The Age of RPGing

Hi SuperViv!

Yes, I also played the LSL games before I was mature enough to "understand" them. Anyway, most of the innuendo and double-entendres were butchered in the Spanish translations, so anyway...

Well, I have a huge problem. As you may well know, I'm a modest man living in a modest apartment... of one room. I can't just "send" the kid to sleep, because if he sleeps, I must sleep. Also, my current setup to play console games demands me to darken the room and project a HUGE image in my wall. So if I play, everybody in the room "plays" with me. I can't just turn the screen away so I'm the only one who can see it.

Also, I don't believe that playing action games turns your kids into criminals, but it's also true that it's not a good idea to show God of War and X-Men Origins: Wolverine levels of violence to small children (I'm not linking any videos, so just imagine a bunch of people getting torn apart in many imaginative ways). I was really scared by violence when I was a kid. Now I don't really pay much attention to it, so I can play those games and find it just mildly amusing. "Nice, another decapitation." So OK, I'll let my son play Manhunt when he's 14 years old if he wants to, but not now.

Uwe Boll is a nice guy. And he's made a few decent movies. But in others, he shows no compassion or humanity to his characters. That's probably his main flaw as a filmmaker: he doesn't care about what happens to the characters, so the viewers aren't supposed to care, either, and they lose interest. But some of his movies look great, anyway. Paco Fox is probably right when he says that Boll is much better as a producer than as a director.

I bought the tinbox edition PC version of Far Cry 2 last year, but then I sold it to somebody else when I learned about its f***ed-up DRM ("5 machine activation limit"), and then I bought it again for PS3 with a promotional code to get some extra missions because I really wanted to play it, and then I sold it again when I learned about the glitch that destroyed your save games in a bad moment, and then I bought it a third time when the collector edition got really cheap... The thing is, I'haven't played it yet, but the consensus about this one seems to be that it's really engaging at first, but then you realize how superficial it is. It tries hard to be RPG-ish, but then it's just a regular FPS in disguise.

But now we have lots of true RPGs coming. Dragon Age: Origins has just been released. I was naive enough to buy the "Deluxe Edition" release on Steam, but now I feel really ripped-off, because all those "exclusive pre-order items" that were promised are NOT in the game. I mean, you can't just download them from Steam. I paid $15 extra to have the right to register in EA's site and in Rockstar Social Cl... I mean, Bioware Social Network and redeem my pre-order CD-key there to gain access to those items. Does it sound unnecessarily complicated? It's because that's exactly what it is. I demanded a refund, but of course Steam doesn't issue refunds.

Also, Mass Effect 2 will be released on January. But I'm still not done with the first one! And now that I'm becoming a father, it will be much worse. The RPG genre is the worst enemy of "casualness". I guess very soon I won't even be a casual core gamer. I may become just "casual", and maybe not even much of a gamer. That would be pretty sad. But sometimes you have to choose: your games or your family. I'll try to choose... both. If it's possible.

By the way, I think it's just fair to warn you right now that at any moment after next week I may stop writing on this blog for a few weeks, as I won't have an internet connection when I go to Spain to join my wife. Oh, well. We don't have many readers yet anyway, so it's not really much of a problem.

Have a nice rest of the weekend!
- Danda

Kids, Uwe Boll and the Malaria Medicine

Hey Danda,

No, I wasn't aware that Al Lowe was the guy behind Leisure Suit Larry. I played several of those games before I was old enough to understand them, and in retrospect, I wonder how I managed to solve them way back when, as an innocent prepubescent girl! And I wonder how my English vocabulary sufficed. At any rate, it's good he's okay and that he called the doctor right away. I read that often times, people don't really notice they have a heart attack because sometimes just their arm hurts and they think, whatever it is, it's probably nothing serious.

To jump right to the next topic, I wonder why you wouldn't be able to play violent video games anymore as a father. You sound like one of those crazy German politicians that calls first person shooters "murder simulators" and claims they turn juveniles into maniacs. I guess when your child reaches an age where video games get to be interesting, you just have to make sure that he realizes that reality is different from video games and real violence is not okay. After all, I don't think it's the video games that causes people to go on killing sprees, I think it's their isolation and social problems. Either way, you can always just play any game at all when your kid is sound asleep (think headphones), and I don't see how that would make you a bad father.

Having said that, of course I also think that some movies and possibly games aren't appropriate for young kids, and I recall an episode of This American Life where someone talked about watching The Shining when he was six years old, and how that basically kept him from sleeping for two years. But yeah, send your kid to bed early, and the rest of the night is all yours. ;)

And speaking about movies, I really like Uwe Boll since we went to meet him, he was so nice and pleasant, and I don't think Bloodrayne is as bad as it's made out to be - it can't be, because it seems I must've lent my Bloodrayne DVD to someone and whoever has it never gave it back. Dungeon Siege also wasn't bad. But I admit, BloodRayne II was a complete piece of garbage, and even I can't find it in me to defend it, hehe.

I myself haven't gotten around to playing much lately, so I'm still stuck in GTA IV somewhere. My brother finished Far Cry 2 not too long ago, even though he thought it was frustrating that you always had to go back and forth between locations and enemies came back to places where you killed everyone earlier. A friend of mine said he stopped playing it when he couldn't find malaria medicine anymore. So I guess that game is not high on my list of games I want to play.

Well, keep playing while you still can, and if you ever feel being a father is so stressful that you can't find time for your Playstation 3 anymore, I'd be kind enough to take it and take care of it for you. ;)

Regards,
-- SuperViv