Level’s 15, 20, and 21 are a BYATCHHHH

But a fun distraction none the less….

I admit it, I was slow to the Dragon Age Origins party, maybe the proximity of Mass Effect 2 has made me start looking at Biowares other games and wondering “what if I get 10% as much enjoyment out of one of their other games”

Dragon Age Origins is rough round the edges, (well at least on the X360) – it has some pretty dire control issues, the complexity of the game makes my head hurt, but by golly, for every single moment I find myself a bit lost, I also find myself pissing myself laughing.

The dialog in this game is fucking brilliant, it’s actually inspired good – I won’t ruin it for you, but merely I’ll post a paragraph and you tell me if you want to buy it after it.

Picture the scene, you and your rag-tag band of merry men (wizards, archers and healers) are ploughing through wave after wave of “darkspawn” (The baddies) – until you hit the outskirts of a settlement, someone shouts for your help, but you can’t see them, so you merryily go around hacking everythings heads off… As the yelling gets louder, you notice two dwarfs stood next to a donkey and a trailer (or a caravan if you’re so inclined) – after beating off the marauding hordes, you talk to the elder dwarf. Turns out he’s a trader and is indebted to you for rescuing him and his son. You exchange pleasentry’s (or in my case, call him a cunt and move on) and never really think much of it as you have bigger fish to fry in the settlement.

Later in the quest, you set up a camp, and lo-and-behold, the dwarf and his son rock up in your camp… The dwarf explains that his son looks a bit special, and says he’s autistic, but he has a talent for enchanting your items. To which the spazzer dwarf claps like flipper and shouts ENCHANTMENT ENCHANTMENT over and over,

I defy anyone not to laugh like a drain.

Whichever designer or producer actually said “I know, I think we should have a spasticated enchantment dwarf” and managed to get it all the way through design and production, PAST EA, deserves a fucking medal and an honorary “ScrewYouHippy salutes you” award, (if such a thing existed)

That tale is just 1% of why I’d happily recommend Dragon Age to anyone who’s even slightly into RPG’s/Adventure games…

I bet the guy who made this video really does hate getting compared to Yahtzee but you have to admit there are some comparisons. Except maybe this guy doesn’t just combine two swearwords into one word and draw obvious similes that people who are none English find funny. At least he admits it’s a blatant rip off (and if you can put up with the stupid voice he maybe makes a few good points)

Anyway, Daniel Floyds main argument hinges on the following.

“There aren’t many girls involved with playing/making video games….”

And this is where it falls down

“naturally, we [males] want to solve this…”

Erm. Naturally? – No, actually, I’ve never once sat there and gone “Hmmm, How to make Call of Duty appeal to more women” – I don’t care about market size and market share, I don’t give two hoots, the people sat around me actually making the games don’t sit around and discuss at length how we can make it appeal to women who.. (and this may come as a shock to some readers) – really don’t give a fuck about video games.

The problem as to why there aren’t as many female video gamers stems from deeply entrenched psychological and physiological training from aeons of development. Look at the army, there aren’t as many females in the army as males. Why is this?

When you’re a baby, if you’re a boy, your room is painted blue and you have army toys. You play soldiers, and if you ever do get a mixed group and play cowboys and Indians you are always a cowboy. You’re told that crying is something girls do, and you’re constantly pressured into a way of thinking, acting and behaving. Some of it is nature, (males have an instinct to hunt and fight that simply goes beyond our experiences) – but an awful lot of it is nurture.

When you’re a baby, if you’re a girl, your room is painted pink and you have dolls. Ken and Barby are your best mates and you’re psychologically programmed to seek a mate. Ken and Barby are representative of the male and female partnership in life, You’re bought things that are feminine, baking ovens (however overtly sexist this is for me to be saying) – you’re interested in shopping, shoes, horses, fashion, feelings, make up, animals, caring for people, children, and all the other wonderful things women like.

Girls reach maturity earlier, they begin to perceive the childish pursuits of males (such as running around with their pointy finger extended and shoutin “ger-ger-ger – got you!”) as immature. This natural perception is entrenched in females brains for the rest of their existence. They view males with a perception that their pursuits, things they simply have no understanding of, as childish and immature. (come on, admit it, guys, who reading this wants to play scalextric right now? Who’d quite like to fly a model airplane or go paintballing?, girls, admit it, who thinks that if they saw a group of males doing any of those things, you’d think “sad, immature, typical, males”)

I’m not saying this is a weakness on either’s behalf, I’m saying this is nature and nurture.

Now, before everyone pipes up in my comments section saying “I’m a girl and I like video games” – congratulations, you’re the exception rather than the rule. Believe it or not, I think I’d be capable of finding a male who doesn’t like video games for every girl you can find that does.

Sure, there are girls making video games, and some who direct, produce and market them. But for everyone of those those, I can name a male fashion designer who makes clothes for women.

I think Daniels most worthy point though is the “boy’s club exclusion” mentality. I don’t openly exclude girls from playing games, if you want to play games and enjoy halo or whatnot, then fine, it doesn’t really bother me one bit. What bothers me more is the “female saddo perception” – and that’s what’s openly wrong about this whole argument. They most likely formulate this opinion due to the popular media and advertising schmucks and their portrayal of females in video games. (making the market seem overtly “during puberty”)

Women don’t need enticing to play video games, that’s step two. Step one is to help them understand that playing video games is no more sad than watching coronation street (something that I find plebeian) it’s more engaging than reading a book, more mentally taxing than watching television, more rewarding than most modern films, and infinitely, infinitely more fun than stripping wallpaper.

In fact, being a gamer, I’m hard pushed to think of anything that I’d rather spend my spare time doing. (apart from the all time number 1)

Joke for the Red Dwarf fans there…

Fair play to some some girls who are occasionally dipping their toes into “casual” games, (I really hate that word) – they play peggle and boggle and facebook shit, and hey, they may even enjoy them and step onto more interesting games (from my perspective) such as the sims, or world of warcraft. One or two might even extend all the way to what we males deem as ‘maturity’ in the video game market and move onto the Bioshocks and Portals. But the key thing here is that girls haven’t been pre-programmed like males have to understand the satisfaction of shooting Germans, or causing mayhem by driving like a dickhead. They simply don’t have that psychological programming. And guess what? Males do,

And Males make video games, and whether they like it or not, they make them with all their psychological make up shinning through, their games are intrinsically affected by their background. Intrinsically making them not appeal to girls. Until this cycle changes, and more girls and more understanding males make video games (and the whole industry bullshit of “one man making the decisions” at the top of the tree suddenly changing his mind) – then this will never change. Sure Nintendo might overtly target females and say “I’m going to make a pony simulator” – but this game lacks universal appeal. Nintendo viewing a need to “target” the market indicates that the market hasn’t reached maturity. (Which it definitely hasn’t)

Maybe it’s just me, but I went to a 21st birthday Party at the weekend where I didn’t really know anyone, and after exchanging small talk with the “adults” of the group (whom I consider myself not to be) – I still found myself having the most stimulating conversation of the night with a 15 year old about Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, it was like a club that no one but he and I knew about and whilst we discussed the pro’s and cons of the FAMAS vs the FAL – we might as well have been speaking French to anyone listening.

And that’s maybe more the reason why it’s a boys club. Because, genuinely boys growing into young males want nothing much more than to, a) piss off their parents by dis-communicating them and b) they desperately want to fit in. Not knowing about football and Call of Duty at that age is tantamount to being gay. They sure as hell aren’t going to share this information with women who, at that age, are the enemy.

The same is true of girls, but they just have different specialist subjects.

I’ll admit that I’ve not read this entire article (mainly because I saw entries such as Pixel Junk Monsters and far too many JRPG’s. But I will say this.

Anyone who says that Half Life 2 isn’t the game of the decade, knows approximately fuck all about video games.

End of story, over, finito.

It’s really simple to write a “game of the decade” article. Let me do one for you right now…

1. Half Life 2
2. Grand Theft Auto 3
3. Resident Evil 4 or possibly Portal

The reason that games like these stand out is because, once released, no-one could imagine a world without them. No single game developer didn’t use one of these three games as a reference point for their new game. These games influenced games designers, producers, publishers, developers and everyone. One of their aspects. Gameplay, story telling, physics, anything, stemmed from these games.

Sure, they are sequels to games, and their roots lie in games previous, but in each case they perfected their game. Unlike movies, games sequels are often much better than their predecessors. And this is the case with all three.

Anyone, who says “Those aren’t the top three” don’t have a clue what they are talking about and/or are trying to be controversial.

P.s. Also, Kotaku clearly don’t understand the word “decade” – for the clueless. A decade is a period of ten years starting at 0 and ending at 9. I learnt this in primary school.

2000 to 2009 is a decade. 2010 is the first year of the next decade. (hence everyone on Earth celebrating it as such)

Odd… I’ve become a bit obsessed with google analytics. (I was going to say “anally obsessed” but to be frank, it’s a poor joke and not something i’d encourage)

Oh, “hello” by the way, No, I’m not dead.

Anyway, I’ve found that quite a few people have been finding my site with the term “Why was goal 3 so shite?” – and frankly, this is really odd, because when I type that into google, my website is nowhere to be seen. Very curious.

Apart from that, not a whole heap of stuff going on at the moment, just thought I’d post something here before the cobwebs set in.

In answer to some random peoples questions:-

1. No, you can’t have the little man .php code up there. You can go and find the code I used on the web, (If you search this site for “that little man thing” i’m sure it’ll give you some directons)
2. This keyboard is really annoying.
3. I thought of facebook, I just never implemented it.
4. I think a naked girl clock would be a fantastic earner.
5. Liverpool are shite

The end. See ya next decade probably

Can’t help this should have been called something a bit more original than tagging “mr” onto something to do with explosions.. It’d be better called something like “Crazy Pyromania a-gogo rainbow 24hours” or something… (A reckless disregard for fireworks?)

Anyway, go and download it, play it for all of thirty seconds, be thankful it’s expunged another 30 seconds of your miserable fucking existence.

If StarGuard (mentioned below) is liquid crack, Caverns is liquid eyeball sucking meths. Honestly, I’m getting pissed off with all these people with Pixel skillz, but this game is fuckin awesome (Although I’m slightly concerned about the author trying to monetise it, that’s not very fucking “indie” is it)

Anyway, Don’t let that put you off, the advert is easily skipped and when you do, the game is utterly addictive, and quite fucking charming.

Back again tomorrow with another boredom killer.

Since installing Google Analytics, (And Adsense) I’ve noticed two things.

1. 80% of my visitors don’t give a flying fuck about this website at all, and have actually bookmarked category 6 which is “boredom killers”
2. No-one, and I mean, no-one has clicked on an adsense link. Which I find frankly quite amazing.

Little Master Cricket game is getting over 600 hits a month, and not a single person has clicked an adsense link. (*note: this is not some begging attempt to get people to click an adsense link, that’s against googles rules, so please don’t do that now cos you feel guilty, you swines)

Anyway:

To cater for my new found audience, I’m going to post nothing but Boredom Killers for as long as I can maintain it. Now, I appreciate I could go and find some random flash games online and spam one a day to this website, but I’m not going to, because I’m better than that. I’m genuinely going to only post shit that’s good.

Trust me, dear strangers – unlike other websites, if it appears on this site, it’s worth a download.

And so…

StarGuard: A fucking fantastic retro platform game which has more charm than a particularly charming 50’s film star at a dinner party. Please download this game, it’s the fucking bomb.

Sure times change and people grow up and all that m’larky, but something horrible is slowly starting to dawn on me now. One of the reasons I moved to where I live now is because I like the atmosphere in the pubs and restaurants, sure there are a few pretentious pricks, but otherwise, it’s all good. A nice mixture of “old people” and “youngsters” – I’ve always liked that, perhaps it was the core of me thinking “you’ll be old one day but you’ll probably still want to see your mates out every now and then”

But it occurred to me, last Saturday, maybe I’ve stepped over the bridge? Maybe I’m now officially old, maybe I shouldn’t be attempting to dance any more (actually, in truth I stopped that a long time ago after someone described my dancing as a bee on fire trying to put itself out) but the spots where we stand in bars, maybe now we should be stepping to the sides, in the darker corners where the young people don’t go.

When do we realise that maybe now is the time to step aside? My mother had a “fall” the other day, she’s not that old, I thought you were supposed to be 76 when “falls” stopped being funny and started being pelvis related.

Then I look at this website, this tatters of my life, and I think “fuck me, I was 24 when I started writing this” – I’m 31 now, my mind feels different now, there’s no way on earth I could write something as well as I wrote in this post. (even though the contents are fairly amusingly depressed – I suppose lots of good things have happened since then… )

Drum roll

Like becoming a dad.

Yes, it’s true, Moi, me, myself, is on his way to becoming a father. – the poor little bugger is going to have to put up with me being their parent. Maybe this is why I’m suddenly feeling older, because now it’s time to fucking quickly get older before it’s too late? Who knows… Time, will, I’m sure, tell.

Now dear readers, I’d never ever go all “arty” and crap on you, No sir-ee bob. But if you’ve got ten minutes of your lifeforce to waste (and trust me, it seems that I have plenty spare at the moment) – then there are worse ways of spending the time than watching this short film.

Anyway, not sure exactly the motivation for me posting it, just boredom I guess. Hopefully it’ll relieve that boredom you’re having reading this too.