Category: Gaming (page 15 of 73)

The Myth of Misandry

June 13, 2013 / / 6 Comments

Males of the Internet, I submit to you the following:

If you think you’re the target of misandry, you’ve probably done something to deserve it.

Before I elaborate, let’s cover some trigger warnings. I’m going to talk about misandry, obviously, but I’m also going to talk about misogyny, degradation and devaluation of women, acerbic Internet culture, racism, homophobia, defamation, and rape. Just so we’re clear before I start rambling.

There are some folks out there who would like to tell you that gaming culture has always been ‘a certain way’. The prevailing sentiment is that everything from teabagging in first-person shooters to calling someone a faggot for inadequate game performance is normal. You can tell someone they’re about to get raped or suggest they kill themselves or get cancer when they beat you, and it’s fine. That’s “just how it is”. “Oh, you know how gamers are.” “Don’t be a little bitch, learn to take a joke.” And so on.

Lately, some folks have been fighting back against this. Everything from Anita Sarkeesian’s series on Tropes vs. Women in Video Games to posts about sexism and misogyny in areas outside of gaming (like this great stuff from Chuck Wendig) has emerged to fight back against this rather callous and insensitive habit of men to use the defamation of women, minorities, and the LGBTQ community as a source for humor that reinforces their need for cultural dominance. And what has their response been?

The threats of rape, I get. That’s a knee-jerk, juvenile reaction from a knee-jerk, juvenile culture. It’s a three-year-old stomping their feet while screaming and maybe chasing the cat with a crayon intending to draw dicks in poor kitty’s fur. It’s as tasteless as it is pathetic and useless.

Guys saying they won’t watch/read/buy anything from the person again, also understandable. I’d even say that’s a reasonable response. Sure, it’s usually wrapped in the sort of puerile drivel I’ve mentioned above, but people expressing themselves with their wallets is legitimate.

But guys saying they’re victims of misandry?

Really?

How is this even a thing?

Let’s look at the big picture, here. Until the 19th century, in most parts of the world that were affluent enough to do so, it was perfectly acceptable for people to own other people. Most if not all of the time, the owners were white males. Democracies began to emerge around the same time, and guess who got to do all of the voting? White males. Before then, we had a lot of dictatorships and monarchies, and most of them were controlled by men. And then there’s the institution of religion, especially in the form of the Catholic church.

Looking at that, men have had it pretty sweet for centuries. White men, especially. As our global population and culture continues to grow, and barriers of communication and distance break down, it’s logical for more people of different races, genders, creeds and outlooks to become involved in every level of living life on this planet, from governing the populace to charming diversions. To try and hold onto a position that’s been held through intimidation, abuse, defamation, character assassination, and the myth of “tradition” or the excuse of “that’s how it’s always been” is selfish, childish, and pretty damn unfair.

I’m not saying that misandry doesn’t exist. I’m sure there are people out there who hate men vehemently and violently. What I’m saying is that misandry as a tactic to be used against the ‘traditional’ gamer culture (and entertainment circles in general) does not exist. There is no great movement to rain hatred and destruction on men in entertainment. There’s no feminist conspiracy to take your games away. Just like the ‘gay agenda’ that FOX News loves to bang on about in their little corner studio in the asylum, misandry in gaming and entertainment is a great way for guys to deflect the thrust of the main issue at hand, which is that as our culture changes and evolves, those participating in it as creators or audience need to change and evolve with it.

And some men are either too lazy or too scared to do it.

That’s right. This talk of misandry, these threats of rape against rational voices pointing out the flaws in our culture, the pedantic and obstinate words that continue to get thrown around the gaming table; all of this is born out of fear and sloth. I know I’m going out on a limb here a bit, and I won’t be correct in every case, but from everything I’ve seen and heard, for the most part, guys who continue to use these words, spew this hatred, make these threats and “jokes”, are too lazy, too scared, or too dumb to change their ways. They’re not as powerful as they’d like people to think they are. They’re cowards, frightened to be placed on an even level with women and people of color and folks born with orientations other than “heterosexual”, and every time they tell a female gamer to get back in the kitchen or talk about getting ‘gypped’ in a game or indulge in other racial slurs, they prove it.

Misandry, as a general mode of behavior, is a myth, gentlemen. We don’t hate you because you’re men. We hate you because you’re behaving like spiteful, scared little boys. This isn’t the schoolyard anymore. It’s time to put away childish things. It’s time to grow the fuck up.

Game Review: Poker Night 2

June 12, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been playing poker for most of my adult life. It’s not a regular thing for me – mostly at family gatherings or parties thrown by friends – but I know the game well enough to not completely embarrass myself, usually. Practice makes perfect, though, and a couple years ago Telltale Games provided a means to practice my game with Poker Night at the Inventory, allowing me the opportunity to throw down cards and chips with some familiar Internet characters. Did it need a sequel? No. Did it get one anyway? Yes.

Courtesy Telltale Games

The doors of the underground gaming establishment open once again to allow for a no-limit high-stakes poker tournament involving some faces you might recognize. Instead of just gaming culture, however, the scope of the invites has expanded somewhat. From the animated series Venture Brothers comes none other than Brock Samson, a quiet but intimidating presence at the table. Balancing the taciturn bodyguard is Borderlands 2‘s Claptrap, who’s vocabulizer seems to be stuck on ‘snark’ mode. Ash from Army of Darkness gives the little robot a run for his money, though, in addition to having any number of catch phrases at the ready. And last but never least is Sam of Sam & Max fame, who replaces his homicidal rabbit buddy at the table. And your dealer, in the interest of computerized fairness, is GLaDOS, from Portal.

If that line-up isn’t enough to get you to drop $6 US on this game immediately, here’s more incentive.

Texas Hold ‘Em, while iconic in terms of poker tournament play, is no longer your only option. The game of Omaha is also available. In case you don’t know, Omaha plays very similar to Hold ‘Em except each player is dealt 4 hole cards instead of two. A player can only use two of those hole cards to make the best hand possible. I feel like this game option is a bit more forgiving to beginners, as you have more options and opportunities to create a good hand, yet at the same time it can be confusing if you’re dealt an attractive-looking set of hole cards but can’t make the right hand work with only two of them. It’s one of the things that keeps the game fresh.

Courtesy Telltale Games

Your fellow players have their particular tells, some obvious and some subtle. This isn’t new, but the ability to make their tells more obvious and their playing more predictable or exploitable is. How, you ask? Buy them drinks. The lovely Mad Moxxi of Borderlands 2 is tending bar, and if you spend some tokens, won from playing or winning tournaments, she’ll bring some booze over to your opponents to loosen them up a bit. It adds a layer of strategy to your gameplay: at what point do you buy Ash that drink so he bets bigger and stops waiting to win on the river? In addition to the libations, tokens also unlock felts, cards, and chip designs that are part of each franchise represented by the game. Unlock a whole set and you’ll change the entire look of the Inventory. The apex of success is the bounty challenges. A random set of them are laid out for you at the start of a tournament. If you complete them all, you get the chance to win an item from one of your fellow players. Winning the item unlocks prizes in the games Team Fortress 2 and Borderlands 2. All from playing poker with some iconic characters who engage in witty banter. What’s not to love?

Functionally, Poker Night 2 is pretty flawless. The AI of its various moving parts seems pretty well implemented. I’ve only seen the occasional clipping issue. As much as I’ll get frustrated when a winning hand turns to a losing one thanks to a lucky draw on the river, that’s down to the nature of poker itself rather than anything the programmers did. Some of the conversations tend to repeat themselves, but this can be minimized by only playing a few tournaments at a time. Like most diversions of this nature, Poker Night 2 is best experienced in moderation.

Still, for its bargain basement price, great execution, and hilarious writing, I’d definitely recommend Poker Night 2. If you’re a fan of any of the characters mentioned, enjoy a good game of hold ’em, or just want the maximum bang for your entertainment buck, this is a fantastic deal.

The Greatheart Returns

June 6, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Courtesy Wizards of the Coast, Art by Mark Zug

Way back when I said I’d be benching [mtg_card]Zedruu the Greathearted[/mtg_card] as a commander. My concern was that the relatively low speed of her deck would be a hinderance in the face of more competative, combo-heavy decks that accelerate towards turn 5 or 6 before creating some kind of infinite mana situation. However, a little investigation through Gatherer and other sources revealed something very interesting about Zedruu and how her abilities work.

Usually, when she gives control of a permanent I own to another player, that permanent leaves my field and goes to that player’s. For the most part, this means that a deck with Zedruu is looking to make other players miserable by bestowing hindering or useless cards. Not wanting to be “that guy” at the table, I wanted to find another way to use Zedruu, as her colors align with the chronomancy I’ve been wanting to use in EDH forever. That was when I discovered the wonderful truth about Auras.

Auras are enchantment spells that target other permanents. Each Aura has “Enchant ________” as part of its description. This is pretty basic Magic knowledge, but here’s the interesting part: changing the controller of the Aura does not change what it is enchanting. So if you have a creature with an enchantment like [mtg_card]Rancor[/mtg_card] on it, and you give control of the enchantment to someone else, the enchantment stays on your creature.

This isn’t to say that my new deck for Zedruu is nothing but auras. Knowing that I’m likely to encounter all sorts of decks, I put everything from counterspells to board wipes into the deck. While some staples of Zedruu are present, like [mtg_card]Steel Golem[/mtg_card] and, my personal favorite donation card, [mtg_card]Celestial Dawn[/mtg_card], my goal in rebuilding this deck was to strike a balance between all the elements I wanted: “Tron” scenarios pairing Auras with Zedruu or other powerful creatures, Chronomancy, and a bit of control through donations, counters, and other little spells that would, hopefully, not make me a threat to other players before it’s too late.

So far, this strategy has paid off very well. In most of the games I’ve played with this deck, one of my donation cards has come up in the early game, locking down an opponent at least temporarily, and allowing me to catch up on any acceleration I’ve missed. The nature of the deck also allows me to assume a pretty powerful political position. Without infinite combos or a frightening-by-nature general, and armed with counters and removal, I can negotiate with others at the table to determine who the largest threat is and help combat it while building my own position. This, to me, makes the game even more fun to play.

You can check out the deck in detail here, and leave your thoughts or suggestions in the comments!

Gratuitous Failure, 80s Style

June 5, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Courtesy Devolver Games

I’ve been writing a lot about failure lately. This is partially because I believe that we do learn more from our failures from our successes, and also because I know there are folks out there who like to know they’re not alone in the struggles they’re encountering. I am, admittedly, one of them. I continue to maintain that the important part is not the failures, but rather our reaction to them; does failure prevent us from moving forward, or inspire us to redouble our efforts? I often find a microcosm of this frustration and determination in video games, especially uncompromising ones like Hotline Miami.

For those of you unaware of the game, here’s a quick overview. It’s the 80s, an era infused with bright neon colors and oversaturated sound, and you are cast as a nameless individual taking job offers from your answering machine. They sound innocuous enough: babysitting, taking out the trash, and so on. But it’s all code for killing. You’re a contract killer and you walk into house after house, punching and bludgeoning and shooting your way to victory. You do so while wearing a rubber animal mask, just one of many indications that whoever you are, you aren’t right in the head.

What sets Hotline Miami apart from other games is the overall feel and timbre of the gameplay. You enter the homes of your targets from a top-down perspective, something not often seen in modern games, and everything is pixelated and vibrant in color, rather than rendered in 3D and drenched in modern, realistic palettes. This is probably a good thing given the level of brutality on display. People, human beings, are punched hard, have their bones broken, get their skulls smashed repeatedly against hard floors, and are shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, and sliced to death. They even get savaged by dogs. And more often than not, this will be happening to you, since you’re not going to get it right the first time. You’re going to fail.

Much like Super Meat Boy, the appeal of this game comes from the challenges it presents the player. Without hints, without cheats, without even a clear indication of how the player should proceed, the game sets up the pieces and lets the player have at it. I think this is part of the reason that the graphics look the way they do: the violence is not the point. Oh, it’s visceral to be certain, but reduced to this fidelity it verges more on goofy than disturbing. The true meat of the game is in its challenges, not in blood and bone and bullets. It doesn’t teach players to shoot people with different skin; it teaches them to keep trying even after you fail over and over and over again.

The message of Hotline Miami is not one regarding violence or madness or the 80s being even more fucked up than we remember. Those are just the trappings, the rails on which the story hums along. Within that story, through its mechanics, the game’s message becomes more clear: You’re going to fail. Keep trying anyway. Bludgeon the challenge the way you bludgeon that mook with a shotgun. Sooner or later, you’ll get it right, and it will feel awesome when you do.

I’m not sure what this says about me, but I’m okay with turning a few pixelated faces to paste to get that awesome feeling. And I know I’ll get it in other areas, too.

Twilight Imperium – Hunka Hunka Burning Sun

May 31, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Previously in Twilight Imperium: It was a pirate’s life for me.

There are a few games out there that promise a different play experience every time you unpack it. I’ve played a few that do vary from session to session, but after two games of Twilight Imperium, I can say that every game is, in fact, different. Tactical actions are done the same way, and the strategies were the same, but everything else was different. Even though we opted for another pre-set map, rather than taking the extra time to distribute the system tiles per the rules, the map was completely different. I did not expect all of the tech specialties to pepper our galaxy the way they did. For the most part, we chose our races at random. My father chose the L1z1x Mindnet (blue), my neice represented the Federation of Sol (purple), my brother-in-law lead the Yssaril Tribes (red), and I drew the Embers of Muaat (black).

I chose to include the options of Custodians of Mecatol Rex and the Wormhole Nexus, as the last time we played, it was far too easy to steam right to the capital. My neice began taking advantage of Sol’s racial powers right away, spawning extra Ground Forces on planets she occupied. My father industrialized quickly, pushing out from 0.0.1, while my brother in law and I established at least a casual alliance as he took sped out from his own home systems. My War Sun, hampered by slow movement, was at least able to claim the rare triple-system near Muaat. The newcomers got a handle on how the turns and actions worked, and by the end of round 2, we all had a good idea of how to proceed with our various plans.

As round 3 moved forward, my father essentially blocked off my neice’s advance towards his systems, and she seemed put off by the approach of my War Sun, now armed and fully operational. My brother bolstered his position on one side of Mecatol Rex, and the War Sun moved into the other side. For most of the rest of the round, each of us tried to determine who would actually go for it. I took the Diplomacy action to prevent my nearest system from getting trounced by either my neice’s growing armies or my father’s dreadnaughts. With that peace of mind, I rolled into Mecatol Rex, the public objective for which had just been revealed. At this point, the game was very close, with my father and my neice tied for first at 2 or 3 Victory Points.

My dad’s a bit notorious around our gaming table. With his massive fleets and aggressive expansion, nobody trusted him. At one point, he asked “How did I make 3 enemies in a 4 person game?” My brother and I were sort of glaring at one another as his Flagship occupied space near my War Sun. As Sol and the Mindnet also glared at one another, there was a palpable sense of tension around the table. It felt very different from the previous TI game, and as my brother swept into my father’s space, I knew that our erstwhile alliance was coming to an end.

Sure enough, the Yssaril Tribes moved in on Mecatol Rex. A great deal of fire was exchanged, but at the end, I was still able to complete my Master of Ships secret objective. The lead that afforded me was tenuous at best, as both my brother and my neice were right behind me. We had agreed to play to 8 victory points, and my objective put me at 6. This was the point in the game where the Diplomacy strategy could almost be used as a weapon or a means to limit an opponent’s choices, and the Bureaucracy strategy became more and more attractive.

By this point, my father had caught up to me in terms of tech. He, too, could construct War Suns. I knew I had to deal with him, but I had to do so in such a way that neither my niece nor my brother could capitalize on my focus. I needn’t have worried, through, as it was at around this point that the Yssaril invaded Muaat. Knowing that I could not claim any more objectives if my homeworld was occupied, the bold move was meant to forestall a Muaat victory. I now had the choice between going after my homeworld or taking my brother’s as he had taken mine. Before I could decide, my brother activated Diplomacy, declaring his home system a DMZ.

With no choice, I steamed home, abandoning Mecatol Rex, and fought to reclaim Muaat. There was some confusion over the proper use of the Gen Synthesis technology, but in the end, Muaat remained in the hands of the Yssaril. The other players were closing in, aiming to destroy my remaining space docks and possibly knock me out. However, during the Strategy phase, I had chosen Bureaucracy. When I activated it, the Imperium Rex card was available, and I played it, ending the game.

Twilight Imperium is quickly becoming one of my favorite board games of all time, and not just because of this win. The variety and depth of the game is staggering, and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. I have yet to play with Mercenaries, Political Intrigue, or Leaders, to say nothing of Distant Suns, but I know they’re on the horizon. My niece, at the conclusion of this game, asked “When are we playing again?” in a very eager tone of voice.

Even if I’d lost, I couldn’t have asked for a better victory.

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