TRIPLE ROCK: FAMOUS OR INFAMOUS? MORALITY AND CHOICE IN SUCKER PUNCH’S PS3 DEBUT
Earlier this week Tom Chick, editor of the Sci-Fi television channel’s videogame blog, Fidgit, was presented with something of a moral dilemma. Having posted his impressions of Sony’s exclusive PlayStation 3 title, inFamous, in two easy-to-digest posts, one outlining ten great things about the game and the other ten ‘poor’ features, Sony explained that his scheduled interview with the game’s development team would no longer be forthcoming.
According to the publisher the interview was “no longer appropriate” in the light of Chick’s coverage of the game. Chick’s dilemma? Whether to inform Fidgit’s readership of the Sony PR team’s apparent petulance, further antagonising its PR department, while reassuring the audience of the site’s continued impartiality in the face of mild threat. Or, alternatively, whether to bite his tongue as a way of protecting future interviews and exclusives with the publisher’s development teams (who, after all, had little to do with the snub) thus serving the readership’s interests by safeguarding the site’s continued relevance.
With convincing arguments on both sides it can’t have been an easy decision to make, especially because the repercussions of either choice are unclear. But this is exactly the sort of grey moral or professional choice that human beings are routinely called upon to make: a cat’s cradle of cause and effect with unpredictable outcomes and unfathomable implications. Life rarely presents black and white moral choices, even if our fables, parables and stories mainly deal in such extremities. (more…)
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Triple Rock
TRIPLE ROCK: X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, OR BULLET FROM A LOGAN
Every step that Wolverine takes toward you is the coiling of spring. His is a menacing swagger, but until the schnick, a sort of calm cloaks the danger. For his foes, his approach is that moment after you’ve leapt from the cliff top, before you’ve dashed your head on the rocks below; the holding of your breath in the second before the world explodes. Wolverine twitches a beat then boom, the spring is sprung and nobody is left standing.
This sense of tension and release is ably communicated by current videogame blockbuster X-men Origins: Wolverine. Its developer, Raven, has relished the chance to illustrate, in unflinching detail, the more gruesome results of the mutant’s cloudy disposition.
This Wolverine brings with him a typhoon of bloodletting, which starts with a 500-foot fall from a helicopter onto a cushioning jungle rebel, and ends fifteen hours and close to 2000 kills later. This is a Wolverine who pulls the head clean from the sunken neck of an ancient stony monster; who punches through a windshield, in one motion hauling and eviscerating the blanching driver from his seat. This is a Wolverine who repairs his own bullet wounds like Master Chief recharges his shields.
But for all his schnickity bombast, Wolverine is a character that lacks the crucial tool in any action game hero’s arsenal: a gun. Videogaming’s critics mistakenly suppose that the medium’s obsession with guns is through choice and not necessity, that it’s the boyhood fixation of an adolescent industry infatuated with tits and cars and bullets. But that’s only a half-truth. Shooting has been our lot ever since Space War fired its first missile across the PDP-1’s highlighter pen green solar system. If shooting stuff were gaming’s primary theme merely because of immaturity, surely we would have grown out of it, forty-seven years on? (more…)
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Triple Rock, Xbox 360
