Thursday, January 25, 2007

Hallelujah!

Bigot prime has chimed in on the whole games and violence debate. If the head of the Catholic Church is calling for a crackdown, well, that just makes me feel all warm 'n' fuzzy inside. I'm pretty sure he's unaware of this, but every time I do something the Church dissaproves of, I get a ruddy glow about the head and neck, and a tingling of the loins. I never thought the Pope would improve my gamesplaying experience.

What an age, etc...

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Ahhh...

Bisto sauces. What fresh hell is this?

Please folks, it's not that goddamn hard. Learn to cook.

No, really, fuck off.

I briefly mentioned that the German government has often been disturbingly reactionary about censorship, but this takes the piss. It's fine for you to carry out your confused moralistic crusading in your own country, but please do not share it with the rest of us. The rest of Europe hasn't taken kindly to German politicians trying to inflict their philosophies upon us in the past.

Censorship, and the outright banning of games, is not the way to protect children. Children do not need protection from the publishers and retailers who make up the videogame industry. These people are not forcing anyone to buy the games. If a game is violent, it has a recommended or restricted age limit applied to it. So how do kids get hold of violent games? Quite simple - their parents buy them for them, through ignorance or an unwillingness to say 'no' and actually discipline their child.

When I worked at Gamestation, the number of times I told a parent that the game they were buying was unsuitable for their child, only to be told that 'they see worse on TV' or similar, frankly beggars belief. People buying GTA: Vice City, for absolute strangers, just because they handed them money on the streets and told them that the big mean men in the games store wouldn't give them their game. Of course, we didn't sell it to any of these guys either, but there's no guarantee that they weren't going to another store and doing the same thing.

Responsibility for the consumption of facets of our culture, be they games, films, art, abso-fucking-lutely anything, lies with the individual, or the parents, if they're a minor. In trying to legislate for these things, you are essentially abandoning any hope that people can decide upon anything for themselves, or even raise their kids.

Oh well.

Monday, January 08, 2007

Well, that's the end of civilisation

Reading back through the nonsense written here, you caould be mistaken for thinking that I work for Microsoft, given the frothing levels of 360 love on display. But today's news just takes the biscuit. The fact that the 360 will soon be streaming TV tickles me for precisely this reason:

I now have no reason at all to get a PC. With TV coming through the 360, and fullscreen Youtube coming though the Wii, it's not going to be easy to leave the house.

I've heard these devices also play videogames. What an age we live in.

Oh Boris, you're my favourite Tory.

From Gamesindustry.biz, Boris Johnson speaks out on videogames:

"These possessions are not so much an index of wealth as a cause of ignorance and underachievement and, yes, poverty," he continued.

"The nippers are bleeping and zapping in speechless rapture, their passive faces washed in explosions and gore. They sit for so long that their souls seem to have been sucked down the cathode ray tube.

"They become like blinking lizards, motionless, absorbed, only the twitching of their hands showing they are still conscious. These machines teach them nothing. They stimulate no ratiocination, discovery or feat of memory."

In other news, Boris is pretty sure there were more cats when he was a boy.