Entries Tagged 'Gaming' ↓

This Means War.

“Don’t. Mess. With. Me.”

Two years ago, Microsoft’s soulful “Mad World” commercial, directed by gaming ad auteur Joseph Kosinski for the debut of Epic’s Xbox 360 game, Gears of War, posted a brand new level of artistry for the marketing of videogames.

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Now, That’s How You Foil an Assassination Attempt.

“Say WHAT?”

As expected, EA’s Mercenaries 2: World in Flames (Xbox 360/PS3) is, reportedly, execrable, and Gearfuse.com calls it “the most mediocre game ever.” But this promised DLC (downloadable content) pack, letting you play as Sarah Palin or Barack Obama, has got to be the chilly-most-sweet thing ever for the next two hours.

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A Board Game to Bore You When You’re Not Yet Truly Bored.

This stuff never gets tired!

When Ray Winbush forwarded over the link for Pimps and Ho’s, above, my first response was, “Haven’t I seen this game a thousand times already?”

I mean, in seems like every three years somebody comes out with some “ghetto” board game, designed to sell solely based on offensiveness, as the makers have no marketing budget. (“The Craziest Board Game Ever Made!”, P&H’s cover art boasts. Really? Crazier than, say, Go?)

I couldn’t even mount outrage. I was going to send it to Racialicious, and even checked to see if they’d covered it, though I hadn’t even really looked exhaustively, when I said, “Ah, Carmen’s got better stuff to cover than this.”

Yawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwn.

African Zombie Virus Rampant.
Forget Medicines. Bring Guns.

Come and get it….

Long before its scheduled March 2009 release, Resident Evil 5 (RE5), the next installment in the immensely popular and influential survival-horror videogame series, started coughing up blood…and controversy: In the narrative, a white protagonist, Chris Redfield, sets down in what appears to be an African or Caribbean country decimated by a mutant “supervirus.” Suddenly, freshly dead villagers start to revive as bloodthirsty zombies, and Redfield must slaughter them in hordes to stay alive, a la this scene, below, from the game trailer.

“Wipe them out…all of them….”

Perhaps Newsweek‘s gaming critic, N’Gai Croal, giving pointed regard to the clip’s images, with their precedents in racist visual history, said it most succinctly in an excellent MTV Online interview: “Clearly no one Black worked on this game.”

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The Gap Band: Making Charles Goodyear Extremely Proud in 1980.

Where there’s smoke there’s fire…

When inventor Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped a piece of untreated rubber on a hot stove and “discovered” vulcanization (“Mesoamericans” had mastered the process centuries earlier), he probably never dreamed that, over 140 years later, the notion of burning rubber would lead to a #1 R&B smash for the GAP Band. Yet, alas.

Merci to hyper-cool Digital Femme Cheryl Lynn for linking to the video, which I’d never seen, despite the track being fundamental as 11-dimensional strings when it came to me getting through senior year at Freeport High School. Most of all, though, Lynn argues that “Burn Rubber On Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)” should be cited as “Reason #525 why Rock Band needs a Funk Band Expansion Pack.” To which I say, hear, hear.

Screaming Alleged Bloody Murder.

“Do I look fat from here?”

Few Americans, perhaps, understand how massive a medium comic books became after World War II. At their peak, retailers were moving $80-100 million worth of them per week. Plus, they were hugely influential: With a typical issue passed around between six to ten readers, comics were consumed by more people than the number of adults taking in movies, magazines, radio, or TV.

However, fewer of us, even more, understand how frantic the nation became when the medium went completely pulp, highlighting tales of noir crime and horror, like the infamous EC comic cover, above. With the enormous popularity of these criminal, murderous tales, comics were blamed for everything from truancy to homicide.

So argues David Hadju, in his new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Hadju is my guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, August 15, 2 pm ET.

You can hear his ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to two weeks after broadcast.

Protecting Our Skies from Big-Eyed, Prepubescent, Love-Struck Girls in Glasses and Navy-Blue Jumpers

“Fire sugar-coated chocolate candies when ready!”

Thanks to DarkRoastedBlend.com for bringing these groovy, manga-coated supersonic jets to light.

“WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!”

Apparently, they’re from the 2007 video game Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation. Downloadable content enables the gamer to change the appearance of these advanced fighters…to something that better matches your 5th grader’s room, but maintains critical in-flight stealth characteristics.

Plushing-Out Your Sims…or the Crushing Irony of Helping Your Computer Game Characters Live Better Than You Do.

“I’m playing myself…”

Thanks to the hot design Apartment Therapy blog for this tip: The Sims 2 is about to release an expansion pack that’ll enable you to drench the little ne’er-do-wells in IKEA.

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Now, All You Need To Find Your Way Around NYC is a Plasma Screen, an Xbox, and a Very Long Cord.

Hearst Building and twin…
I can see Gayle King from here: New York’s Hearst Building (57th St. and 8th Ave.), home to O Magazine and others, and its GTA IV twin

I. Cannot. Wait.With the April 29 release of Rockstar Games’ (and, full disclosure, my former employer’s) Grand Theft Auto IV now nearly a month behind us, many are raving over the game’s raucus gameplay and sophisticated storyline. Still others are flabbergasted by the company’s reported game sales of over 6 million copies sold in the first week, including 3.6 million the first day, for a gross of half a billion dollars the first seven days of release, beating analyst projections widely. (These also beat Microsoft’s Halo 3 numbers, ’til now the biggest release. Little-known fact: In 2004, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas also beat Halo 2‘s sales with, much the same, little fanfare.)

But whether you love video games, like I do, detest them, like my wife does, or are a voice actor for the GTA IV who doesn’t believe Take 2, Rockstar’s parent company, paid you enough, like Michael Hollick, if you’re New Yorkers playing GTA IV, there’s one thing you can all agree upon: The striking sense of verisimilitude with which the game overwhelms the player.

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“Plus, You Should See This Guy Hitchhike!”

You hunk….

I’m not quite sure what Sony was trying to say about Playstation 3 aficionados with this European Playboy ad. (Sony has done some seriously confused marketing over the entire nex-gen cycle.)

I’m not even sure if this qualifies as NSFW, but, anyway, the entire ad is after the jump. (Thanks, Joystiq.)

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