We discuss Wii Fit and how it tells fat kids they are fat. Bucky explains again why legislatures need to get over it and make parents do their job. Daniel believes the new breed of gamers want work not fun. GTA breaks entertainment records, Yeah! Is PC hardware classification a good thing?. A good Brit proves that video game violence does not cause real world violence…nanny nanny boo boo! Daniel asks the question on everyone’s mind… Shouldn’t Guitar hero be Band Hero?

link

• Body Mass Index : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index
• Liberty City and New York Side by side : http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewj/sets/72157604988911230/
• Interview with Ray Muzyka of Bioware : http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3667/a_new_future_under_ea_ray_muzyka_.php
• Jack Thompson needs mommy’s permission to submit legal docs : http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080520-judges-report-in-jack-thompson-case-guilty-on-27-charges.html
• Half Life 2 Havoc Mod : http://www.hlhmod.com/about.html
• History of Physics in Video Games : http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/534/physics_in_mass_market_.php
• Mobile phone Snake : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game)
• Thomas Hobbes was a realist Chump! : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes
• The Mattel Power Glove : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove

 

 Off the Reservation [57:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Games are too damn repetitive these days. Seriously. I’m looking at my Xbox 360 games that I haven’t finished and out of 9 games (not including GTA IV, which I’m currently playing), I have finished 4. That means out of 9 ‘next gen’ games, I only had the endurance to finish 45% of them. Compare that to finishing about 96% of every other game I’ve ever played that didn’t suck. What the hell does this even mean?

Simply: ‘Next Gen’ games are too freaking long and too freaking repetitive. Before we go on, I just want to say that I loathe the term Next Gen. What a freaking lame-ass marketing-asshole-type buzzword that means nothing. Damn it. Anyway, I digress. Xbox 360 and PS3 games are ridiculous. I appreciate the thought: It seems right that game developers are trying to give us our money’s worth. It would be great, it really would, if the developers who had wanted to give us our money’s worth on length didn’t skimp out on content or gameplay mechanics, but alas, it seems that with ‘Next Gen’ we get our choice: good gameplay or good graphics and a long game. It seems that most shops are going with the latter, rather than the former.

Well, what’s the big deal? I’ll tell you: Imagine picking up your favorite book, let’s for the sake of this example, say it’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Imagine picking up your favorite book, and seeing that instead of it being a hearty 900 pages, the author, who is probably Oprah, has actually increased the length of the book to over 25,000,000 pages! Hooray!! More of whatever the hell it is that’s in How Stella Got Her Groove Back!! But upon turning the page to 901, you realize that the next 24,999,099 pages contain nothing but the first 900 pages repeating themselves 27,777 times. That is what it’s like playing Assassin’s Creed. It’s reading How Stella Got Her Groove Back over. And over. And over. And over again.

Compare that to games that came out for the Super Nintendo. Legend Of Zelda: A Link to the Past is like going out to your mailbox and getting the best-of edition of Penthouse Forum. It’s chock full of things you love reading, and right as you’re about to get sick of reading and go blow up some anthills with m80s, the game ends and you’re left wanting more.

I think we took a wrong turn back in Albuquerque. I mean in the weeks leading up to Forza 2’s release, I could barely sit still. I almost called in sick to work the day it came out. I played it for three weeks straight. I loved it. And then I slowly realized that I was driving on the same tracks that I had been driving on for the past three weeks. Except before, I was only driving two laps around the track instead of six. And those two laps only took four minutes, instead of the fifteen it took to finish six laps. Sorry, Forza 2, I don’t feel like devoting fifteen minutes to driving around the same piece of asphalt that I’ve been seeing for the past three weeks, even if I am driving a wicked awesome M3. Yes, it’s more realistic with longer laps, but some times (most of the time) realistic racing simulation does not make for fun video games.

Somewhere along the way, games went from being fun and providing a great experience to pumping out the sickest graphics and longest gameplay. How is it, that I could devote over 90 hours to Oblivion (which I consider a ‘Last Gen’ game with good graphics) and its two expansions, but I can’t find it in me to finish twelve minutes of driving on a track? I don’t know, maybe it’s that Oblivion provides diverse, rich, unique environments. Maybe it’s because I loathe repetition, which is ironic, because NES and SNES era games are chock full of doing the same thing over and over again, and that’s what I’m sitting here pining for, but I’m seriously becoming disenchanted with the ‘Next Gen’ experience.