A funny thing happened to me the other day. Well, not so much funny as strange. And not so much strange as boring to anyone but me.

After a brief visit to the local church, a place I’m not known to frequent outside certain holidays, the parish priest opined to my grandmother that he would be thrilled if I could write something for the church newsletter.

(I’d like to take this opportunity to plug www.geeks.co.uk, where you can find more articles by me and other fine writers about games, music, movies, gadgets and more. End plug.)

Not being religious in any organised sense, I elected not to write it, in the interest of not needlessly offending religious people. And because Futurama was on. But it got me to thinking about how I could write something about things I like in the context of religion. Presto change-o, Bible games.

Some might consider the following to be blasphemous, but as a gamer I don’t. Besides, I’m pretty sure the presence of games based on the Bible is already tantamount to blasphemy. Not because they’re turning their followers’ guidelines for living into the kind of thing those same followers usually protest over, but because it seems that pretty much every Bible game is complete and utter shit.

Whether it be the fact that the dominant colour scheme in these games seems to be brown, or the fact that in their zeal to convert young kids to God they forget to program in things like collision detection and jumping, Bible games are by and large just  …continue reading Bible Games, aka What Would Jesus Do?…Hadouken!!!, aka And On The 8th Day, God Did Say, “You got PWNED, Noob!!!”

It is a commonly-held criticism among many freedom-of-expression activists that Western culture will tolerate far more violence than it will sexuality. In no medium is this more true than it is in video games; anyone who has played video games for any length of time has slashed ninjas to pieces, gunned down hundreds of thousands of unnamed enemy soldiers (usually Nazis), plucked still-beating hearts from the chests of defeated foes, and wreaked untold mayhem upon countless innocent bystanders. By contrast, only a scant few games depict sexuality in any way. When adult content does rear it’s naked bosoms, it’s almost always in a purely ornamental fashion – the briefly exposed Jessica of Final Fight, the topless slave girls of Conan, the provocative yet strangely chaste flirtations of Dead or Alive Volleyball.

Whether this is true or not, it’s no secret that there isn’t much sex in video games as released by commercial producers. Not since the days of the Atari 2600 have sexually explicit games been widely available on a console, but at least on the PS3 we have a pair of games that afford us the rare chance to compare and contrast: God of War III and Heavy Rain.

I’ve written elsewhere about sex as portrayed in God of War III, but here’s the nutshell: every God of War game has a brief mini-game that depicts Kratos ravaging one or more females offscreen. In GoW3, that female happens to be Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love and possessor of a voracious sexual appetite. Within the context of the game, having sex with her serves roughly the same function as triggering a door switch – it gets her to open a portal to your next challenge in the game. The only storyline justification given is that insatiable Aphrodite yearns for the touch of a “real man” like Kratos. To some extent this isn’t surprising; GoW3 is a game about action and killing – dare I say the violence our culture better tolerates – rather than story. The relationships between its characters serve no purpose other than advancing the plot, and the depiction of sex is thus fairly mechanical – both in it’s execution (a decontextualized quicktime event, as all the action happens offscreen) and in how if fits into the story (Aphrodite is looking only for a momentary distraction; Kratos is looking only for his next fight).

Heavy Rain, by contrast, is a game about …continue reading Sex in Games Part 1 If your QuickTime Event lasts more than 4 hours, consult a physician

In the new day and age, with the new media(s).  Things are going 24/7
and everybody is involved.  This is a good thing and unfotunately a
bad thing.  Good in that you can get ahold of your family and friends
at almost anytime.  Get important news updates as they happen.
Unfortunately we get alot of shlock and every d-bag has a page where
they just love to hate things you love.  We call them trolls.  But it
seems that in some catagories they all get together to unanimously
hate things that are actually pretty good, but as if that is not
enough they also like to unanimosuly love things that are terrible.
Then again this is all opinon.  And that is the real point of this
article.  Don’t make decisions solely on somebody’s review.  Again,
this goes for all media, movies, books, tv shows, podcasts, but this
is a video game website, so I’ll focus on that.  Shall we?

I want to start with Clive Barker’s Jericho.  I bet that …continue reading With a grain of salt

Its not very original to point out that most game to film adaptations suck. The majority suck so bad the crossover genre rightfully has a bad name. The cinematic output of Uwe Boll alongside massive blunders like Doom, Resident Evil, Street Fighter and Super Mario Bros have left a bad taste in gamers mouths worldwide. Some of them even Stinky doesn’t like, and he has Battlefield Earth on Laserdisc. Coming up with a list of video game movies to recommend to your enemies would be easy. Finding four to recommend to your buddies is a pretty arduous task as I found when trying to put this together for you, the wonderful We Talk Games extended family. On top of this I’ve put together four mini synopses of games I’d love to adapt as feature films and how I’d go about making them as it relates to scripting etc.

So here’s my list of the best video game flicks around. …continue reading The Delights of Coin-op Cinema aka Good Video Game Movies

The next generation of video game systems will bring about more than a hardware upgrade and a new level of interaction. The way we buy video games has always changed with each generational upgrade. Be it the change from cartridges to CD’s or the places we go to buy games. At first is was independently owned video stores and toy shops. Now supermarkets and petrol stations  have  racks of games, while speciality stores like Game Stop have a foothold in pretty much every town on the map. With so many places to pick up games and gear we have a great buyers market, where you really don’t have to settle for the prices offered by one or two outlets.

A download only future seems …continue reading The End of the Gaming Buyers Market?