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The Responsibility of Game Makers

In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning California's First-Amendment-violating law prohibiting the sale of violent video games to children, the firestorm has kicked up again with both sides - for and against - shooting their mouths off.

One such person is the San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Morford whose tweet stating, "Dear videogame makers: sort of pathetic to cheer that you can now freely sell ultraviolence to children.  Just FYI," was retweeted by film critic Roger Ebert.

Ebert is no stranger to video game debate.  His opinion - and it is just that - that video games are not, and cannot be art received much attention, and he often brings the topic up again and again on both his personal Twitter account and his blog.  With this latest retweet, and his utterly tactless (now-deleted) tweet in the wake of Jackass cast member Ryan Dunn's death, Ebert is quickly proving he is quite possibly the internet's greatest troll.

Jamie Kennedy vs. Gamers

In 2007, actor/comedian - and I use both terms very loosely - Jamie Kennedy hosted one of the most disastrous press conferences in the history of the Electronic Entertainment Expo.  Kennedy's gig as the emcee for Activision's press conference has become the subject of mocking in the four years since, and apparently the thin-skinned, self-obsessed actor has had enough of it.

Butting into a conversation about the worst E3 gig of all-time between former PC Gamer editor Gary Whitta and Michael Pachter, best known for his financial prognostications involving the game industry, Kennedy fired off the following tweet: "wow u dorks can't let that go, You have no idea what really happened, because ur not in the biz, ur a spectator."  Please note that the period in that sentence was added by me.

That opened the floodgates for gamers on Twitter, who began taking Kennedy to task, resulting in some hilarious exchanges and an insight into his delusions - namely that he is a huge star and we should all be impressed by him.

Said one tweeter, "dude if you want to talk about 'in the biz' I actually had to Google you to find out who the fuck you are. #bList," to which Kennedy replied, "I still don't know I, gay list."  Please note, the period was added by me again.  It's obvious that Kennedy meant to hit "U" and not "I," but that doesn't make his toothless, gradeschool-caliber comeback any less hilarious - though probably not in the way he intended.  Instead, it makes him look like a barely-literate homophobe with a serious superiority complex. 

When another user responded, "You're such a fucking moron.  Thanks for making me laugh this morning.  @garywhitta owns you," Kennedy's response was simply, "I'll kill you."  Once again, I added the period.  With such witty retorts as these, it's no wonder Jamie Kennedy has skyrocketed past Kathy Griffin on his climb to the C-list!

The irony is that Kennedy's insistence that he's super-famous is by far the funniest thing he has ever said or done.  He's pointed out that we dorks have no articles written about us, but considering that some of those articles include UGO's '20 Worst Actors of All-Time,' where Kennedy sits at #19, that's probably not something I'd brag about. 

What the star of Kickin' It Old Skool doesn't realize is that he's probably most famous for his role as Randy, the horror movie nerd in Scream.  Either that or being mistaken for Seth Green, which I'm sure irritates nobody more than Seth Green, who is actually funny, talented, and has never starred in Son of the Mask.  Flaunting your acting career isn't that impressive when Malibu's Most Wanted is on your resumé.

His desperate attempts to pass himself off as an A-list celebrity make Kennedy seem insecure.  More than anything, he seems to be trying to convince himself that he's somebody, but the end result is that he appears self-obsessed - the type of lunatic who has a shrine to himself in his home, complete with newspaper clippings and press photos taped to every square inch of available wallspace so he can bask in his own perceived awesomeness. 

His inability to ignore the insults by faceless Twitter users and trying to prove his fame by way of examples seem to validate my theory.  Seeing as how he cannot handle criticism or heckling, it's a miracle he continues to pursue an acting career given the steady stream of critical and commercial disasters that bear his name.  The smart thing to do would be to poke fun at yourself, stripping the insults of their impact, but instead he struts around Twitter - with less followers than the gaming website Kotaku and considerably less than Epic game designer Cliff Bleszinski, both of whom he'd call "dorks" - as if he's the world's greatest artist and that simply opens him up to further mockery. 

It's both funny and sad to see how famous Jamie Kennedy thinks he is, but the reality is that he should be thankful for his negligible celebrity status.  As singer Chris Brown has found out numerous times, chucking homophobic slurs around when you're in the public eye typically doesn't go over so well.  Luckily for Kennedy, nobody from the press follows him so his "gay list" tweet will go unnoticed. 

In Jamie Kennedy's bubble, he's winning the battle against the dorks.  In the real world where the rest of us reside, he's a blip on the Hollywood radar.  To say his estimation of his self-worth and success is an exaggeration is an understatement when he can't even get as many Twitter followers as a game developer, despite his heightened visibility by way of his choice of careers.  To put it as clearly as possible: There are more of us dorks than there are Jamie Kennedy fans, and none of us are impressed by you.  Welcome back to Earth; enjoy your stay.

Innovation vs. Entertainment: Reviewers Gone Mad

Can someone, anyone, show me where it is written in the Video Game Reviewer Guidebook that each and every video game must innovate?  At what point in time did it become a prerequisite that a new game in a familiar, popular franchise must suddenly change everything about what made people enjoy it in the first place?  When it comes to new games, when did it become the equivalent of a crime against creativity to focus on doing something really well instead of doing something new just for the sake of it?

This is just one of the many hypocrisies that made me start blogging in the first place.  It seems that all so-called professional reviewers take their jobs as art critics so seriously that they've forgotten the first and only rule that truly matters in gaming: The goal is always to have fun.

Sega Dreamcast: A Retrospective

It all started with an arcade game.
 
I was a young man of 21, working for the largest electronics retailer in the United States, and after many late shifts my friends and I would frequent a large recreational facility about a mile away.  They had everything - pool tables, minigolf, a bar, and a fully-fledged arcade stocked with newer arcade games ranging from Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Mace: The Dark Age, Gauntlet Legends, Silent Scope, War: Final Assault, and the game that led to one of the best gaming decisions of my life - Crazy Taxi.
 
One February night, I decided to give the game a whirl.  Upon sitting in the cockpit and plunking in my quarters, I was treated to only about a minute of gaming as I was clueless about what to do.  All I knew is that as bad as I played, I wanted more.  I put more quarters in and did significantly better the second time around, so I put in more quarters after I was done with that.  Then more, and more, until I'd spent over $10 on that cabinet alone.  Several of my friends had gathered around to watch me play, laughing with glee as I crashed through traffic, drove on the sidewalk, and caught air while going over steep hills of a pseudo-San Francisco to deliver my fare to their destination. 
 
The next day, I went to work bright and early on my day off, plunked down $350 cash and purchased a Dreamcast, a Visual Memory Unit, as well as copies of the just-released port of Crazy Taxi and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver.  Before stopping home, I decided that two games simply weren't enough and hit up Toys R' Us, where I walked out with Zombie Revenge.  My car filled with treasures, I went home and quickly hooked my new system up to my television. 
 
I waited with baited breath as the orange dot bounced along the screen, making watery sounds as the orange swirl I would grow to love so dearly appeared for the first time.  After the monumental task of setting the system's clock and date, an act that always seems to take forever when all you want to do is play a new system for the first time, I was finally ready to make some crazy money at home.

In Perspective: Sierra On-Line

In 1980, computer game designers - and husband and wife - Ken and Roberta Williams released a game known as Mystery House for the Apple II computer.  Conceived and scripted by Roberta, and largely designed by Ken, the game was a simplistic adventure through an old Victorian mansion wherein the player soon discovered that the other inhabitants were mysteriously dropping like flies, and he (or she) might be next.  Though primitive by today's standards, Mystery House was a significant leap forward in computer games for one reason - it was the first adventure game to combine graphics and text.
 
Though its simple line-based, black and white drawings may be considered laughable today, up until that point adventure games such as the seminal Zork were entirely text-based.  For the first time, gamers could see the world they were exploring, however basic it may have been.
 
Mystery House was both a revolutionary and evolutionary leap in computer gaming.  It changed the way people looked at computer games, and became the precursor for over a decade of dominance in the adventure game market for Ken and Roberta's newly formed company, On-Line Systems.  Don't recognize the name?  Perhaps you'd know them better by their more famous moniker, Sierra On-line.
 
Throughout the 80s and into the 90s, Sierra's catalog of adventure games grew to monolithic proportions, and nearly each one of them was a success.  Stategic acquisitions of subsidiary companies like Dynamix and Coktel Vision helped grow the Sierra brand, branching out into genres Sierra's own programmers hadn't tackled including flight sims, fantasy RPGs, and brilliant puzzle games.