Hold the phone

Hi Everyone, Just a quick update to say that Stunt Car Online is now ONLINE

You MUST register for the forums before you can log in, (this is a temporary measure whilst I check the server loads and the global hiscore table system)

Hope you like it, you can read more info about it here.

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.

A 50 year old woman has spent 10 thousand great british pounds on plastic surgery to make her look more like her 22 year old daughter.

Above is a picture of the pair. Study it for a while and try and determine which one is the codger and which one is the young-ish one.

My question, however is this, Instead of spending 10 thousand pounds on plastic surgery to look like her daughter, why didn’t she spend it on trying to look like someone pretty?

Meow

Still struggling with determining the youngster? – Really? Have you never heard the phrase “it’s all in the knuckles?” – No? Well you’ve never hung out with me.

Yes dear readers, check out the pairs hands…

It don’t matter how much plastic surgery you have, the hands never lie.

Check out those bad boys! – They look like the hook handed mullah of hate..

And so, congratulations, you win post #2 of “hold the phone”

I remember the time when I liked Beyoncé Knowles. No, seriously, I remember the time, it was exactly October 7th 2008. And then, in an instant it was like I heard a million voices cry out and then suddenly silence I’d attended Hitlers Reichstag speech. When I heard “If I was a boy”.

If I wasn’t driving, I’m sure I’d have instantly turned green, muscles popping everywhere whilst my clothes ripped, and left me with a respectable pair of purple shorts. But alas I was driving, and had to sit through Beyoncé FUCKING Knowles telling me how all men are wank.

Tar – Brush, Here go on, fuckin may as well.

If you’re fucking lucky and don’t live in a world where the fucking Radio play the same three songs all day every day, then you may not have heard it, So here are the songs lyrics. Which I enjoy breaking the copyright of.

If I were a boy
Even just for a day
I’d roll outta bed in the morning
And throw on what I wanted then go
Drink beer with the guys
And chase after girls
I’d kick it with who I wanted
And I’d never get confronted for it.
Cause they’d stick up for me.

[Chorus]
If I were a boy
I think I could understand
How it feels to love a girl
I swear I’d be a better man.
I’d listen to her
Cause I know how it hurts
When you lose the one you wanted
Cause he’s taken you for granted
And everything you had got destroyed

If I were a boy
I could turn off my phone
Tell everyone it’s broken
So they’d think that I was sleepin’ alone
I’d put myself first
And make the rules as I go
Cause I know that she’d be faithful
Waitin’ for me to come home (to come home)

(Chorus)

It’s a little too late for you to come back
Say its just a mistake
Think I’d forgive you like that
If you thought I would wait for you
You thought wrong

(Chorus)

But you’re just a boy
You don’t understand
Yeah you don’t understand
How it feels to love a girl someday
You wish you were a better man
You don’t listen to her
You don’t care how it hurts
Until you lose the one you wanted
Cause you’ve taken her for granted
And everything you have got destroyed
But you’re just a boy.

You know what word in that entire fucking tirade pisses me off the most?

“Just” – Just a boy? You fucking condescending bitch. I’m not JUST anything.

And anyway, that’s not my major beef with Beyoncé, no, I can transcend shitty song lyrics, but what I can’t condone is the following: (Little bit of background information beforehand)

For many years now, psychologists have been studying the differences between men and women, like how men are tunnel visioned because when they were cavemen they used this to “focus” on their prey, or how women cannot sleep if a baby is crying because of their instincts, or men having a lower pain threshold because a) they don’t give birth, and b) they need pain sensors to help them realise they are injured (and therefore vulnerable)

So shrinks have been researching the differences between men and women for hundreds upon hundreds of years, and unfortunately, what they don’t have is a control subject. Sure you can be a transvestite, but that is basically “pretending” to be a woman or a man when you’re not, if a man becomes a woman, his vision doesn’t suddenly become wide-angle. His pain threshold doesn’t double.

It’s simply not possible to know for certain that, for example, women see the colour blue as something else entirely.

If Beyoncé WAS one day to wake up as a man, and didn’t commit herself to scientific research to answer all these unsolved mysteries, then basically she’s a self-centered bitch.

Case ends.

So I’ve re-wrote her lyrics for her so that it better reflects what she should have done with this amazing gift.

If I were a boy,
even just for one day,
I’d wake up in the morning and say
“holy fuck me, I hope I’m not gay”

I’d get in the showerrr….
I’d wank myself offffff….
I’d put up with girls….
because I know how they moan
I’d learn to play darts,
I’d laugh and share farts,

I’d go and see a doctor,
and they’d stick it up me,
cause I’m a freak of naturrrreeee..

[Courus]
If I were a boy
I’d donate myself to scienceeee,
Because I was once a girl
and now I’d swear I was a man,
They’d take out my brain
Cause they know how it hurts
when women fucking nag like twats
LIKE TWATSSSSS!

If someone would like to sing these lyrics on YouTube and generate a million hits, that’d be fine.

Thanks for listening chillllll-dren!

P.s. Valentines day isn’t just for girls, if it was, we’d have Steak and Blowjob day as recompense

Now, let me get this straight from the start so that we’re all clear. I’m not against all piracy in the games industry. (Unfortunately it’s just one of those necessary evils – I’m cool with it, you should be too, I like to exact my revenge by downloading Music and Films all over the shop*)

The number of people who’ve contacted me about “R4″ and the such like cartridges after christmas this year almost takes the piss. Seriously, I can count 10 or so people who’ve all approached me and said “I got a DS for Christmas, where can I get a dodgy cartridge so I can download loads of games and not pay for shit”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I consider myself being able to find and download pirated stuff, kind of like an industry perk. If you make games, you expect them to be copied, so therefore, you’re almost allowing other people to download your games and play them. I wouldn’t expect Id, for example, to pay for any game I’ve made, I’d let them freely pirate it and play it and then hire me. (So I can teach them good gameplay and all that – Thanks Squidy, but you knew I’d always get the final say )

I sort of see it as a right, I’m allowed to download shit, because my shit gets downloaded and I don’t really mind.

It’s the people who have no input to the games industry that I don’t necessarily enjoy watching rip our games. It’s just inevitable. (And for another post, completely solvable too – I’ll discuss that one day)

Anyway… Back to the people requesting I load up a DS hack-cartridge with Barbie games because I have the technical knowledge and know how to do it (for them)….

Although I’d love to say, whenever I get such a request, I kick them in the twat and say “FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING VILLAIN! – You’re the reason I don’t get fucking completion bonuses, and to fucking ask me to facilitate your fucking enjoyment for nothing, is tantamount to me asking you to let me fuck your wife, then ask you to roof my house, and re-install the wiring.”

I don’t say this, unfortunately, but I don’t go out of my way to make it easy for them either. “Yeah, search online for one, then go and download the firmware, then buy and SD card, then copy the games over, and yeah, that’ll work”

I spent a good long chunk of my life not fingering girls behind the bikesheds, or mastering how to play pool, or being cool and learning the names of all the opening moves to chess. (Although I often bluff this when playing chess and say “Oh the reverse dixon, I’ve not seen that since I used a combination of mariot versus old-detroit style”)

The reason I didn’t do all these things was because I was playing with my joystick – fnar fucking fnar. Or I was learning MS-DOS, or I was figuring out what the fuck twos compliment meant and how it could be ignored for the rest of my single bastard life.
I spent these formative years of my life being a socially inept twat, not so you don’t have to, but in reality, to make me millions upon millions of pounds.

It really irritates me to see “Computeach” adverts on TV – They sort of go like this:-

VOICE: “Are you a social shithead who has a shitty job at woolworths?”
VOICE: “No career prospects? No money? Big Jigsaw shaped hole in your minge?”
VOICE: “WELL NO LONGER!!!1! – YOU CAN BECOME AN I.T. PROFESSIONAL AND EARN SHIT LOADS OF CASH BY SATURATING AN ALREADY SATURATED FUCKING MARKET OF ILL TRAINED I.T. FUCKING PROFESSIONALS!”

I hate how computers have become the “easy out” – I long for the days when you needed a six hour training course just to teach you how to get past the bios.

This brings me (finally) onto my point. There’s a shop down my road which is ran by a complete twat, (I say he’s a complete twat, even though I don’t know him, because he drives one of these – Have you ever seen a bigger twats car than that?)

And on his mobile phone shop window, he has an A4 piece of paper with “R4 Nintendo DS HackCartridge for sale here., £25.99″ – Now that’s really taking the piss, isn’t it? – Surely that’s not allowed. Surely the police will one day clap eyes on that and see that? Aren’t R4 cartridges completely illegal?

Or are they? I dunno…

And hence, dear viewers, it’s time to play Fighting Fantasy “Screw You Hippy”

Turn to Page 399 if you want to send a letter to F.A.S.T and get the fucker shut down and so he’ll have to sell his lovely Audi.

or

Turn to page 42 if you want to just ignore this sign and move on your merry way to somerfield.

Did you ever notice that in Final Fantasy books, if the number was above 300, it meant certain death? – It’s true. One of the most annoying ever pages I’ve ever read in one of the FF series was “Turn to page 15 – You wake to find it was all a dream. Game over”

* – Caveat Emptor – This is a joke, I don’t really download loads of music and movies at all, this was used for comic effect. Please don’t send the filth round to my address, please, I’m only kidding. I don’t even have a PC. I’m writing this using a cheese wire, a baked bean tin and a mouse. (The kind that goes squeek – No, I’m not talking about my old squeeky ball-mouse – I’m talking about oh, never mind)

Fucking awesome pirate graphic was nicked from here – In an attempt at Irony, I appreciate that taking this artwork and using for my own purposes is completely against deviantarts spirit of copyright and completely infringes all their rules, but a) I don’t care, and b) it’s about fucking piracy for fucksake… oh, and C) this image was drawn by this guy who is far and away too talented.

As we all know, games writing is a bullshit art. Seriously overpaid people who think that they can put as much detail of story into a game whilst the player is concentrating on blasting the fuck out of a brumak on insane.

Just to make everyone clear, I think that “stories” in games are the anus of games, to be perfectly frank, barring a very few rare exceptions, I do not give a fucking shit about stories in games. In fact, I think games are medium where we should transcend stories altogether and brace yourself let the player make up his own story. Hey, now there’s a fucking novel [pun pun] idea.

And so when I wake up this morning with a rapidly cooling coffee, and click Kotaku to see Rhianna Pratchett spouting off about the subject indicating that “integrating story people into the development team is the future” – it kind of irritates me.

Why does this bother me?

Well Mirrors Edge has possibly got one of the most waffer thin “stories” I’ve ever fucking experienced in a game. I god damn tried to like the fucking game, but just can’t. The controls are hit and miss, and in a world where controls are so important, it’s inexcusable.

Secondly, and this is the more applicable point for this post is-
Every single interesting bit of the game is shown to you in a cutscene. So horribly ripped off from “thief: the dark project” but not carried out with anywhere near as much style. See, these fucking developers think that ‘no one will spot it if we nick that cool idea from a game in the 1990′s’ – Wrong.

Course – I’m not adverse to saying that copying good things is okay, it’s fine, it’s how we learn after all, but copying and making significantly worse is an entirely different kettle of bastard.

So, lets assume these cut-scenes are where the story is being told. (And it seriously is as thin as cling film) – Why are they 2d cartoons? Is that supposed to be stylish and cool and hip and trendy and an EA thing to do? Why do they have exciting bits that I have to Watch why not have me actually taking part in them, are we not there yet? (Ref: Half Life ~ 1998)

Hold the phone then when you start sharing your wisdom when you are obviously not fucking qualified to do so. Just because you worked on a game that gets media coverage doesn’t instantly make it a fucking diamond that did everything right.