Negroid. n. An African-American that perpetuates negative stereotypes against black people. i.e. Cole Train, Lil Jacob
Lil Wayne was sentenced today on three counts of being a dumb negroid.

This is always fun to write about. Gaming has a history of making black characters out to be extremely lame. Lame as in one-dimensional and cut from the same stereotypical mold. Everytime I bring up race in games, the conversation with my white friends inevitably ends up going, “Why does it  matter what race you’re playing as? It doesn’t matter to me. Sounds like you’re the one who’s racist.”  Am I just weird for that? Is it wrong that I pick males when the game lets me pick gender, too?

I don’t think game developers are racists. They’re just mostly asian and white dudes who aren’t particulary good at creating any minority characters without stereotyping. Here’s to the ones who are: my top 5 non-stereotypical black characters.

Digital Rights Management and piracy are touchy subjects in the PC gaming community. On one side you have the consumers, who defend their right to do whatever they want to with a product after it’s purchased. On the other you have game developers and publishers, who feel pressure to add DRM restrictions to games to combat the loss of sales, sales which anti-DRM gamers say is nonexistent.

It’s been a gridlock with both sides making sound arguments, and aside from the occasional Bioshock scale scandal, it’s been largely swept under the rug due to the controversy. But it’s becoming critical for the issue to be addressed immediately. Independent developer Amanita Design has reported that only 5-10% of the people playing their DRM-free game Machinarium have payed for it. They’ve gone as far as to offer a “Pirate Amnesty sale” to entice more people to buy. If the PC gaming community wants to maintain relevance and flourish, there’s a few ways that everyone involved has to adjust.

The Prince of Persia movie has now become the highest grossing video game movie of all-time. However, the movie was by no means perfect. My biggest problem with the movie was that it was basically a live-action version of Disney’s Aladdin, with a very unpersian Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia. Outside of the flawless casting of John Leguizamo as Luigi in that masterpiece known as the Super Mario Bros movie, picking out the right actors for video game movies seems like an impossible for today’s studios for some reason. It can’t be that hard, right? Let’s give it a shot.

A lot of time and money is being dumped into motion controls these days by the big three console companies. I wouldn’t call motion the death to the joystick like some of my industry compadres, and I think certain aspects of motion controls have merit. It’s just disappointing when you think of all the other things game companies could be putting their research and development into. In the massive push to change the modern controller, there is so much else developers could be fixing that actually, you know, need fixing.

I’m always shocked by the sheer number of haters towards video games. There’s always that one person in every group who due to their contractual obligations by Haterade must not only dislike games, but would be more than happy if you put down the controller for good. It’s a phenomenon that I thought would go away with time. Games have expanded, have become more mature and more of an “everyone” thing. Yet Negative Nancys still go about their merry way. After independent research, my findings suggest that gaming’s RPH (or Raw Hate Percentage) is significantly above movies and television; somewhere below pornography and making cocaine.

Let’s put all the “video games are art” debates to rest, everybody.

Roger Ebert finally threw up the white flag on the whole video games as art debate and basically admitted what we knew all along: he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Ebert is my dude and all, and easily the most renowned and respected movie critic there is, but when he dropped the infamous “games can never be art” line on the world he turned into the bad guy from Ratatouille for gamers everywhere. Just like Anton Ego though, it appears Mr. Ebert knows when to stand up from the table and just walk away.

Epic Mickey’s initial concept art blew minds.

I originally dismissed them the first time I saw them, because there’s no way Disney would allow a mechanical Country Bear scorpion killing machine to be seen in a finished product, right? Then the first real in-game screenshots of the game said came out, and answered that question with  “pretty much.”

I remember a boom about ten years or so ago of real-time internal clocks in games. Pokemon Gold & Silver had a night and day system where certain Pokemon would only show up at specific times of the actual day. Animal Crossing is easily the most famous example: events and holidays mirrored the real world. Tom Nook’s shop had real hours and if you stopped playing for a month, weeds would take over your town and your animal buddies would be like “where have you been?” Animal Crossing and the Pokemon games were huge, so what the hell happened to real-time games exactly?

On June 11, the world’s biggest event will commence. Hundreds of millions will bear witness simultaneously and the majority of the planet will unite for one moment in time. This is the World Cup.
Yet if you live in America, most of the people you know won’t give a shit.

It’s the world’s biggest event featuring the world’s biggest sport. Except here, where we just don’t give a fuck. We even call it “soccer” instead of the name “football” used by the rest of the globe. We’re just too cool for school.

But soccer has been slowly rising in the United States as a spectator sport lately. This uptrend of popularity has baffled analysts. Most take the popular scientific approach and blame it on the Mexicans. I, on the other hand, still believe the Lil Wayne rule applies: you’re not really popular unless white people like you. What has really been raising interest in soccer in the US and will continue to do so are EA Sports’ FIFA games. If they keep going at their current rate, I see soccer becoming a top three sport here within the next ten years.

Fuck gaming journalism.

I really hate it. I’ve been part of the machine for years now and I’m sick and tired of it. I’m tired of holding back how I feel about games due to the ass-kissing of publishers, advertisers, and readerships. I am sick of being told to create “diggable” articles, which is really just a term for “crap everyone already agrees with.” I am tired of reading and writing the same repetitive shit that bloggers who call themselves “journalists” in front of their friends and family spew out on a daily basis. Fuck it all. I am going in a different direction.