Wait, you don't know the Jungle Book? For maximum creepiness, read the past two pages and then watch this:
If I ever get a pet panther, I'm totally naming it Bagheera.
On a more angry note, Remember Me is already 20% off on one website. Please excuse me as I stab the collective gamer subconscious in the face 50 times. This is why we can't have nice things; a bunch of reviewers rush through the game because they didn't receive enough pre-release ad revenue not to, gamers listen to their ill-informed, copy-pasted-from-other-reviews-to-maintain-consensus stupidity and subsequently pass on the game, and now we have a game better than Bioshock Infinite that's less than two weeks old and already underrated. It's been completely drowned out by the anticipation for games that likely won't even get close to matching it. One of the few great female protagonists in gaming is doomed to disappear under a massive wave of bro-gaming and its bought-and-paid-for anticipation, so you can't imagine the depths of my sadness right now. And rage. Mostly rage, actually.
The only way I'll get that game is for $20 or less. Still not sold, 227. It really does look like a copy/paste menagerie.
The pre-release videos and stuff leading up to release totally misrepresented the game. It's far more linear than the blatantly Assassin's Creed vibe it had in those videos (though that's apparently become a bad thing since March). It's pretty scripted at times, too, but if that disqualified games from being great, then Metal Gear Solid would never have gotten to game 5. It kind of reminds me of the first Metal Game, actually. Not in tone or atmosphere or anything, but in the sense that it's a linear game that I finished and immediately wanted to start playing again.
The reviewers make combat seem awful, when in reality it's one of the best combat systems I've seen. You're not just button mashing, but actually strategically using certain combos that you set up ahead of time in order to break enemies' blocks, heal yourself, and reduce the cooldowns of your special moves:
I don't really care if people wait for sales, but the lack of any hype whatsoever while people sit around waiting for games that look like complete and utter shit is astounding to me. You'd think that quality sells itself, but you really do have to pay for hype these days or else end up completely overlooked.
The reviewers make combat seem awful, when in reality it's one of the best combat systems I've seen. You're not just button mashing, but actually strategically using certain combos that you set up ahead of time in order to break enemies' blocks, heal yourself, and reduce the cooldowns of your special moves:
I don't really care if people wait for sales, but the lack of any hype whatsoever while people sit around waiting for games that look like complete and utter shit is astounding to me. You'd think that quality sells itself, but you really do have to pay for hype these days or else end up completely overlooked.
http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-RME/remember-me
Two 5/5 user reviews. Out of two user reviews total. Sigh.
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/remember-me
Not that metacritic means anything, but user reviews taken as a whole tend to provide a fairly accurate picture. The user reviews for the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions are even more skewed toward the green.
It's just depressing the direction that games in general are going. I don't mind the dumbing-down of difficulties or games becoming "more accessible," but when people gravitate toward the generic-looking Watch Dogs or bro-shooter 36793837, leaving games with well-written and plausible characters behind, it's really frustrating. This happened with Velvet Assassin, too. Good game. Good protagonist based on a real-life badass. Interesting morphine element that tied into the story. The physical version even came with a printed manual in color. Completely overlooked, and now you can pick it up for like 5 bucks. $1.25 when the digital version is on sale, which is almost always.
Okay, I'm done. Also, I'm disappointed that Fat Sardine didn't get offended by that video and the obvious implications it has about Baloo.
Two 5/5 user reviews. Out of two user reviews total. Sigh.
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/remember-me
Not that metacritic means anything, but user reviews taken as a whole tend to provide a fairly accurate picture. The user reviews for the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions are even more skewed toward the green.
It's just depressing the direction that games in general are going. I don't mind the dumbing-down of difficulties or games becoming "more accessible," but when people gravitate toward the generic-looking Watch Dogs or bro-shooter 36793837, leaving games with well-written and plausible characters behind, it's really frustrating. This happened with Velvet Assassin, too. Good game. Good protagonist based on a real-life badass. Interesting morphine element that tied into the story. The physical version even came with a printed manual in color. Completely overlooked, and now you can pick it up for like 5 bucks. $1.25 when the digital version is on sale, which is almost always.
Okay, I'm done. Also, I'm disappointed that Fat Sardine didn't get offended by that video and the obvious implications it has about Baloo.
You're only encouraging Baloo by turning a blind eye to his perversion. Think of the children! The video was just the Bare Necessities song, but it shows Baloo eating bananas, getting freaky with a tree, and generally being way too hands-on with Mowgli. Very scary stuff, even before you get into all the potential metaphors.
Checked for the NeoGAF thread, and it looked to be more positive than you made it sound. Or maybe it turned around? As for the other one, I honestly don't care what anyone at RPS has to say unless it has to do with how bad RPS employees are at their jobs. Game journalists should be held to a higher standard than "intermittently competent," if you ask me. Which you didn't, but you should have.
Checked for the NeoGAF thread, and it looked to be more positive than you made it sound. Or maybe it turned around? As for the other one, I honestly don't care what anyone at RPS has to say unless it has to do with how bad RPS employees are at their jobs. Game journalists should be held to a higher standard than "intermittently competent," if you ask me. Which you didn't, but you should have.
Why? No other job is.
Really, they aren't. Maybe pilots?
It depends on your standard of competency. Journalistic competency consists of what? Reporting what you believe to be true as best as you can? More? Less? What would you do better?
People love to complain, often about things they have no idea how to do themselves or things that offend them. Not saying this is your issue with RPS, but I see that a lot about gaming sites and journalism. All sites, eventually.
I find RPS to be pretty solid. I don't always agree with their perspectives, but I have no issue with their integrity or journalistic competence.
Last time I saw that NeoGAF thread, it was pretty negative. Let's see..latest page, 21, positive. 18...much less positive. Some defend it, more not. General impression I get is wait for sale or rent. Page 14..positive. Yeah, still gonna wait.
Heh, I see i-Lo got hisself banned from NeoGAF. Naughty!
And proving I have the willpower of a squashed squirrel, i went to order Remember Me from Green Man gaming and it won't take the voucher code. Hmm. HMM. To buy at full price or not?
Really, they aren't. Maybe pilots?
It depends on your standard of competency. Journalistic competency consists of what? Reporting what you believe to be true as best as you can? More? Less? What would you do better?
People love to complain, often about things they have no idea how to do themselves or things that offend them. Not saying this is your issue with RPS, but I see that a lot about gaming sites and journalism. All sites, eventually.
I find RPS to be pretty solid. I don't always agree with their perspectives, but I have no issue with their integrity or journalistic competence.
Last time I saw that NeoGAF thread, it was pretty negative. Let's see..latest page, 21, positive. 18...much less positive. Some defend it, more not. General impression I get is wait for sale or rent. Page 14..positive. Yeah, still gonna wait.
Heh, I see i-Lo got hisself banned from NeoGAF. Naughty!
And proving I have the willpower of a squashed squirrel, i went to order Remember Me from Green Man gaming and it won't take the voucher code. Hmm. HMM. To buy at full price or not?
Depends on the airline. More often than not, Southwest Airlines' captains fly like drunken bats. Ever had a captain make an announcement while you're in the air and realize that he's slurring his words? Yeaaaaaaah. I can think of better places to be with a potentially drunk driver than above the clouds.
That's exactly what my problem with it is. Journalism isn't supposed to have anything to do with what one believes to be true. It's like at some point in the past, normal journalism tripped and fell into the opinion pages and people just accepted it for some reason. Really, this is becoming true of all journalism these days, but it's especially prevalent in gaming journalism.
For example, that RPS Cyberpunk interview where the interviewer was talking about the Cyberpunk trailer "disempowering someone who seems like a lead female character." Direct quote. "Will Cyberpunk be more even-handed in terms of the way it treats gender overall, though?" So much subjectivity there, but it's still presented as though the way they see things is some absolute truth.
One would think gaming journalism would revolve around games, but at some point it started to become about causes and taking sides. That's not even mentioning the whole "seems to be a lead female character" bit that shows just how little preparation happened before the interview. I don't know if these people aren't aware of their own biases and causes or if they just don't do a good enough job of communicating to readers how much of what they say is subjective, but it's not journalism. It's op-ed stuff that calls itself journalism.
Reviews are trickier because hard facts pretty much disappear at that point and subjectivity is more or less the point. I wish more reviewers were clear about the kinds of priorities they typically have going in, but the closest thing to that I can recall is this gem of "I hate everything about this genre, so let's review it anyway as though I were trying to be objective!"
That's not even getting into the flagrant stuff. I refuse to use Eurogamer for anything ever again after they let someone who did PR for Black Ops 2 review Black Ops 2. I refuse to use Destructoid because they suspended the one person who actually shared information about the Chloe Sagal thing, then covered up their conflicting reasons for doing so by editing out forum posts that were different than their official reasons. There are a hilarious number of insane things like these that have happened.
I vote no, because if you hate it, I'd be partially responsible. Probably. Ducking responsibility for that would take too much work.
Ah, well, see. Right there is, if you'll permit me a judgement, a fundamental flaw in your perspective. It has -always- been "what you believe is true." Verify as best you can, but when reporting an issue, there is often very few, even no, ways to be 100% sure.
This isn't sophistry - much of journalism is based on witness reports, not first-hand evidence. Some are second or third hand reports. Consider Watergate, a famous case. Woodward and Bernstein worked mostly from anonymous sources. They believed Deep Throat. He had convincing stories and, to them, solid credibility. They did their best to verify what he said, but, of course, it was cover-up.
In Canada, we had the Maher Arar scandal relatively recently. Our cops handed information on a suspected terrorist to US security. They sent Arar to Syria, where he was tortured. Eventually, he was released and the Syrians said they had nothing on him. Our people announced they, in the end, had nothing on him and he was fully exonerated. Much money was paid to the poor bastard.
The first media controversy? "Arar's case reached new heights of controversy after reporter Juliet O'Neill wrote an article in the Ottawa Citizen on November 8, 2003, containing information leaked to her from an unknown security source, possibly within the RCMP. The secret documents provided by her source suggested Arar was a trained member of an al-Qaeda terrorist cell. The RCMP later raided O'Neill's house pursuant to a sealed search warrants it had obtained to investigate the leak"
The leak turned out to be false - there were no such documents. But O'Neill did believe they were authentic and considered it her duty to release them.
The media, of course, spent months hammering the government on Arar, based mostly on the -lack- of evidence about his incarceration.
These are very serious issues, with serious consequences. Unlike gaming. But they do demonstrate that any journalist has tan obligation to verify to the best of their ability, the facts of a story. But only to the point they truly believe in the source, or the data. Sometimes, belief is all you get.
As for the politicization of gaming, I shall be a wee bit harsh here: grow up. I mean that not in the personal sense of your maturity, ( you could be more mature than I!), but in the sense that we choose to exempt gaming from the rest of our adult hobbies.
We should not. Gaming, the artistic and entertainment medium, is no more exempt from examination and castigation than literature or film. If a gaming scene depicts violent torture or mutilation of animals, children or even Republicans, that is worthy of examination. If it displays a marked political turn, that is worthy of examination. If it shows a turn for the sexist, or the sexualization...well, you get my drift. A writer must begin with an opinion, a sense of place on a story, if they are to write about that story at all. RPS makes it clear what their perspective is, when they feel it is necessary. Then they do their research and publish.
As a side-note: when a full-dressed and geared man shoots shoots a mostly-naked woman in the back of the head, yes, it is fairly disempowering. Even if she is surrounded by the bodies of her victims. She's just been shot in the head.
I get why they did it, I get the contrasts created. I get that they odds are they had a pretty good idea of what they wanted from that scene. You do that, you are going to get questions. Tarantino gets those sorts of questions all the time and for similar reasons.
Op-ed pieces, not that I consider necessarily a writer expressing his or her opinion in the publication they work for, an op-ed piece, are journalism. They reflect the opinion, hopefully considered, of a person not necessarily connected to the publication. It is journalism because it reports the opinions and perspectives of these non-affiliated persons, allowing the reader - or viewer - to compare a contrasting or clearly biased perspective from that of the publishers. Or in-line with the publishers. I think you are correct in that these opinion pieces are more and more prevalent in what we think of as journalistic arenas. I would suggest much of that is the hunger for conversation, bias and personality.
Social media has blurred many of these lines, of course.
Journalism cannot be neutral, but it must struggle to be honest. It is a challenging struggle at the best of times.
It will hopefully strive for fair, but that is much more...of a moving target, let's say.
Wow. Wall of text. I blame, uhmmm...Dragon. Yeah, curse you, Dragon. Etc.
This isn't sophistry - much of journalism is based on witness reports, not first-hand evidence. Some are second or third hand reports. Consider Watergate, a famous case. Woodward and Bernstein worked mostly from anonymous sources. They believed Deep Throat. He had convincing stories and, to them, solid credibility. They did their best to verify what he said, but, of course, it was cover-up.
In Canada, we had the Maher Arar scandal relatively recently. Our cops handed information on a suspected terrorist to US security. They sent Arar to Syria, where he was tortured. Eventually, he was released and the Syrians said they had nothing on him. Our people announced they, in the end, had nothing on him and he was fully exonerated. Much money was paid to the poor bastard.
The first media controversy? "Arar's case reached new heights of controversy after reporter Juliet O'Neill wrote an article in the Ottawa Citizen on November 8, 2003, containing information leaked to her from an unknown security source, possibly within the RCMP. The secret documents provided by her source suggested Arar was a trained member of an al-Qaeda terrorist cell. The RCMP later raided O'Neill's house pursuant to a sealed search warrants it had obtained to investigate the leak"
The leak turned out to be false - there were no such documents. But O'Neill did believe they were authentic and considered it her duty to release them.
The media, of course, spent months hammering the government on Arar, based mostly on the -lack- of evidence about his incarceration.
These are very serious issues, with serious consequences. Unlike gaming. But they do demonstrate that any journalist has tan obligation to verify to the best of their ability, the facts of a story. But only to the point they truly believe in the source, or the data. Sometimes, belief is all you get.
As for the politicization of gaming, I shall be a wee bit harsh here: grow up. I mean that not in the personal sense of your maturity, ( you could be more mature than I!), but in the sense that we choose to exempt gaming from the rest of our adult hobbies.
We should not. Gaming, the artistic and entertainment medium, is no more exempt from examination and castigation than literature or film. If a gaming scene depicts violent torture or mutilation of animals, children or even Republicans, that is worthy of examination. If it displays a marked political turn, that is worthy of examination. If it shows a turn for the sexist, or the sexualization...well, you get my drift. A writer must begin with an opinion, a sense of place on a story, if they are to write about that story at all. RPS makes it clear what their perspective is, when they feel it is necessary. Then they do their research and publish.
As a side-note: when a full-dressed and geared man shoots shoots a mostly-naked woman in the back of the head, yes, it is fairly disempowering. Even if she is surrounded by the bodies of her victims. She's just been shot in the head.
I get why they did it, I get the contrasts created. I get that they odds are they had a pretty good idea of what they wanted from that scene. You do that, you are going to get questions. Tarantino gets those sorts of questions all the time and for similar reasons.
Op-ed pieces, not that I consider necessarily a writer expressing his or her opinion in the publication they work for, an op-ed piece, are journalism. They reflect the opinion, hopefully considered, of a person not necessarily connected to the publication. It is journalism because it reports the opinions and perspectives of these non-affiliated persons, allowing the reader - or viewer - to compare a contrasting or clearly biased perspective from that of the publishers. Or in-line with the publishers. I think you are correct in that these opinion pieces are more and more prevalent in what we think of as journalistic arenas. I would suggest much of that is the hunger for conversation, bias and personality.
Social media has blurred many of these lines, of course.
Journalism cannot be neutral, but it must struggle to be honest. It is a challenging struggle at the best of times.
It will hopefully strive for fair, but that is much more...of a moving target, let's say.
Wow. Wall of text. I blame, uhmmm...Dragon. Yeah, curse you, Dragon. Etc.