Halo Killer
I’m late to the party, obviously, but still light years ahead of the mainstream media, who you just know are going to cotton on to the Halo half of this tragic news.
The Watertown Daily Times is reporting that an eleven-year old by the name of Joshua Nimm took the day off school to play video games. When his Dad got back from work that afternoon, he found Joshua dead, a single, .22 calibre gunshot wound to the head. Local PD have since concluded their investigation, asserting that Joshua was trying to recreate something he’d seen in Halo.
It’s horrible news, of course; I mean, it’s awful, it really does suck for the poor kid, and I’m only covering this because I’m wont to suspect that the minute an American newspaper or a British tabloid gets their filthy hands on the story they’ll blow it out of all proportion.
First off: I’ve played all three of the Halo games to date, and nowhere does anyone – neither Spartan nor Elite – shoot themselves in the head. A gun to your head, though; it’s a pretty familiar image – and I’m saying that as someone who’s never seen a real gun. I’ve seen it plenty in the movies. On television, too; and in books and comics and other video games. But not in Halo. In the end, whatever my problems with the franchise, Halo and its sequels are the LIVE generation’s Star Wars, and they’ve always known their place. There are moments of maturity, even of sacrifice (I feel like I’m giving these games to much credit already) but Master Chief is a moral machine, and the notion of suicide is much too real, much too terrifying, to ever intrude on the cartoon mechanics of his narrative.
Not that the vast majority of the media will care enough about the truth to fact-check the inevitable flood of stories that stem from this incident. It’s just too delicious an opportunity to have a go at one of the few video games the general public knows exist; Halo 3 was in the news last year when it beat Spider-Man 3 to become the most profitable entertainment launch ever. And we all know, if there’s a video game involved somehow, it’s probably to blame. Unless they find Marilyn Manson mp3s on the kid’s computer, that is.
You can be sure, though, that having a gun in every home, a pistol under every pillow and a loaded rifle in every closet in America – that’s not to blame. I mean, how else could these wonderful peace-loving people defend themselves against the ills of modern society otherwise?
Mistakes and Regrets at Electronic Three
My apologies, dear uncertainites, for the downtime these past few days. Excuses include: I’m nowhere near E3, but I’ve been covering the convention from afar on the Ace Gamez blog. And I totally called it. Animal Crossing on the Wii; lots of Little Big Planet; downloadable Ratchet and Clank episodes; and more besides. But the point isn’t to boast – I have no particular insight, yet the only real surprise of the electronic three was Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360. And that, in itself, makes perfect sense. Squeenix have a history of platform loyalties that aren’t loyalties at all, but canny decisions. This is just the next decision.
For all that could have been, then, a toast.
If there’s a conference next year – and sadly, it really is a case of if and not when – I think I might make the trip. I’d get press credentials, but I’d need a laptop, airfare, commitment. In the twilight years of E3, I’m certainly not alone in wondering: is it still worth it?
The Solace of Certainty
Last week, I booted up my big black shiny lean mean grilling machine to download the 2.4 update. It brought in-game access to the cross-media bar, apparently, and trophies – as if we need another metric by which to measure our e-penises. But we all know how this story ends. The 2.4 firmware borked a few PS3s; Sony shortly withdrew it and returned to their programmer mancaves with hearts weighty with sorrow. My console survived the update without injury – I suspect most did; crafty fanboy buggers on the internet, you see, they have ways of making you think there are more of them than there are. I turned it off.
This morning, I turned my PS3 on to download 2.41. I turned it off again.
When exactly is Metal Gear Solid 5 coming out?
All Things Babylon
This is brilliant. I don’t know if it’s new news or age-old, but according to the BBC, ‘Babylon’ by David Gray is among the greatest hits of US torturers in Iraq.
Amongst all the musician’s unsurprising whines, of course, he has a point: play anything to death and it becomes an annoyance, whether it’s trash or Tchaikovsky. And yes, whatever the comedy value of their choice of song, they’re still torturers, and torturers are bad people with rotten capitalist hearts and teeth yellow as pissed-in snow.
Still – what could be funner?
If only someone had the wit to strip the detainees naked and ride them like pack animals… hillarity would ensue, surely, to a predictable Benny Hill soundtrack. Enough, even, that these jolly sadists might memorialise a few Kodak moments for the family album? Now there’s a thought.
:O
That is all.
Crisis on Uncertain Earths
Well, they’ve only gone and done it. Kotaku are reporting that Rock Band 2 has been announced – officially this time. And it’s coming sooner than you might think – sometime in September, which, would you believe it, is less than three months from now. On the bright side, Harmonix have already sworn that it’ll be the first game “to support fully fuctional cross-title DLC”, and that’s a relief to say the least.
Still. This wasn’t supposed to be a cash cow. The dev team are the very best at what they do, and they’re perfectly entitled to roll in the profits of their efforts, but you just know there’s going to be a new set of instruments – sure, you’ll be able to use your old guitars and drums, but the new ones will be better put together; they’ll offer extra functionality, new knobs and waggly bits only true Spartans could resist. I fear I’m not up to the task.
Just as well I hadn’t gotten around to getting the original Band in a Box, then. Kiss your £100 goodbye Harmonix. Admittedly you can probably have it this holiday anyhow, but I won’t take any pleasure in giving it to you. Oh no!
Black Holes and Revelations
Plenty to report, but it’s all a little scattershot; the day job’s been keeping me plenty busy lately, leeching at the time I put aside to keep All Things Uncertain a going concern. To hell with it.
I’ve a couple of interesting news stories earmarked for your pleasure. First of all, there’s been another outbreak of mad scientists and the otherwise well-to-do making science-fiction a reality. The Earth, reports the BBC, is not at significant risk from the Large Hadron Collider.
If you’re too lazy to click the link, let me spell it out: in a facility on the French/Swiss border due to become operational this Summer, particle physicists mean to collide quarks and gluons inside protons – creating, in so doing, their very own bonzai black holes.
The Last Remnants of Hope: Japan and the 360 RPG
I try to write a news story and this is what I come up with:
http://www.acegamez.co.uk/blog/2008/06/last-remnants-of-hope-360-and-rpg-in.htm
I’m not going to cross post because wordpress won’t let me embed trailers from gamevideos, and I gah at the thought of wading through the Web 2.0 filth to source them elsewhere – but do check it out.
In other news I’ve been assigned the Ace Gamez review of Final Fantasy: Crisis Core on the PSP, which means, at the least, that I’ll play a game that otherwise I probably couldn’t condone spending much time with at all. Here’s to new experiences – like 40 hours spent squinting at a tiny screen with persistent earbud-ache!
40 hours, I should add, that I won’t be spending finishing up GTA IV or getting started on Snake’s final mission: Guns of the Patriots.
Wait, is that a 6′ Solid Snake figurine I see in the post this morning?
Oh yes, yes indeed.
I Want To Believe
This Summer? Really?
Well sign me up. I really would like to believe, but we’ll see.
The Day Begins At Sunset: A Review of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project
Lazarus of Bethany was survived by his sisters, Mary and Martha, who had during his fatal sickness bade Jesus to come cure their beloved. But the Bible testifies that even Jesus was not innocent of tardiness on occasion, and his lingering meant that when at last the prophet arrived in the town of Bethany, Lazarus has been entombed for four days. Jesus was not, however, discouraged. To the sisters he is said to have declared: “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die,” and without another moment’s indecision raised the corpse of Lazarus back to the land of the living, wrapped in grave-shrouds and presumably rather the worse for wear. The Bible has it that the Lord granted Lazarus a second chance – as, some might assert, the first recorded zombie – and leaves it at that ominous point in the proceedings, but the lore was embellished in the 13th century to include Lazarus’ latter-life escape to Cyprus, where he become an immigrant who lived the proverbial dream, ascending up the rank and file of religion to become the first Larnacan bishop; and without once devouring the brains of his fellows. More power to him.
To a self-confessed heretic such as myself, it’s not difficult to see why Alexsandar Hemon takes the story for an anchor of sorts. With such a commingling of appealing themes – of power; the glib timeline of life; of hope against reason; and ultimately, of otherness and its recurrence in time and place – it’s a concise and moreover an appropriate means of fastening the narrative of The Lazarus Project as it trips from country to country and skips from a plot thread in one time period to the next in another. Alongside the Passion – another of the so-called signs chronicled in the books of the disciple John – the story of Lazarus is among the Bible’s most disturbing, and it fits that Hemon’s modern-day protagonist, Brik, is moved from time to time to consider those hopes and fears that must have plagued Lazarus after his resurrection. The second chance he was granted is cited, after all, as one of the reasons the high priests and judges sentenced Jesus to the cross. His death and rebirth helped to spark a revolution, a religion, and much more besides.
Ubidays 08: The Good, the Bad and The Evil
It’s been an underwhelming few weeks in the games business. Not an unusual turn of events at all considering the calm that typically precedes the media storm of E3, but, to tip the Ace Gamez hat at just a few of this year’s highlights, with the release of Burnout Paradise, a new Devil May Cry and GTA IV, what, I wonder, has been typical about 2008 thus far? Nonetheless, embargoes across the internet lifted yesterday on the assorted revelations of Ubidays 08, and around the world, Tom Clancy franchise fanboys wondered in unison where the prolific French developer had hidden the latest iteration of Ghost Recon.
Other than that strange oversight, the news thus far has proved well worth a look. Before we get our teeth into the good stuff, though, let’s get the relative non-events out of the way. HAWX has a rather ridiculous acronym for a name but looks solid enough otherwise; the new Brothers in Arms I could honestly care less about, although it’s worth saying that the transition to next-gen looks to have gone very smoothly, without losing the unique squad mechanics that sold the series to its many fans in the past; and the less said about Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party and Easy Way to Stop Smoking the better.
To my surprise, newcomer Shaun White Snowboarding looks rather promising. On the Wii it’ll feature full balance-board intergration, making the expense of that accessory in Europe a little less outrageous. On the PS3 and Xbox 360, meanwhile, the über-powerful Assassin’s Creed engine looks to be performing better than ever in the trailer. We can only hope it proves to be the sport’s Skate rather than another Tony Hawk-inspired button-masher – I expect SSX has that covered already, anyway.
More groundbreaking, however, is Far Cry 2. Take the much-discussed setting of Resident Evil 5, open the world up in the mold of Grand Theft Auto, throw in the excellent, if somewhat extravagant FPS mechanics of the original Far Cry – and what do you have? Pure awesome, perhaps. We can only hope.
Despite talk of an Earth-shattering new paint job, the trailer for the relaunched Prince of Persia looks strangely familiar, and for all the talk of revolutionary new gameplay, the dark/light angle has been done too often already. So it’s certainly no Okami, nor worlds apart from the previous instalments in the series, but distinct enough all the same to get a little excited about. If you ask me, it’s been too long since we wall-crawled our way to winning our very own Arabian princesses anyway.
But none of these games can stand up to the highlight of Ubidays 08: Beyond Good and Evil 2. Yes, you read right. Music to these ears, and plenty more besides. Despite rock-bottom sales of the first game, creator extraordinaire Michel Ancel is bringing back the critically-acclaimed Beyond Good and Evil for another go-around. One of the most singular experiences I’ve ever had with a video game, or indeed in any media, I was next to inconsolable when its abysmal sales figures came through to seal the unfortunate fate of an often sung but obviously not often bought piece of brilliance. That this sequel could be greenlit boggles the mind (in a good way!) and reassures some of the more serious concerns I have about the industry that regulates our entertainment of choice. What could possibly be next? Metroid Dread at last? A follow-up to Wii adventure gem Zack and Wiki?
At least on the latter count, I’ve certainly heard as much. Readers: rejoice!
All Things Uncertain 