KanePaws • Comments

• Saturday Soapbox: IP Freely?

• KanePaws 18/05/2013

  Need for Speed,
  Splinter Cell,
  Assassin's Creed:
  Go to hell. Reply 0

• Avant garde stealth game Tangiers looks like a surreal noir nightmare

• KanePaws 18/05/2013

  The game looks interesting both visually and mechanically, and it was nice to see a Eurogamer article that didn't have the sub-heading "It's [popular game 1] meets [popular game 2] with a bit of [popular game 3]." Though I guess the article itself was unable to explain what a stealth game or a branching narrative was without multiple references to Dishonoured. :rolleyes: Reply +1

• Nvidia's Project Shield to cost $349 in North America

• KanePaws 18/05/2013

  @Yautja_Warrior

  I just don't see the point really. If Vita and 3DS are not selling out like handhelds used to back in the day, what chance has this got ?

  But Nintendo handhelds are doing better than ever. According an article (from Eurogamer 2012, no less), "3DS and DS sales roughly equal after [the] same time period." Furthermore, the DS outsold the GBA by a roughly 2:1 ratio, and the Game Boy by about 50%.
  
  3DS sales total over 31 million and it's only been 2 years, so, really, I don't think the portable market has shrunk at all - it's always moved up and down with different generations, and it's doing extremely well right now. Good news for us. :) Reply +2

• Men's Room Mayhem due next week

• KanePaws 18/05/2013

  Screw Ł0.69 games. This is something that, 10 years ago, would have been tucked away on a "Free Flash Games!" website; it really deserves its own article? Reply 0

• Sega Nintendo alliance announced for three Sonic exclusives on Wii U and 3DS

• KanePaws 17/05/2013

  @captain-sylver

  Stop making Sonic games is the best advice I can offer Sega.

  Stop making Sonic anything is the best advice I can offer the Internet. Reply -5

• Elder Scrolls Online: "You can compete with your friends to catch the biggest fish"

• KanePaws 17/05/2013

  So it has many of the most basic features of every WoW-style MMORPG.
  
  Was there ever any doubt it would lack a rudimentary fishing minigame and the ability to loot things? Reply 0

• Hawken art prank changes CEO's mind about scantily clad women

• KanePaws 16/05/2013

  @Dangerous_Dan Sometimes what is popular happens to be best, though. Either way I'm not sure a persecuted homosexual man from the late 19th century is the best source for the present discussion of a gaming company CEO's low-brow use of a sexy cartoon riveter.
  
  That said, I really appreciate the fact that I can even be arguing with somebody about Victorian philosophy. Only on Eurogamer, haha!
  
  Cheers! Reply +2

• KanePaws 15/05/2013

  @Dangerous_Dan

  To quote O.Wilde - “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible....”

  I think Wilde was talking less about objectifying women in mass media and more about the philosophy behind aestheticism... Reply +4

• Sid Meier's cultural victory

• KanePaws 15/05/2013

  I'm looking at the lower corner of that Covert Action box - "1MB minimum hard disk recommended" - where am I supposed to get specs like that!? Reply +6

• Dream is a video conceptualising how visually sumptuous next-gen games could be

• KanePaws 15/05/2013

  So now I'll be able to play corridor shooters that show even more landmarks in the distance! Reply +8

• Scribblenauts Unmasked confirmed, stars DC Comics superheroes

• KanePaws 15/05/2013

  How long until we get the Coca-cola edition? :rolleyes: Reply 0

• Inside the Poppenkast, indie's secret idyll

• KanePaws 15/05/2013

  It's a culture of creation where conveying an idea in as short amount of time as possible is the most important thing.

  That sentiment really makes me sad. Many indie games can portray a feeling, a general theme, or a sense of something, but by and large they're plotless, wordless, or tongue-in-cheek. Among smaller, newer creators, lengthy storylines seem to have fallen out of vogue. At least that has been my impression. Reply 0

• 2008 PSN hack suspect smashes PCs, hides HDDs, gets off lightly

• KanePaws 14/05/2013

  Miller also... was ordered to get his high-school equivalence certificate.

  lol. Reply +1

• Ace Attorney 5 will be an eShop-only offering

• KanePaws 14/05/2013

  I'll be skipping this one; I have a nice shelf at home and I'm not interested in paying full price for an icon in one of my 3DS's folders. Not that I'm too regretful, as Capcom really knows how to over-saturate its market. Reply 0

• Pokémon X and Y adds mounts, is set in an alternate version of France

• KanePaws 14/05/2013

  @FortysixterUK I wouldn't worry; they've made dozens of main-series Pokemon games over the past (nearly) two decades and the games invariably use the same formula (for better or worse). Heart Gold, which you mention, is actually a remake of the much older Gold version; and the most recent games, Black 2 and White 2, are essentially the same as the very first Pokemon games from 1996.
  
  The games are all so similar to one another that, if you liked any of the main-series Pokemon games, you'll probably like every other one, too. Reply 0

• KanePaws 14/05/2013

  @Bobrek

  Are those avatars going to allow for much in the way of changing in ethnicity

  Careful, apparently people got mad when I mentioned it earlier... >_>
  
  Was it because Game Freak already showed their desire for diversity with the Aunt Jemima cameo?
  
  Reply -1

• KanePaws 13/05/2013

  It'd be nice to customize hair and skin shade separately; it would be a strange choice not to allow that. But it is nice to know that it only took Pokémon 17 years to allow you to play as a person of (kind of tan) colour. Reply 0

• Saturday Soapbox: Force feeding fandom

• KanePaws 11/05/2013

  A comment from the review of Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, posted 11 years ago:
  

  Dear George Lucas,
  Can you.... actually put some effort into your future Star Wars titles please?

  If I'm still around, I'll cite a comment from this thread come 2025, when the newest Star Wars game fails to impress. Reply +6

• Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity review

• KanePaws 10/05/2013

  @Pandy

  If you couldn't follow it then I'd suggest that it was you that had the attention deficit.... Maybe you should just stay in Pallet Town next time. Nobody's forcing you to go on an adventure.

  Off topic, there's really no reason to take such an insulting tone. On topic, the whole point is that you, the player, are indeed forced to go on the adventure - your only options are to be complicit or to shut the game off, which is what so heavily stunts the potential of any moral exposition. That is the point, in a nutshell.
  
  Because the core premise of the game is to capture and sport fight these creatures, to use them to cut down trees and build skyscrapers, to command them to pull boats and fly people around the countryside and so on, there can never be a solution that makes any sense. To free Pokémon would be to dismantle the society, the fiction, and indeed the very mechanics of the games.
  
  That's why, at the end of it all, the conclusion is something as incredibly flimsy as "friendship was the answer all along!" What does that even mean?
  
  Well, it's an amazingly conservative answer, a perfect justification of the status quo, it's comfortable and, best of all, it requires no changes whatsoever to take place. Which is the point. It turns out Pokémon love unpaid labour, they love building our skyscrapers and digging holes for us, they see it as a point of personal honour to hurt themselves and one another for our amusement - and all we have to do is respectfully tend their wounds afterwards. There's never a question of the ranking of beings: humans are on top, unquestionably, and Pokémon are subservient. How could it be any different? Even though these same creatures all understand human speech, sometimes speak human language, and often seem to possess human-level intelligence, they are not entitled to human-level treatment. It's a matter of course that they serve us - they have their place and we ours, in short.
  
  And that's why the moral exposition ultimately fails, because it must, invariably, return to support the scaffolding already in place. Since it's impossible (from a gameplay and, really, a franchise perspective) to throw out the old rules, the exploration of these problems has to turn full-circle and justify the very actions that were under scrutiny, no matter how paper-thin the solution.
  
  And if nothing can change, then it's a mistake to bring up these moral concepts in the first place. As I initially said: the topic is never done justice - and it's solved in such a shallow manner as to render the discussion of it useless.
  
  So... friendship. Reply +2

• KanePaws 10/05/2013

  @Pandy I feel that whatever Pokémon games do raise the question of the wide-spread, brutal Poké-slavery do so in such an attention-deficit and incoherent way that it would have been better never to bring it up at all.
  
  The plot is so rife with inconsistencies and half-finished thoughts that, by the end, we've stopped wondering whether Pokéballs are mind-control devices, stopped caring about the 129 lives forever stashed away in our PC, and are really just having our trained animals attack one another in order to stop some evil magician from freezing the world with the cannon of a giant, flying pirate ship. (That was the plot of Black/White 2, after all.)
  
  That's the greatest problem: at the end of the day, we must collect badges, we must collect Pokémon, and we must fight them for our own agendas. So long as these actions are inseparable from the game (and they always will be), any moral conundrums that arise must be swept under the rug, as hastily dismissed as they were brought up.
  
  That's why it's really best they never bring it up - and why, when they do, it's still as though they haven't - because the topic will never (can never) be done justice within the unshakable formula. Reply +2

• First-person open-world survival horror game The Forest looks brilliant

• KanePaws 09/05/2013

  @BrahManDude Perhaps because the most vengeful, cruel, and frightening monsters of all are neither formless nor foreign, but deep within the human soul. o_o Reply +2

• KanePaws 09/05/2013

  @Harmonica

  Breaking the golden rule of not actually showing the thing that is meant to be scary until the last moment possible (ie, several hours into the game and not the teaser trailer) - and also having it be a bloke in a spandex suit - doesn't really bode that well.

  I don't know about you, but a dude in banana-yellow full-body spandex is pretty much the last thing I'd want chasing me through a forest. Reply +10

• The Room rakes in over 2 million sales

• KanePaws 09/05/2013

  "The Room rakes in over 2 million sales..."
  
  ... 1.8 million of which were caused by titular misinterpretation. Reply +6

• Sony: "Unlike PS3, we are not planning a major loss to be incurred with the launch of PS4"

• KanePaws 09/05/2013

  "Sony believes a combined 5 million PSP and PS Vita units will be sold this financial year..."
  
  So about 412 Vitas, then?
  
  /ducks Reply 0

• World of Warcraft subscriptions drop 1.3 million in three months

• KanePaws 09/05/2013

  That screenshot makes me a bit nauseous. Reply -1