Gamer Culture, Grand Theft Auto, Xbox 360
It’s been nearly five months since the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, giving gamers ample time to complete every mission, side mission, assassination and stunt jump. If you’ve managed to complete 100% of the game, kudos to you, and I’m sure you’ll be excited to know your quest is not quite over, that is, if you own an Xbox 360.
Business, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, Xbox 360
Despite current economic suckage, video games are proving to be resistant to high gas and food prices. In fact, video games sales have increased. Compared to a year ago, there has been a 53% increase in both software and hardware sales. The biggest surprise? The PS3 outsold the 360 last month, and kept going strong throughout July.
Pop quiz: Name a successful video game company (and their flagship, late-blooming, overcomplicated black monolith of a console) whose leading luminaries can’t seem to pull their ideas together for a unified vision of their company. Pencils down… or rather keys up. Partial credit if you answered “Atari,” but this is Current Events, not Ancient Video Game History. Of course, they say those who don’t know the past are doomed to… something.
When I was in college, I worked at a Japanese toy store. Fan boys would approach me to pay, but somehow decided to first show off the pictures in their wallet. Nope, no photos of pets, family members, or girlfriends; instead, I saw their favorite anime characters scantily clad in bikinis and lingerie. This made me realize a trend amongst hot illustrations and the people that love them.
If it were an equation, I think it would read something like this: disproportionate fictional chick + least amount of clothing possible = ultimate dork hotness. Seems like a Suicide Girl realized this, too, in one of her video game-inspired shoots.
It began with a tragic, though not entirely uncommon, news story in December: “Johnstown - A quiet, working-class neighborhood in this small town 40 miles north of Denver quickly became distraught over the news of the death of a popular 7-year-old girl, who allegedly died from abuse by her older sister and her boyfriend.
No, I still haven’t played GTA IV, don’t ask me to explain why. Apparently, though, some guy who has, and seemingly doesn’t have a degree in Psychology, any experience in law enforcement, and has never read Johnathan Swift, was seriously offended by a joke in this adult-centric video game. The man theorizes that people will become pedophiles not by playing GTA IV, but by stumbling across a fake, FBI-seized porn website within the game called littlelacysurprisepageant.com, which isn’t any more suspicious than actual legitimate porn site URLs that I probably can’t list off here. Needless to say, the source of this story was a tabloid, Britain’s The Star.
Or at least that’s what Electronic Arts’ CEO John Riccitiello would have us believe. In an interview on gameindustry.biz, Riccitiello expressed concerns about the Metacritic scores of some of EA’s upcoming games. Who’s to blame? Cults, apparently.
Art is expensive. Particularly electronic, interactive art that allows its audience to participate in everything from the slaying of Barrow-Wights, to break-neck police chases through crowded, virtual streets. As hardware and software developers continue to push the envelope of the video game experience – progressing from little more than colorful distractions (Frogger and Pong come to mind) to complex interactive narratives – the production of their art becomes more costly.
An unfathomably enormous amount of man-hours goes into the construction of games the likes of the recent smash hit Grand Theft Auto IV. Today, Pong and Frogger only satisfy if the player’s avatar can play them on a decrepit old arcade machine inside a virtual bar so luminescent with detail that one can practically smell the urine stain in the corner.
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