Abu Gaga

Did anyone else come across the video for Bianca* Knowles’ “Video Phone” (song far inferior to decade-old precursor “Picture Phone” by the Sub Debs; so ya know) and choke on their Pepsi when the writhing Abu Ghraib prisoners appear, grinding their bodies against the curvaceous young singer’s supple form like so many Boschian incubi? I know that what’s really going on with the blue-hooded, dark-skinned men is that they were supposed to have their heads blue-screened out and replaced with cameras (as seen elsewhere in the video), but apparently they ran out of time, forgot to do this bit, or couldn’t figure out a good way to transition from the naked skin of the dancers to the CG camera. Hell, for all I know the director saw the effect and liked it. But there’s no way anymore to see an image like that and not flash, for a moment, to the guy standing on the box with the wires on his hands.

Combine that with the constant imagery of guns in the video and the presence of Lady Gaga who, like Saddam Hussein, is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Kurds, and you can’t help but see the whole piece as a teasing commentary on the repressed sexual desire that America sublimates into violence in general and news coverage of the Middle East wars in particular.

No idea what’s up with the weird homage to Tarantino at the start, tho.

Here is the video, embedded in much the same way that Geraldo Rivera was during the invasion of Iraq. Concidence? I think not:

-ssr

* I know what her name is. “Beyonce” looks to me like a phonetic spelling of how someone might pronounce “Bianca” if they had no idea how it’s actually meant to be said. Ha ha.

Film Century 1.5

Dec. 19 Monty Python’s Life of Brian – It’s a damn shame that the Santa Clause gets played on TBS every Christmas and this doesn’t. 137/150
Dec. 19 6ixtynin9 – Sort of a peanuts and lemongrass version of Jackie Brown. 138/150
Dec. 20 Up In The Air – Imagine what would have happened to Jack if Tyler Durden never showed up. 139/150
Dec. 20 LA Confidential – A glittering, ticking Rolex of a film. 140/150
Dec. 21 Wild Zero – OK, so Alex Cox, Ryuhei Kitamura, and Link Wray walk into a bar… 141/150

Useless Headline or Most Useless Headline?

“Mom calls cops to thwart video-game-playing son” from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Seriously?? The headline makes it sound like they had to save her from some psychotic high functioning 25 year old who was having a psychotic break. The truth of the matter: She called the cops because her 14 year old son wouldn’t stop playing video games.

Let’s reframe the proposition shall we?

“Public safety funds wasted by woman who insists on letting electronic devices and law enforcement do her parenting for her.”

or perhaps

“Woman who lack even a modicum of parenting skills falls back on public servants when an ill fated first attempt at discipline fails.”

I mean FFS. Your 14 year old won’t stop playing games, what do you do? First you ask them to stop. Then you tell them to stop. Then you unplug the console and carry it into your bedroom and put it under your pillow. You also take the TV remote with you, as most TVs these days require one to function at all. On Monday you sell the console and get you and your kid into joint counseling/parenting sessions. Because if your kid is up at 2:30 AM playing GTA, he’s not the onlyone with the problem.

-fyrehaar

In A Shocking Turn, Sony Attempts to Solve a Problem Via Overpriced Hardware

SPARROW

In what Rachel Maddow might label a “holy mackerel” story, news broke a wee way back about Sony finally launching a new PlayStation console in Brazil. Well, new to Brazil, anyway. At launch the console will cost $445 and have “over 14” (i.e. 15) games available to play.

Oh, did I mention? This isn’t the launch of the PS3; this is the PS2 launch in Brazil. Remember when you got your PS2? I got mine with a college financial aid check, back before anyone in the US had ever heard of Al Qaeda.

It’s weird that Sony would be trying to do this now. Legitimate game sales in Brazil tanked back in the 90s when massive sales taxes were laid on game sales. Game companies fled the market, pirates swept in to fill the void, and now over a decade has passed without any serious non-pirate presence in the Brazilian games stores. I honestly don’t get why Sony thinks that this is going to work out well for them with how far things have slid. It’s not like things have turned around lately in some way that makes a console launch auspicious.

I suppose the question is: if Brazil has gone as long as it appears to without a culture of buying games legitimately, how do you change the paradigm there, given that an entire generation grew up with no non-pirate means of playing current-gen games. The Escapist pointed out in March that you can get games for $5-10 at pirate mini malls, and nobody has ever played a PS2, PS3, Xbox, or 360 game in Brazil that wasn’t pirated. What’s worse, Brazil still has a brutal tax on games that’s close to 100% (which probably accounts for at least some of that PS2 launch price). Good luck keeping your game costs competitive with pirate copies while that’s in effect.

I’m sure that game and console makers would like to break the grip of the pirate market in South America, but I’d be really surprised if they manage to do it anytime soon. In our current gen here in the US, they are using a carrot and stick approach. You start by removing value from pirated games: you create DLC that they can’t access, or you make it hard to use them, for instance by requiring games to log in to a server every time they are played a la Steam/EA Online/MMOs. Second, you add perceived value to legitimate copies by lowering their prices competitively (way more common with PC than console games, but I’d be really interested to see a chart that relates Pirate Bay game crack seeder numbers with price levels for individual games over time) or by adding free content that only works once with a legitimate copy (DragonAge and probably many more to come). The download/online based solutions aren’t really viable in South America right now: Brazil is near the head of the pack in regional internet usage, but only 5% of Brazilian households have a broadband connection. For comparison, the US has around 60% broadband penetration, and that puts us behind 19 other countries. ElectroMegaVideoGameopolis (aka South Korea) boasts a broadband connection in 95% of all households; the rest presumably are presently on fire and cannot connect to the internet for the moment. My point being, there is a way to go before Brazil, and the developing world in general, will have the infrastructure to support the copy protection strategies that have been finding success in the US in the wake of wider broadband support.

And as for competing on value, well… How do you compete with a $5 bootleg copy of FIFA 2010? Especially when tariffs mean you can only charge $2.50 retail for your version, and you can’t even offer any free DLC because hardly anyone has a fast internet connection. Oh, and you haven’t released an internet-friendly console yet. Oh, and your customers have been buying games from the pirate mall down the street for the last 15 years because the sales tax on your product drove you out of the country back when Clinton was president.

I’m not saying Sony shouldn’t try here. Maybe they have some strategy that will help; maybe all this time and effort have been used to develop a more pirate-resistant PS2. Even so, they’ve set themselves a tough row to hoe here. If I were them and wanted to break into markets in developing countries, I would work on lobbying governments and telcos in those markets to encourage the spread of broadband and drop taxes back to the other side of the Laffer curve.

Film Century 1.5

Dec. 11 Fantastic Mr. Fox – Spend a charming hour watching Wes Anderson play with his dolls. 133/150
Dec. 12 Say Anything – So does Lloyd Dobler grow up to be Dale Cooper, or is the universe just fucking with me? 134/150
Dec. 14 The Botany of Desire – I never thought domestication was a one-way street where humans do all the exploiting and none of the getting-exploited: I’m a cat owner. 135/150
Dec. 16 Good Night and Good Luck – George Clooney delivers a black and white movie that is – not coincidentally – shot in monochrome. 136/150

Can’t wait for it to end – The TF2 War

I know that TF2 being an old game, the developers have to come up with events and ideas to keep it fresh, fun and exciting in a world of shiny new games. and I’m not trying to bag on the whole Demoman v. Soldier idea, it’s cool and fun (soldier forever! demos suck!!).  But the game has been fundamentally changed since they started the war and will remain so until it ends. Everyone is so focused on the war that the game has fallen by the wayside. Servers are Demo Servers or Soldier Servers and heaven help you if you actually try to get an objective on them.

It’s a good idea, I’m just not very excited about how the community has responded to it. I also hate demomen with a passion and seeing so bleeding many of them makes my teeth hurt. Grenade spamming bastards. Kill em all!!!

-fyrehaar

Starting Something

Jim Sterling announces that anyone who thinks Left 4 Dead 2 is an expansion pack is a fucking idiot.

Yahtzee announces that Left 4 Dead 2 is “little more than an expansion pack that dreams of the stars”.

…

Foul-mouthed angry British nerd fight! Foul-mouthed angry British nerd fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!

With the obvious caveat that I played L4D exactly once and may be completely out of my element, the new game sounds like a proper sequel to me. Similar gameplay with new environments, characters, and weapons has been a staple way of progressing franchises that find success and don’t want to monkey with it since time immemorial. Off the top of my head: God of War, Resident Evil, Gears of War, Phoenix Wright, Armored Core, The Sims, and Tomb Raider all have stuck by the formulae that brought them their respective successes without too much complaint from the game-buying public that their ongoing installments were really more like expansion packs than true sequels. I’d honestly be really amused to see a discussion among the gaming community about what constitutes a “real” sequel versus an expansion pack; I suspect you’d see the sort of logical contortions that usually accompany arguments about whether a band is “real” punk rock.

I think Jim’s probably on to something when he says that gamers have been spoiled by Valve and their way of doing things. Up to this point, they’ve tended to eschew yearly punchings of their franchises’ udders in favor of long development times tided over (especially in the case of TF2) with relatively frequent free content updates. If the original Left 4 Dead had been published by Microsoft, Activision, or EA nobody would have batted an eye when a sequel came out a year later, and frankly I think they’d have been pretty shocked at how much seems to have been added.

Certainly nobody would be saying “You owe us all of the work you’ve done this year – for free – as thanks for the server load we’ve inflicted on you.” I’m a bit of a Valve fan, I’ll admit it; I like the games they make. I think they deserve more for their hard work than a double standard.

-ssr

M.U.L.E Remake Issued, Made Mandatory for All Corporate CEOs

ShackNews reports that remake of M.U.L.E has been launched by an indie dev with updated graphics. I’m absolutely flummoxed by this. M.U.L.E. was one of the best games I played back in the 8-bit era (I had the NES port); it wasn’t graphically special, but it was the first game I played with a functioning economy that was so well-modeled that you could actually collapse it by being too successful. If you completely cornered the market on a resource, all of which are required for survival, you could demand literally any price and the AI players would pay it. If you gouged them badly enough, the other characters would go bankrupt and the entire economy would go down the tubes – at which point there would be nobody left to buy your product and you’d fail too.

M.U.L.E. was one of the only multiplayer games I’ve played where players are competing with one another, but also have to work together at the same time to reach a shared goal – in this case economic survival. I’ll download the client and let you know how it is, but fans of build-em-up games like Civ and SimCity should have a look as well.

-ssr

[h/t Destructoid]