Publisher Microforum is releasing a "massage simulator" game called Enjoy your massage!for the Nintendo Wii. (Idiosyncratic capitalization theirs, not mine. I can't say I'm fond of using full imperative sentences, complete with punctuation, as titles. Maybe they're going for a "stern German female masseuse bellowing commands" sort of tone.) Microforum promises that:
Enjoy your massage! has been created with the cooperation of a team of psychologists: a special mix of slow breath-rhythmical animations and harmonic sound relaxes the player and enhances his emotional involvement.
So "emotional involvement" is what the kids call it nowadays, apparently.
It's a natural progression, really. The Wii has achieved its stunning success by appealing to a hitherto untapped market for casual and family-oriented games, so apparently developers for the system are again seeking out new markets by trying to win over the lucrative "sweaty, clammy-skinned perverts who can't quite work up the courage to take that copy of Chained Heat up to the counter at the video store, age 18-35" demographic.
So, if you've ever wanted to use the power of the Wii's motion controls to simulate the experience of rubbing people, you'll have your chance starting on August 9th. Also, seek help. Or social contact. Or some back issues of Hustler, or the underwear section of a Sears catalog, or something, for God's sake.
One of my favorite games of this generation, Red Faction: Guerrilla, is getting a sequel entitled Red Faction: Armageddon. To be honest, the trailers that have been released so far don't have me that enthusiastic, since it appears that the open world hit-and-run gameplay of Guerrilla has been replaced by a rather claustrophobic-looking underground setting, and this time the antagonists are aliens. The original Red Faction on PS2 was also set in a pretty constrained environment, and there's plenty of games I like that are too, but this seems like it's losing a lot of what I loved about Red Faction: Guerrilla.
The cool thing about Red Faction: Guerrilla, aside from the fact that virtually every structure you encountered (some of which were quite large) could be demolished, was how it was different from most third-person action games. You had to pick your battles, use the element of surprise, think about things like escape routes, and know when to fight and when to run away. Despite that, it still revolved around action rather than stealth: lots of bullets flying, vehicles slamming into each other or crashing through walls, wrecked buildings coming down in rains of debris. (I'm generally not a fan of games focused on stealth. If lurking out of sight to evade an ever-present threat of detection and hostile confrontation was something I enjoyed, I'd just spend more time around my family instead of paying $60 for the privilege.)
Hence my annoyance at the complaints I occasionally heard about how, once you did something to cause an enemy alert, the game would spawn endless waves of enemy reinforcements until you escaped to a safe house or hid outside of the populated areas: You're not supposed to stand your ground mowing down wave after wave of enemies as if you were playing Gears of War or Call of Duty. The hero of Red Faction: Guerrilla is a guerrilla. He exploits mobility, stealth, surprise, and the ability to conceal himself in the wilderness or among the civilian population to launch sudden strikes against the enemy, destroy his objective, and then get the hell out of there, as opposed to sitting immobile out in the open so that he can get into a slugging match with a numerically superior enemy army. That's why the game was called Red Faction: Guerrilla and not Red Faction: Napoleonic Infantryman. I'll miss that style of gameplay if it's gone in Armageddon.
I'm not enthusiastic about the introduction of aliens, either. The story of Red Faction is not particularly deep or the focus of its appeal, but I liked the fact that it was a science fiction setting where all of the antagonists were human. The crimes of the antagonists- robbing Martian workers of their livelihoods, making dissidents "disappear" during the night, murdering noncombatants to terrify the populace into submission- are human crimes. The conflict was based entirely on fighting back against the brutality, oppression, and exploitation perpetrated by and against human beings, and that just has a different feel for me than fighting some inhuman subterranean horde. Neither is inherently better, but I find Red Faction: Armageddon's apparent switch from the former to the latter jarring.
Plus, there's just something inherently cool about a hero who uses his work tools to strike down his oppressors, especially when the principal tool in question is a giant miner's sledgehammer you can smash through solid walls with. It's like being Wat Tyler and The Mighty Thor at the same time. Or perhaps the Kool-Aid Man, if the Kool-Aid Man crashed through the walls of houses in order to kill people with repurposed mining equipment rather than distribute Kool-Aid.
Still, I'm going to try to keep an open mind about this while I wait for more to be revealed. You can check out the website for Red Faction: Armageddon here.
It's hard for me to believe, but this past Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of Pointless Side Quest. From its humble beginnings Pointless Side Quest has become a colossus of the blogosphere, drawing threes of readers each and every day.
At times like this, it's only fitting to take stock of the past. Cue up the schmaltzy romantic flashback montage ballad of your choice as we look back on a year that brought us:
A trailer has been released with gameplay footage from Vigil Games' forthcoming Warhammer 40,000 MMORPG, Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online. (Or Warhammer 40K, for you godless metric system users.) I'm not much of an MMO guy, but what they're showing so far is interesting:
The trailer's pretty impressive, but I've long thought that Warhammer 40,000 was ill-suited to the MMORPG genre. The 40K universe mostly revolves around very large-scale military conflicts, and the Imperium of Man- the good guys, sort of, albeit by the standards of a universe where a genocidal amalgam of the Spanish Inquisition and Stalinist Russia is the last, best hope for mankind- is a rigidly hierarchical and authoritarian society. It's a context where the usual paradigm for MMOs, where players and their characters have a great deal of autonomy, doesn't really make much sense for the setting's most important faction.
That's fine for a strategy game like Dawn of War, but a setting that is less “lone hero or small band of adventurers running around on their own initiative and doing various quests” and more “enormous hordes of nameless, faceless canon fodder being ground into mulch” is less promising for an MMORPG. (Unless the game's main buffer class is the Commissar, who strengthens the stats of the party by periodically executing other party members, in which case I will buy at least three copies the day it comes out.)
That said, the look and style of what they've shown so far suggests that Vigil has a good feel for Warhammer, so that's cause for optimism. Time will tell.
I do have a minor nitpick about the video's opening narration: Saying “It is a time of war” in this context is sort of superfluous, given the Warhammer 40,000 universe's lack of times of things other than war. It's like specifying that World War I was a time of humans who breathed oxygen, or that the Roman Empire fell during a time of a time of things that were made of atoms, or that August 3rd, 1998 was a time when Pauly Shore should have been repeatedly kicked in the balls for being Pauly Shore. Aside from that, though, top notch.
Microsoft has announced that the Xbox 360's motion control system, heretofore called Project Natal, will instead be released under the name "Kinect." At this point I'm starting to wonder if Federal Trade Commission regulations require all video game motion control devices to have really, really stupid names. There's clearly some malign force at work when changing the name of a product to something as cringe-inducing as "Kinect" is at least arguably an improvement.
First Nintendo replaced the perfectly serviceable name "Nintendo Revolution" with "Wii." Then Microsoft, witnessing the Wii's explosive success and apparently reaching the conclusion that pre-Wii motion controls systems had failed to catch on because their names weren't stupid enough, dubbed their own motion controls system "Project Natal," which makes it sound like either some sort of obstetric equipment or (if you pronounce it "Na-TAHL") some war-torn Third World capital city of the sort that Christiane Amanpour does solemn voiceovers from for CNN.Now Natal is replaced by Kinect, which sounds like the sort of name you'd give to a cheap knock-off of Legos or Tinkertoys. The name does have the advantage of sort of resembling the word "kinetic" and so has something approaching actual relevance to the product, though if Microsoft is trying to imitate Nintendo's success in appealing to a broader audience I'm not sure a name vaguely evoking a term most people probably haven't used since fifth grade science class is really the way to go. Meanwhile, there's Sony's entry in the field, PlayStation Move, which is arguably the most generic name ever given to a consumer product. It makes the branding of the cheap store-brand soda that my mom used to buy, with the brown label that just said "Cola" on it, seem like a riot of creativity by comparison. It's like making a candy bar called Eat, or marketing a clothing line called Wear, or re-releasing Daikatana with the title Uninstall. On the plus side, Move isn't obnoxiously "clever" like Wii or Kinect, and sadly that's enough to make it my favorite of the the three.It's troubling to realize that the best-named motion controller ever made was probably the Sega Activator, AKA this monstrosity:
There's just no marketing like 90s Sega marketing.
Red Dead Redemptionhas drawn a bit of criticism in Ireland for the character of “Irish,” a drunk, which the Irish news site Herald has criticized for invoking “the stereotype of the drunken Paddy.” Sadly, negative portrayals of the Irish have a long and unfortunate history in the world of gaming, dating back to the release of Hibernian Blaster for the ColecoVision in 1983 and arguably reaching their apex in 2007 with the release of Activision's Call of Duty: Black and Tan and the ill-received God of War clone To Hell or Connacht: The Adventures of Oliver Cromwell.
Red Dead Redemption developer Rockstar Games is no stranger to controversy over its portrayals of various ethnic groups, of course, having previously come under fire for it's portrayal of Haitians in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and for alleged white supremacist themes in the controversial 2008 PlayStation Portable release Grand Theft Auto: Aryan Brotherhood Prison Assassination Stories. Rockstar has not made any public comment specifically referencing the issue, but is reportedly unfazed by the criticism from Ireland and has announced that it's forthcoming entry into the city-building/strategy genre, SimGreedy Land-Owning English Bastard, will be coming out as in early 2011.
(I'm somewhat troubled to realize that this is the second time in less than a year that both Oliver Cromwell and the Aryan Brotherhood have somehow come up in the same post. What the hell am I doing with my life?)
Some rather neat news about another well-known actor whose voice will be appearing in a video game: Ben Kingsley will be providing the voice of the King of Mist Peak in Peter Moleyneux's forthcoming Fable III. It's Fable, so based on past precedent there's a good chance that by the time the game actually comes out “Oscar winner Ben Kingsley as the King of Mist Peak” will have been scaled back to “Guy who watches the Oscar awards ceremony on TV every year as the Viceroy of Mist Peak,” but let's stay positive.
I hope this goes well for Kingsley, a talented man whose career has followed a Hindenbergesque trajectory that somehow took him from winning the 1983 Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in Gandhi to a recent supporting role in Uwe Boll'sBloodRayne. Though not, sadly, Bloodrayne II: Deliverance. He's not listed in the cast for the forthcoming BloodRayne: The Third Reich, either. I can only hope he'll return for the inevitable BloodRayne IV: Bleed Harder so that his fans will finally get to see him reprise his role as whoever the hell he played in the first movie.
