A Good Post On Resident Evil 5

…Is right here.

Broken in Oakland

I rarely have occasion to walk around the streets of downtown Oakland, mostly because there isn’t a whole lot there. It’s a stretch of office buildings that all feel like they were ripped off the set of Mad Men, complete with elevators that actually have working Door Close buttons. Well, more accurately, it’s a stretch of vacant lots, punctuated with the occasional inhabited office building. It’s kind of depressing – were it more densely populated, I could see it being kind of cool to work in an area that looks like I imagine New York did in the ’60s, but whenever I’ve been there it has looked like a ghost town.

So it was rather unusual that the one time I’ve had to go to downtown Oakland happened to be the day after the BART-shooting-protest-turned-riot. Honestly, though, I had a hard time telling exactly what was due to last night’s events.

I wish I had been there, if only to see how the protest became violent. I can certainly understand how frustration and anger lead to the desire to smash and destroy, but it’s totally stupid to go about demolishing your own hood. That’ll teach them, all right. Next time the rioters ought to bus over to Piedmont and loot the A.G. Ferrari, at least.

Interestingly enough, SFGate notes that several of the “mob” were affiliated with Revolution Books over in Berkeley:

The core group of the mob appeared to be about 40 people, several of whom were with Revolution Books, a Berkeley bookstore. A man distributed the “Revolution” newspaper – whose tagline is “voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, U.S.A.” – as he shouted “This whole damn system is guilty!”

I’ve been there a couple times – there’s a lot of amazing reading material there – but I can’t imagine them to be the kind of guys who go around breaking stuff.

I’m sure there’s a game idea here. Something about replicating the influence of the mob mentality, perhaps. Maybe I’ll think more about it later.

pat m.

It’s That Time Of Year…

How Akuma Stole Christmas

Screw Christmas music in all the stores. Every time this gets posted to Shoryuken.com I know it’s the holiday season again. (Click Next at the top to go from page to page.)

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, etc. etc. to all of you! And thank you for reading!

pat m.

Chrono Trigger DS

I’ve been playing through the Chrono Trigger DS remake lately. Yeah, it’s still Chrono Trigger, with a few new gimmicks here and there to spice things up. Worth playing if you never played it on the SNES or PSX, but if you’ve already gone through it a few times you might want to save your time and money. If you haven’t played it, you might want to avoid reading this, as there are mild spoilers.

- The new monster raising mode seems pretty boring so far, and unless it changes dramatically later in the game (I’m almost at the Black Omen) I wouldn’t really bother with it. Sure, you could probably get some nice items from it all, but by the time you can fight the high-level battles your party is already probably pretty dominating.

- For better or for worse, the game was retranslated. The game reads much more smoothly now (”The finest in defensive equipment for my, daughter!” has been fixed, thankfully) but Frog’s accent has been removed to make him speak more like everyone else from the Middle Ages.

-I had never noticed this before, but the game was almost perfectly designed for handhelds from the start. Even though there is no quicksave option, the dungeons tend to be short enough that you can finish one in ten minutes or so. The game is meant to be broken up into small manageable chunks, and with the exception of the new dungeon, it doesn’t keep you in any one place long enough to really get bored. 

- The new dungeon was thoroughly disappointing for a few reasons. Disappointing Reason #1: It took me a few hours to get through, not because it was particularly difficult, but because you had to keep on walking back and forth between essentially what amounted to the same seven screens or so. I think I climbed that stupid mountain at least fifteen times. What’s more, each screen has an annoying unavoidable fight that does nothing but make the fetch quests you’re sent on even more of a pain in the ass. Do yourself a favor and use a FAQ to save yourself one or two redundant trips, at least. The reward items are nice, but half the stuff isn’t as good as your end-game equipment (which you can get very easily before you do the Lost Sanctum) and the stuff that is good doesn’t really mean much because the game pretty much peaks in difficulty at the Ocean Palace. I never understood why people bothered getting their characters all up to level 99/max statistics in this game because it’s not like there’s anything that really gets hard to kill after level 60 or so. I hear there’s a new ending, and a new last boss. Maybe I’ll need to be really buff for that one.

-Disappointing Reason #2: I found the end of the second fight with the Reptites to be one of the more poignant moments in the game; Team Crono has basically been fighting to ensure the survival of the human race, and the Reptites have all been total jackasses up until this point, but once you beat Azala he reminds you that he was basically doing the same thing for his people, and since he lost, the Reptites were doomed to extinction. Even Ayla, despite the fact that she was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with all Reptite-kind, seems to be surprisingly understanding and even sympathetic towards Azala. Considering that non-human, Other monsters are so easily written as straight evil characters without any particular nuance, I thought that Azala’s send-off was really well done. What’s more, the effects were permanent – the only Reptite you see in the game after that fight is running in the races at the Millenial Fair – which is something unusual for a game that’s all about traveling in time to fix things. You can bring Crono back, you can put Cyrus’s spirit to rest, but you can’t make the Reptites and humans co-exist…

…That is, until you go to the Lost Sanctum and discover there’s a whole town of Reptites left. Guess you just killed the Asshole Reptites.

pat m.

White Nationalists Love Dungeons and Dragons

http://raceindnd.wordpress.com/

Good stuff, though – as usual – the comments thread isn’t quite up to snuff.

pat m.

Join the Facebook Group!

…and verify that I’m the author, please.

http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blogpage.php?blogid=72957

On Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

I think that the “Metrovanias” that Konami has been releasing for the last decade or so are gaming’s equivalent of Dragonlance novellas, or something like that; they’re amusing and fun experiences, but generally not worth dwelling on. All told, I’ve played Symphony of the Night, Circle of the Moon, Aria of Sorrow, parts of Harmony of Dissonance, Dawn of Sorrow, parts of Portrait of Ruin, and now Order of Ecclesia, and I’ve got to say I’m damned if I can remember a whole lot of notable stuff about any of them save Symphony of the Night, which is the only one I’ve bothered to play multiple times. Oh wait: I do remember JONATHAN! CHARLOTTE! JONATHAN! CHARLOTTE! JONATHAN! CHARLOTTE!

…Just had to get that out of my system.

Order of Ecclesia took an interesting tack with the Castlevania standards; all your moves use MP, so you’ll have to manage the meter, the difficulty level has been cranked up significantly, the Glyph system feels pleasantly customizable without making me feel like I gotta catch ‘em all, and it’s nice to have a world map with multiple level setpieces and Dracula’s Castle. When it comes down to it, though, there’s not much I’m going to remember about it except that I got to play as a woman this time, and not just a rather womanish-looking dude.

Kind of makes me wish I could mod the game so I was playing as Wesley Snipes from Blade though.

pat m.

Obama Wins Presidency; White Nationalists Threaten To Move To Alaska

Apparently Canada is a bit too socialist for them.

Token Minorities officially supports this standpoint. Seriously, if there’s anything I can do to speed up the process, let me know.

pat m.

My Take on the Street Fighter Stereotype Squad

When Capcom was taking flak for the Resident Evil 5 debacle, a few people would occasionally comment that Capcom actually has a history of racially offensive characterizations in their games – specifically, the characters from Street Fighter. This gave me pause – I have adored Street Fighter for a long, long time, and it never really occurred to me that the characters were seriously offensive. Furthermore, I’m hardly in the minority, here – virtually no one in the Street Fighter community ever really brings this kind of thing up, and it’s not because there’s a lack of people of color who play seriously, or reasonable people who can talk about race. So why would this be?

bankuei commented in the open thread about this a while back:

 

Here’s a thought: Street Fighter 2 was one of the first videogames that gave you a WIDE range of playable characters in terms of ethnicity. Stereotypical? Yeah. Still, better than playing either a Ninja or some random white guy all the time.

For that level of nostalgia factor alone, I think people are willing to give it a pass. (though, admittedly, videogames are rife with racist stuff. The fact that all the characters can be protagonists is good, though Blanka, Balrog/M.Bison and Dhalsim are the most problematic).

This is the first step. To use an example:

Media representation of Asian Americans has been a huge issue in the community for a while now. We’re sick of seeing ourselves portrayed as geeks, martial arts masters, delivery boys, sinister ganglords, and dragon ladies. Before we could organize around that, though, we had to make it in the media in the first place. Before Asians were portrayed in American films as those stereotypical images, we weren’t really in much of anything at all. 

Fighting games are quite possibly the easiest place to bring in a diversity of characters, particularly since it’s less about developing a character’s story and more about bringing in an exotic aesthetic. Certainly, this is problematic on some level, but it’s also given us our first Filipina character (Talim from Soul Calibur 2) where introducing a Filipina character in any other genre would have required a lot more pushing. Street Fighter 2 created stereotypes by drawing on each country’s fighting myths and legends. It wasn’t perfect – Balrog and Dee Jay, inspired by Mike Tyson and Billy Blanks (of Tae-Bo fame) aren’t exactly the inspiring figures I’d have wanted to model the first couple Black game characters after, Dhalsim is downright bizarre with the human skulls around the neck, and it seems painfully unfair to neglect Brazil’s vale tudo combat tradition by giving us Blanka instead of, say, a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu player – but it was a welcome departure from white guys and ninjas.

To be fair, Capcom has rounded it out a bit since then. The Street Fighter III series gave us Sean, a Brazilian brawler with moves inspired by MMA and Ryu and Ken’s Ansatsuken karate, and Dudley, the dopest black boxer in a video game ever, to make up for Balrog and Blanka. Most recently, Street Fighter IV added a white American single-mom-secret-agent with lips like Angelina Jolie’s, a French MMA fighter inspired by real-life fighting legend Fedor Emelianenko, and a fat white American biker kung-fu guy with a ponytail and a happy trail. On the downside, we get a Mexican Lucha Libre fighter (and chef) named El Fuerte:

Sigh. One step forward, two steps back, I suppose.

pat m.

Interlude: The Hilarious Stupidity of Ashley Todd

So by now everyone should know that Ashley Todd, the McCain supporter who fabricated a story about being assaulted and groped by a knife-wielding black man for $60 and some press for Obama by way of a (backwards) “B” on her cheek. Racialicious has a good summary of coverage over at their open thread.

Here’s what I want to know.

White people are perfectly willing to believe that there are plenty of 6′4″, 200lb black men out there who are willing to mug a white college girl for $60 at knifepoint. 

The bit about grabbing her breast isn’t really too much of a stretch for white people, either.

Once we’re there, conjuring up the elusive brother who is dumb enough to do all that and carve a BACKWARDS “B” just might work for some white folks.

Linking that to the current presidential race by claiming that the “B” stood for “Barack” (because all black people are on a first-name basis with the next President of the United States of America), however, should be too much for anyone to swallow.

Overall Black voter turnout was, at 60%, 7% less than overall White turnout in the 2004 election (census). I suppose that’s not so bad (voter turnout in Asian American communities is a huge issue – we’re well under 50%, I believe). But if you consider that voter disenfranchisement laws (which temporarily or permanently suspend a convict’s right to vote) prevented 14% of black men from casting their ballot in Atlanta in 2004, or that the Human Rights Watch reported in 1998 that 1.4 million black men couldn’t vote, to say nothing of the damning statistic that 1 in 9 young black men are in jail, it seems a little bit implausible to me. You think homeboy is really going to punch you in the face, take your money, grab your boob, and then say, “Hey, don’t forget to vote Obama!“

That’s some real thug life shit right there. Next time we see C.J. running around GTA: San Andreas, he better be volunteering for the campaign.

I leave you with this.