The Daily Fail (some of you may know it as the ‘Daily Mail’) is again trying to tackle those pesky violent video games by vomiting words without thinking.
Here is a quote from their article (more a jumbled mess of right-wing garbage than an article):
This Christmas’ top selling computer game could be one in which players kill hundreds of civillians in an airport. The sick game, called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, features a level in which players score points by shooting unarmed passengers at an airport terminal, according to a trailer released on the internet.
The footage shows the player entering airport security with a machine gun in hand, before killing every innocent bystander in sight, often while they are crawling away injured or screaming for help. Eventually, the player must shoot the police that come to the public’s aid to progress.
Gamer Alan Burke, 14, said “The game looks like a lot of fun. All my friends at school are getting it for Christmas”. But mum Cathy was outraged; “I can’t believe they thought this was suitable material for such impressionable minds ” she told us, “it’s absolutely sickening”.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare sold over 7 million copies, and this new version is predicted to break that record. Market research shows that most of the players are aged between 12 and 18.
PM Gordon Brown condemned the game in a conference call this evening, saying “It’s atrocious that the entertainment industry feels the need to make light of such a serious and grave issue”, and Conservative MP Justin Davis called for the game to be banned from sale. Activation, the company who make the dispicable title, refused to comment.
Damn those video games, coming over here with their violence, poisoning our kids minds, making them go on school shooting rampages. It gets me really angry, it makes me want to actually parent my children, make sure they don’t access 18+ games instead of complaining and whining like an extremist conservative cunt who is taken in by the media bile that spews from within the Daily Mail pages.
Sidenote: If you’re letting your kid play an 18+ game, it isn’t the game at fault, it is the parent. End of. The fact that some ‘sheep’ will follow the Daily Mail’s article is laughable, but another needless blow to gaming. Shooting (FPS) games have been around for a while now, maybe it is time people grew up and accepted the fact that a game is just a game.
My friend, Phil Whittle, a fellow gamer also said in an online discussion:
I really hate how the Daily Mail reports things, and I wouldn’t be suprised if this leaked footage was done by Activision to drum up a bit of free publicity about the game before release. We don’t know the full context of the scene yet, I read that there are two warnings before the scene starts and you can skip it at any time, and it’s actually there to demonstrate how bad the terrorists are, not to reward the player for commiting terrible acts as the article implies.
Since they brought up kids playing the game, it’s rated 18+ by both the BBFC and PEGI so they shouldn’t really be playing it (although that’s a debate for another day).
A project is underway, to translate Moby Dick into emoji (cute little japanese icons). You can donate to the project to receive a copy upon completion, amongst other things.
Planetfall is a wonderfully aesthetic scrolling space shooter (shmup) game that my friend (Phil Whittle) and I have been working on for a very long time. It all started in 2007, but now I’m going to reveal some of the development and design processes and explain a little more about the project.
The game wasn’t ever meant to be complicated, but it was meant to be beautiful with a vast array of complicated particle-based effects and wonderful patterns. The main game was supposed to feel both modern but with a retro feel, so we decided anti-aliasing was a no-go area, pixelated minimalist graphics were given the nod.
We announced and started developing in October 2007, with a beta release in November, we expected it to be complete by December. So here we are in October 2009 and we still have no firm release. One could describe it as vapourware, and until we release it, that would be a partly accurate description. We originally picked up a little bit of hype in the local and small forum communities, though this has died down a lot since then.
Why has the project taken so long? Well 2008 was spent with at least 2 engine rewrites, a break whilst working on other important projects and a makeover. Then 2009 came and we made the final engine rewrite and the final design makeover. In addition to that, I use a Mac and the game is developed on Windows at the moment, so I’m limited to how much I can do.
Basically, all there is to do now is to create the actual game, though arcade mode functions very well and it’s possible that we could release arcade mode on its own, rather than a story filled mode.
You may have noticed the minimal ship designs in the newer builds (see first screenshot in this post). The designs were not always minimal, however, here is what the player ship used to look like (see below).
Note: Press ‘F1′ in-game for controls.
Download (Updated):
Download removed.
*Working on a Mac version, beta only available for Windows, annoying I know, especially for me since I use a Mac.
This is a collaborative post between my friend (Murray Lewis) and I (Brendan Clarke), it may be part of a series, but for now here is an article comprised of contributions by us both.
Philosophical problems are most often seen as puzzles. There will be something that we, as a race and/or as a person, do not understand and we try to solve this puzzle somehow. Somewhere in each problem, we think, there must be an ambiguity or an incorrect assumption – if we could only find it then the problem would be solved and we could rest easy.
‘Solving’ these problems, however, often raises more questions than it answers, leading to more confusion and unease. Yet, even in these situations, we strive for further clarification. A problems solution, we assume, cannot be contradictory because the universe we live in cannot be. Or can it?
Contradictions can be readily created in speech or writings. There is, for instance, nothing to prevent me from saying that ‘this post contains more than one thousand words and less than four hundred’, but it could not possibly describe how things are or ever could be.
What sense could be made of that sentence? What grasp can be made of our having free will, yet everything we do being determined by events not under our will?
A problem involves reasoning – a piece of reasoning that strikes us as excellent. We begin with beliefs, propositions or principles which are obviously true and, when we reason correctly with these truisms, our conclusions must also be true.
A paradox, however, has a conclusion that somehow we see as obviously false, unacceptable or undesirable – a conclusion that contradicts what we have already taken to be obviously true. What has gone wrong? Are there errors in the reasoning or are some of those underlying, ‘obvious’ truisms actually false?
Perhaps, even, the conclusion that we reached, despite being so obviously wrong, is the correct one? Something has to give because, although we may casually speak of the world as being contradictory, we cannot make sense of an inherently inconsistent existence.
You cannot be both reading these words and not reading these words at the same time. Perhaps you are doing something as well as reading these words, or perhaps you are doing something less than reading – skimming, but not paying attention – but you cannot be both reading and not reading at the same time.
Of course, philosophically, this is all set in stone, but in the world of science, a theory is just a theory, it will be replaced when a better one, when one comes along because some explanation is better than no explanation.
I’d like to say that through improving and evolving of ideas, the laws of physics that we have found and written to reflect and describe the world around us is a very good explanation and interpretation, one I can support more than the alternative theories (such as religious explanation). However once you leave the comfort zone of this world, laws of physics start to break apart, there are anomalies in the laws.
So what do we do? We look at them, we try to describe and create more laws to explain how our expectations could have been broken, so a theory comes along that adds to or even replaces an existing theory which better describes what we have witnessed and it will probably be a matter of refining and adding for the rest of human civilisation.
There are contradictions, problems that need resolution, in Science right now. As we speak there are a vast cauldron of problems, be it physics or anything else, that has not yet been solved, but we are striving to solve them because humans have the evolutionary advantage of knowledge and the lust for knowing and understanding, self consciousness and learning.
For example; we as humans, have determined that a temperature below absolute zero is physically (literally) impossible. What if one day it happened and not only that it happened somewhere, but it also brought about unexpected results? We’d have to rewrite that particular law in our vast system of man-made and imperfect laws.
As a fan of sci-fi and of art and design, this appealed to me straight away, a lovely, informative and picture-plenty article over on ‘Pink Tentacle’.
“In 1969, Shōnen Sunday magazine featured a series of illustrated articles entitled “Computopia,” which depicted life in a pleasant future pervaded by computers.”
It is rather ironic that Nick Griffin has effectively filled a complaint to the BBC about him being discriminated against on last nights Question Time, isn’t it usually him doing the discrimination?
He even had the balls to call it a ‘lynch mob’ which he believes was orchestrated by the BBC. No, Nick, people genuinely think you are a cunt.
As I, and everyone else, predicted, he did tone things down last night but still ended up looking like a modern day hitler.
The BNP’s own Nick Griffin will be spreading his racist views and rancid, nazi ideology on Question Time tonight.
To be completely honest, I don’t think anything too controversial is going to be said tonight, but that is partly the problem.
There is a slight delay in recording the show and it ending up on our screens, the audience has been vetted and of course there are mass protests which have caught the attention of those in charge. The BBC will be a hawk pumped up on caffeine, with eyelids gaffer taped back; they won’t want to upset it’s many liberal (or non-extremist conservative) audience.
If Nick Griffin appeared on question time and spouted out the putrid self-perpetuating bile that he believes so strongly, then people are simply going to flat-out reject his views and the BNP will gain nothing. The best thing for Griffin is to try to appear normal and promote buzzwords such as security, freedom and terrorism.
If he does come off as relatively normal, his BNP supporters may gain a few members, which is inherently bad but a job well done in the eyes of Nick. This isn’t just speculation, this has been Nick’s plan for a while and it became public when he was giving a verbal vomiting session to racists in America (which included a convicted Klu Klux Klan leader), he said:
“The BNP isn’t about selling out its ideas, but we are determined to sell them. Basically, that means to use saleable words such as freedom, identity, security, democracy…”
“Once we’re in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, then perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say, ‘yes, every last one must go’. But if you hold that out as your sole aim to start with, you’re not going to get anywhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity.”
- Nick Griffin
So tonight, the ‘Griffinator’, the ‘BNP Hate Machine’, will be silently and effectively spreading his hate to the sheep of Britain, to the uninformed youth and to anyone who will absorb the shit that he believes and stands for.
The new Apple products combine function and aesthetics, something we all expect to be done well by Apple, though I think it is an inditement on my character when I think that one of the most interesting things to be announced was the new touch-sensitive mouse (aka ‘Magic Mouse’). I really want one.
Of course, the new iMacs also tantalise the senses.
