This is the beginning of the giving season. One of my favorite giving events happens to benefit the Child’s Play Charity. A Video Game comedy troop from Canada called LoadingReadyRun are, for the third year, enduring their fundraiser Desert Bus for Hope. Torturing themselves by playing Desert Bus, the most painfully boring games created, for as long as the donations keep buying up the hours of play. The ingenious part is the live broadcast of themselves enduring the game, keeping their sanity from being whittled down by responding to a chat room and drafting up donation challenges that end in torture for one of the crew. Last year one of the crew was forced to watch Twilight three times in a row due to three hundred dollar donations. I request that you to go, watch and then donate to these crazy folk to allow them to continue “hating themselves for the children”.
Well we are back, this cast is covering what I am calling the FML syndrome. This is the effect that certain games have to rope you into playing the game to detraction. Where the only thing that makes you stop playing is realizing that the dawn is only brighting up your room.
This morning’s reading of video game blogs discovered quite an interesting article by Matthew Kaplan from GameCritics.com . The article brings up how the elderly are currently portrayed in video games and touches on their minority status in protagonist roles, beyond the cliché role of the grumpy old man (using Bill from L4D in their example). In this article they ask: are we going to see more elderly heroes? The main gaming population, the kids that grew up playing the NES and Atari, are now in their thirties. Back when I was a kid I remember many games where the protaganist was a child: games like “Kid Icarus”, “The Boy and His Blob”, “Nemo’s Adventures in Dreamland”, or “Zombie’s Ate My Neighbors” and “Earthbound”. In my memory the child protagonist was a rather dominate choice of playable character, though the reasoning behind this could be simply that was the targeted demographic for video games of the time. But with the aging of the gaming population, as the article brings up, will we see larger use of elderly protagonists? Where this issue really gets me interested is in how you can create a game that has such a protagonist, coming up a game premise that would allow for, explain, and encourage the use of an elderly protagonist.
But, I digress. Kaplan’s article presents the issues far more succinctly and is defiantly worth reading. So, what are you still doing here?
I was shown a website called Artifice Clothing recently and was blown away by their cybertech section. It just hits all the right chords to be on my fervent want list. These articles of attire fit into what I call future artifacts, chunks of items dropped off of the prop cart for the latest sci-fi film. Just have a look and I have to say the wings they have available are expensive but amazing.
Not much to say other than here is the cast, my mind is on playing Brutal Legend. I hope you enjoy.
September 12th, 2009
Rick
This is what kills sites, breaking the schedule. Right now I am a week behind posting this podcast all because I didn’t take the time to listen to it after tear down. Dave was right I could have been posted when we were done, at least it is going up now. With as many problems that we have with recording and posting from expos and cons we have got to come up with a better game plan than brute force and ignorance.
Anyway, the podcast. Let me set the mood we were going for: think back to a week ago, PAX is going strong, the horrors of the PAX-pox have yet to be released upon the world. Where our friend Chris joins Dave and my self in a room above the RockBand freeplay stage at PAX09.
A little warning, I had to massively raise the gain to get all three of us to be heard on the file.
Greetings, Dave and I have returned from our adventure to the Penny Arcade Expo with more than we expected. We both are currently quite under the weather. I do believe the both of us have escaped the event with out becoming infected with the n1h1 that was present at the event. What this means is both of us will be taking in massive amounts of fluids and rest, while our podcast will be late this week. I will attempt to edit and post it up tomorrow, but that is all hanging upon if I have a fever by then or not.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are in the final stretch. The countdown to PAX is consuming my thoughts, the anticipation for it filling me with tingling nervous energy. This year is going to be amazing and absolutely packed. The confirmation that all three days of the show have sold out just hit the net. I hope there won’t be too many people who haven’t heard about this development showing up.
Today is also the day I leave to acquire a compatriot for this mad weekend, and he will be joining us for our weekly transmission. Time to run, wish me luck
uplink terminated
