Gamers love their sense of self-image, don’t they?

Take the 360, for example. It’s not enough that we have a console that provides hours of entertainment, we need it in different colours. We want to fit it out with different faceplates of our favourite game, and play with controllers that are labelled with our favourite footy team. We need to attach cameras to it (why you would want to buy a proprietary webcam is beyond me, but anyway) and we want to have a different dashboard theme to everyone else.

Then we have character customisation in games. Take Oblivion, for instance. We can define what the shape of their nose is, the width between their eyebrows and the highlight colour of their fingernails. I’ve heard of people spending hours on this. As you progress through the ranks of Vegas 2, you end up unlocking clothing items. GRID has you choosing your team name, nick name, colour scheme, and racing number, while the latter NFS titles let you completely ruin a perfectly good looking car in a variety of different ways, from puce pearlescent paint to alpine green flashing neons. Purchasing the Collector’s Edition of Gears of War 2 even gives you access to a gold plated Lancer (usable only in multiplayer maps, of course).

Vanity is my favourite sin.

Every once in a while, you’d like to watch a movie that doesn’t involve any thought - just kick back with some tightly choreographed action scenes and a few explosions along the way.

Taken fits the bill, more or less. It does give a perspective on the rather depressing and all too real subject of human trafficking throughout Europe, but manages to include a vengeful Liam Neeson in the works. I can’t help but think if they flesh out the other characters and provide some insight into the whole process, it would have given it some depth. Man on Fire showed how Dakota Fanning reformed Denzel Washington’s character and justified his own little quest of rage…would I be asking too much to see the same here?

Probably.

The story is fairly straight-forward, and Neeson does have a tendancy to become wooden rather than cold and precise, but towards the end of the movie he does demonstrate what he’s learnt over his long illustrious career as a “preventor”. And, really, isn’t that why we’re watching movies like this in the first place? To see some guy with killing skills maim and incapacitate hapless thugs foolish enough to get in his way?

Having said that…for clinical flair, I find it hard to go past Matt Damon’s Bourne. But if you want a stubborn ex-CIA agent going on a killing spree in Paris, this will do pretty nicely.

Worth the rental.

It must be hard making sports games.

I’ll give them a couple of years to tweak the gameplay, which is fine. But eventually it will reach a state where it plays suitably well. It’s well balanced and should be done and dusted.

But companies insist on releasing new versions of what is essentially the same game, except with updated team revisions. They might even update the control scheme a little, perhaps give the graphics a bit of a spitshine.

So how do players justify the AU$90 for a game that is essentially exactly the same as before, except with a handful of changeovers and new players?

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I’ve been playing Condemned 2 fairly regularly these past few nights.

Initially, it was a bit of a brown-pants-fest, what with the mutilated vagrants jumping at you from the shadows and walking through abandoned buildings with nothing but a piss weak torch and a lead pipe. It’s a good thing.

What really grinds my gears is who I’m playing as. Ethan Thomas, after being expelled from the SCU, is meant to be a cynical, violent alcohol-abuser. I can understand he’s meant to be a bit stand-offish, not the best people person…a man with a bad case of the crankies.

I didn’t expect him to be an all-out prick.

Most anti-heroes have a reason for doing the things they do. Max Payne is willing to take a body full of slugs balanced out with a handful of pain pills because he needs to put the case of his family’s murder to bed. Niko Bellic does some morally questionable actions, but you know that he does these things because he’s got debts hanging over his head, and he’s damned good at what he does. The Punisher may be a broken minded vigilante, but he’s so feverent in his beliefs that you could forgive him for being a preacher of death.

Ethan has no redeeming traits. He insists on letting everyone around him know how miserable he is. He was coerced into helping out SCU to find a person that he saw in a hallucination. He hates/suspects everyone around him for some reason.

Overall, his whole journey reeks of the magic question: “Why?”

Thankfully, the game redeems itself through the use of stun guns, alcohol and meat cleavers.

Alter Ego has a portfolio of projects on their site, attempting to bridge the infamous “uncanny valley“.

I’m all for the advancement of technology. I love pretty graphics. I marvel at how we manage to represent breast physics more and more accurately with each passing moon. We have come so far, from a handful of pixels on screen at once to trillions of the buggers, complete with post-processing.

But, at the risk of sounding like one of those senile old porchers who yell unintelligibly at dog walkers (I have some strange people in my neighbourhood), I don’t like the idea of focusing too much on graphics, partly due to the following reasons:
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The keen-eyed amongst you will notice that a certain GRID review is present one day, but missing the next.

This is because it’s been submitted for a little competition, and one of the conditions is that it is not published anywhere else.

So, depending on how it turns out, you’ll either be seeing it back with the other articles by the end of the month, or published elsewhere. Details as they come.

Well, the past few weeks have been a bit dramatic for me so far, but I’m willing to put up with a bit more.

I’m going to be moving this brain dump over to some paid hosting for a bit more flexibility and storage. It’ll all be somewhat new to me, but I’m quietly confident.

Once I go over the Ts & Cs then we can take the various steps to get this beast up and running. I just wonder how I’m going to pull all my content over…