Somehow, the words "From the makers of the 3DO" just don't inspire much confidence

Panasonic has announced a new portable handheld game system called the "Jungle". It will apparently be focused on online gaming, and has a touch pad and full keyboard alongside more console-style controls. Not much is known yet, aside from the fact that one of the flagship titles will be a Battlestar Galactica MMO.

First impression: Awful name. I applaud Panasonic's attempt to offer a change of pace from the "game systems that sound like acronyms for government agencies" style of naming seen in the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, but ”Jungle” sounds like an internal development codename that Panasonic forgot to change for retail. I would have thought it obvious that naming a video game system after vegetation was a bad idea, but I guess not.

Older handheld systems did it far better than their modern successors in this regard. The Nintendo Game Boy, the Sega Game Gear, the Atari Lynx, whatever the hell that portable version of the TurboGrafx 16 was called... THOSE were names for game systems. On the plus side, the inevitable Guns N' Roses references that will appear in every video game press article about this system from now until the end of time pretty much write themselves, which is a timesaver.

It's early yet, but frankly what I've seen so far seems like the worst of several worlds to me: Bigger, less convenient, and almost certainly much more costly than a DS or PSP, less versatile or user-friendly than a laptop computer, pointless overkill for the sort of mobile games people play on cellphones. I also can't imagine playing a game that involved any significant input from a QWERTY keyboard on a keyboard that size. Maybe it'll do better on the Japanese market, where handhelds and wi-fi based multiplayer games are much bigger business than they are in the US.

Alternately, if the Jungle is able to play some of the big MMO names like World of Warcraft- it's still not clear at this point- Panasonic may be able to tap in to the ultra-hardcore MMORPG player/addict/Morlock market. Necessity is pitiless and unyielding, and even the most obsessively devoted MMO player has hitherto been forced to occasionally face those nightmarish interregna- trips to the bathroom, funerals of immediate family members, house fires- when he simply must step away from the computer, precious dopamine draining from his limbic system's burnt-out reward pathways with every moment. The potential appeal of a portable MMO-focused system like the Jungle is obvious, though I'm not sure how much disposable income that particular demographic has.

The most appalling eruption of foul language since Hitler said "damn" in the original Bionic Commando!

This is supposed to be a blog about gaming in general and not the Mafia II Offensive Content Gazette, but a journalist goes where the news is: the Guinness Book of World Records has provisionally certified Mafia II as the game with the most instances of a well-known swear word. This is a family blog, so for decency's sake I'll just say it's the one that starts with F and rhymes with "fuck."

Mafia II dethrones previous record holder House of the Dead: Overkill, a fluffy, Disneyesque romp for the Nintendo Wii that used the word a mere 189 times. Prior to House of the Dead's release, the record had been held for a stunning 16 years by Sierra Entertainment's critically acclaimed but commercially disastrous movie-tie in point-and-click adventure game Glengarry Glen Ross: The Quest to Sell Some Fucking Real Estate. Sadly, the game was doomed commercially by a gaming marketplace not yet ready for the game's mature content, the greater popularity of rival series such as King's Quest and Gabriel Knight, and the limited audience for games about middle-aged guys sitting in a room and yelling at each other about their unsuccessful careers in the real estate industry.

A spokesman for Guinness said:

"The number associated with the record is liable to change in the next few weeks, as 2K have promised to supply us with a copy of the game's full script under NDA so we can count the number of f-bombs ourselves and update the record with a complete figure."

This really has me wondering what working at the Guinness Book of World Records office is like.

Can anyone be assigned curse-counting duty, or is there somebody at Guinness who focuses on this sort of record? And if the latter, what's he like? Is he a seemingly normal man with a nice home in the suburbs and a family who thinks he works in the sporting records department? Is he some sort of shadowy, morally ambiguous black ops figure, tolerated as a necessary evil and yet feared and shunned by the very Guinness staffers he protects for making the sort of grim moral compromises that the naive, soft-handed civilians who spend their days compiling aerospace speed records or measuring the world's largest structure made entirely of popsicle sticks could never face? Is there some insane, subhuman, unspeakably foul-mouthed Gollum-like figure confined to a dark, filth-encrusted pit where he subsists on carrion, whatever live rodents he catches, and the gnawed bones of other Guinness employees who stood too close to the pit? Inquiring minds want to know.

Analyst's report: Open-world crime genre projected to have offended members of every ethnic group on the planet no later than 2015

The Italian-American advocacy group UNICO publicly condemned the recent release of Mafia II and it's developer and publisher, 2K games and Take-Two Interactive, for what UNICO has called the game's racist portrayal of Italians and organized crime. UNICO president Andre DeMino issued a statement in which he said:

Why would [Take-Two] foist a game on their targeted audience of young people wherein they will indoctrinate a new generation into directly associating Italians and Italian Americans with violent, murderous organized crime, to the exclusion of all of the other 'mafias' run by other ethnic and racial groups...Take-Two is directly, blatantly and unfairly discriminating and demeaning one group to the exclusion of all others. We are demanding they halt release of the game and cleanse it of all references to Italians and Italian Americans.

Unfortunately, Mafia II is set in the years following World War II, decades before the Mafia began the groundbreaking series of affirmative action programs that have made the ranks of today's Mafia such a diverse, United Colors of Benetton-esque smorgasbord of Men of Respect of every race, color, and creed. Take-Two is apparently going for an authentic historical atmosphere, so making a game where the main characters are 1940's/50's American mafioso named Abdullah "The Dolphin" ibn Yusuf, Ragnar "Berserker" Gustafsson, and Nine-Finger Johnny Krishnamurti creates some suspension of disbelief issues.

I could sympathize with DeMino more if the pervasive pattern he alludes to actually existed in modern games, but I see no convincing proof that it does. There are too many Eastern Europeans and Japanese and African-Americans and Generic White Guys of No Particular Ethnic Background in crime-related games for the claim that Italians are being systematically singled out to be plausible.

It could be a lot worse. Pretty much any time a character who shares my principal ethnic background shows up in a video game, they're a freaking NAZI. Or a soldier fighting for Nazi Germany. Or a Neo-Nazi. Or an exiled former Nazi. Or a thinly veiled stand-in for a Nazi. Or some sort of monstrous Nazi cyborg hell-beast spawned by unnatural Nazi superscience and/or blasphemous Nazi occult lore.

As the old proverb goes, "I was sad because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet." Or, in this case, "I was sad that I was a tough-talking 50s gangster, until I met Undead Mecha-Hitler." Words to live by.

Furious edge-of-your-seat bus route scheduling ACTION!

Paradox Interactive has announced that it will be publishing developer Colossal Order's game Cities in Motion, billed as the "ultimate public transport simulator." Player's are put in charge of running a mass transit company with scenarios based on the cities Vienna, Helsinki, Berlin, and Amsterdam and a time frame spanning 1920 to 2020. This sort of thing is right up my alley, and I definitely like what I see so far.



The subject matter may be mundane to some, but I'm a a lifelong resident of Illinois. When you live in a state where the two consecutive governors preceding the current office holder are now both convicted felons, several streets in yout area have had half of their lanes closed for "repairs" since President Taft was in the White House, and every news story that references roads invariably includes some combination of the words "scandal," "extortion," "bribe," "racketeering," "federal grand jury," and/or "will neither confirm or deny allegations of ordering Chicago Outfit assassins to conceal the alderman's severed head in the Governor's Mansion," the very concept of well-run transport infrastructure is strange and exotic.

This sort of game is probably the biggest reason I remain interested in PC games despite generally preferring consoles. The reactions of gamers to this sort of niche strategy game tend be split them into into two pretty sharply defined camps, in my experience: Those who find the prospect of spending hour after hour designing subway systems in a simulated 1950s Finland utterly fascinating, like yours truly, and those who have already started to nod off from sheer boredom just reading the words "designing subway systems" and would be in danger of slipping into a coma if they suffered extended exposure to the actual game.

Sadly, as has been demonstrarted by the commercial failure of games like 2009 multiplatform title Call of Duty: Postwar Highway Reconstruction and the PS3's critically acclaimed but financially disastrous recent entry to the Shin Megami Tensei series, Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. The Transport Workers Union of America, one of these groups is not large enough to provide the sort of sales needed to support console development costs. So it's definitely nice to have the PC for niche titles like this.

So many disgustingly inappropriate Wiimote jokes I could make, so little time

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.

New Red Faction: Armageddon trailer has too many aliens, not enough property damage

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.

Pointless Side Quest turns 1

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:

My groundbreaking proposal for what promises to be the hottest game yet in the ever-popular "God of War clone based on Macbeth about fighting an army of genetically engineered monstrosities in a steampunk alternate-history 19th-century Scotland" genre!

A chilling look into Mario's secret world of underground blood sports, drug smuggling, medical fraud, and gangland brutality!

The most terrifyingly evil artificial intelligence since Ro-Man!

Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and the phrase "time-traveling Otacon in drag," in the same sentence at last!

The day Fist of the North Star opened my eyes to a new world of crudely pixelated, ludicrously violent entertainment!

Ill-fated attempts at legitimate commentary!

Final Fantasy brings us an epic saga of childhood orthodontia-related emotional trauma, those obscenely expensive bags of nuts sold at hotels, and Cloud Strife's dark and tragic history of minimum wage recreational facility employment!

Sentient talking birds who sell insurance and challenge our rigid binary conceptions of gender!

A cavalcade of middle school-level jokes about topics including, but not limited to, porn, women's sanitary products, venereal disease, constipation, sexual aids, and much, much more!

My inexplicable recurring fixation on regicidal 17th-century statesman Oliver Cromwell!

My ability to enjoy Christmas, Star Wars, or Bea Arthur is destroyed forever!

Illegal drug use!

Subtle, tasteful discussion of EA's subtle, tasteful marketing for Dante's Inferno!

Crude sexual objectification!

Crude 19th-century anti-Irish propaganda!

A ten-year PlayStation 2 retrospective that degenerates into a distasteful anecdote about the time I became violently ill playing Half-Life!

Quite a year, indeed.