See, I find that pretty unsettling.

Not where I am, but they don't have a TV. It's more of a tiny shack next to Rita's Water Ice.

And Boo Boo, I completely agree with your point. But I was talking about California's argument.

damn LA noire and having to inspect completely naked girls zoomed in .... just cant play that game with family around , and cant find a time when they're not ....

I can't play Grand Theft Auto IV when anyone is around, because I just can't resist all the hot hookers.

I thought Mortal Kombat was a big deal. And I was a sophomore in college.

resident evil 4 is so amazing

Which is funny because the violence in MK is about on the same level of realism as one of those gory Monty Python sketches. I mean C'mon. One of Johnny Cage's fatalities was punching his opponent's head off... THREE TIMES IN A ROW.

I don't see anything disturbing in ridiculously over the top violence, shockingly realistic violence like what you see in Call of Duty however...

Call of Duty is hardly shockingly realistic in terms of gore.

Well nothing in gaming is outright realistic. But you gotta look at it from my perspective, I remember when games like Splatterhouse and MK were being discussed by actual politicians, and when Lara Croft's oversexualized design was considered shocking. And yet a great majority of western developed games now dwell in violence that at least parallels REAL violence a good deal. There's stuff like God of War that's still pretty damn over the top, but you know where I'm getting at.

Stuff like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor have such a hard on for the military it would freak even Michael Bay out. Didn't the guy behind that big Norway massacre outright say that Modern Warfare 2 was part of his "training simulation"? Doesn't MW2 actually have a mission that requires you to kill Russian civilians? Seriously I can understand why people may find that a tad xenophobic.

We don't have to worry about douchebags like Jack Thompson anymore, so I think it's important that gamers themselves take the responsibility of discussing issues like when or if a game can go too far.

Been looking at the trailers and teasers and gameplay videos for Bioshock Infinite, and even though much of it looks like an amazing continuation of all the things that made the first two great, I think I'll have to sit this installment out unless people I trust tell me it's one of the best gaming experiences they've ever had or something similarly hyperbolic. The whole conceit of teaming up with a girl with her computer-artifacty boobs constantly falling out of her dress and imagining that I'm having a real emotional story with her complete with schlocky melodramatic music during intense scenes is far too fucking corny and ridiculous for me to bear. The constant reminder that somebody out there actually found such a thing erotic and emotionally involving (or even non-offensive) would have me laughing my ass off to the point of distraction from every other potentially good aspect of the game. If this industry doesn't want to grow up, that's fine, but don't expect me to shell out 60 fucking dollars for a game and over 48 hours of my time and then be forgiving about this kind of shit when you make it an integral part of the game. I'm voting with my money on this one.

I've always found it amusing that piss poor would be video game critics sometimes actually deduct points from their reviews of really old video games (or recent Mario games) because they "don't have a very engaging story" while at the same time praising games like Uncharted which one guy accurately described as "a C grade Indiana Jones movie starring Dane Cook" for their "deep" storyline.

You see, in the eyes of many gamers a "deep storyline" is just another way of saying the game has a lot of cutscenes. And crticizing old games for not having a story when that really has no effect on the quality of the games themselves just makes no sense. TODAY when stories are a very important part of many video games. It IS an important criteria.

But whenever somebody criticizes the story of the Halo games for example and points out that those games have really creepy fascist undertones, some fucking assface gets defensive and says "dude, it's not about the story, it's about the gameplay".

Yeah that's seriously all that people care about, the gameplay. That's why the developers spend so much goddamn effort in giving everything a massive backstory and that's why there are fucking books about Halo and why there's even a fucking anime about Halo (which I find super ironic given the legendary Japanophobia of the Halo fanbase) and why Peter Jackson actually wanted to make a fucking movie about Halo. Clearly nobody cares about the story.

And how about that Gameplay? Yeah, it's a generic FPS. Big fucking whoop. That totally warrants the absurd amount of self importance that the Halo series gives itself.

Now don't get me wrong fellas. There is nothing wrong with video games putting an emphasis on story. I just hate how when developers simply want to make a fucking game and nothing else there's a goddamn stigma attached to that. I personally long for the days when games were games and weren't expected to tell stories unless they absolutely needed to (as in games that are built around a storyline, like JRPGs or adventure games) because around the time stories became a standard for every game, the great majority of games simply riffed a basic, popular movie formula. Thus the beginning of the era we are at now when every other game tries REALLY hard to be a hollywood blockbuster.

But hey, isn't Bioshock essentially about how Ayn Rand's utopian ideals are full of shit? I thought you would totally be into that Dreww. I wouldn't be too harsh on it. I haven't played any of the games, but it's one of the few FPS franchises I can think of that actually has an original premise and an appealing aesthetic sense. In this day and age, that really counts for something if you ask me.

Why spend sixty dollars on a game? I almost never do that. I can wait. When a game I want comes down to twenty or thirty bucks, that's when I buy it. Unless it's something I really want to support, like Red Dead Redemption, or something I don't want to wait for, like Borderlands - Game of the Year Edition.

yeah the only time I buy new games is when I have a gift card

You know, I still have this hunch that one of the big things that lead Ebert to come to his conclusion about video games not being art now or ever is because he might have wondered at some point what video game "critics" were like and..... well yeah.

Remember that movie Battle of Los Angeles that was just generic war movie cliche bullshit with generic aliens thrown in? Movie critics hated it of course. But video game critics would have been cumming all over it if it was a game. No seriously. They WOULD, and we all fucking know it.

Think about that for a little while.

Roger Ebert doesn't like video games because he's old and obstinate of shiny new technologies. And yeah Battle Los Angeles would've been an awesome game if it was made by bioware or Bathesda or someone.