More Roger Ebert, CoD, BC2 Linkage

    I was pleased to get a call from an old friend, Bobby V., last night. He left for the greener pastures of Points South over a decade ago. I'd been dodging calls on my cell from an unknown phone number for over a month; it turned out to be Bob. It was a blast talking to him again. If the stars align, he might come by and visit while he's attending to business up here in the North East.
    In the links below is another riposte to Roger Ebert on this whole "videogames can never be art" thing. At Kotaku, there's An Open Letter to Roger Ebert, which basically echoes a point Reibo and I made when discussing this: Roger Ebert co-wrote the script for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a schlock POS released in 1970, which should make him the last person on Earth to bitch about games not being art. [Update: Reibo and I think Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is crap, but the article seems to think it's art; the upshot of it is, how does Roger Ebert pass judgment on games when his opinion isn't based on playing games.]
    With the PVR ordered and Riebo slaving away on whipping the new PC into shape, I've been pondering storage options. Yesterday, Reibo found a DVD-RAM labeled "Matt Halo" which intrigues me; I can only imagine what treasures are on that disc that can't be read at the moment. I'll have to dig around & see where my Multi-drive is so I can check out the contents of that. We used to record, via S-video connection, all our Halo 2 games. The Team Rockets games were the absolute best, loaded with hilarity. Even then, team-killing and suiciding douchebags were the bane of the Halo universe. Nothing much has changed but for a few more pixels per square centimeter.
    I guess deciding what to get in terms of optical storage can wait till the PVR arrives, we learn how to use it, and see if it's practical to use it for game recording. After all, Reibo's gameplay is usually the only good gameplay, so recording his FFAs is a given. Will we record the much less spectacular (on our part) TDMs? We'll see.

• Destructoid: Sniper: Ghost Warrior locales revealed.
• Joystick Division: Sniper: Ghost Warrior screenies.
• Fragland: Red Steel 2 review.
• El33tOnline: Splinter Cell: Conviction tops UK sales charts for week of 17 April 2010.
• Kotaku: Splinter Cell: Conviction promotional stunt almost gets someone shot. Check out Destructoid's take on this; the picture alone is worth the click.
• Destructoid: Crytek working with Move and Natal, exploring 3D.
• Joystiq: Best of Big Download 12-18 April 2010.
• GamePro: The real science of Mass Effect 2.
• UGO: The Most Useless Video Game Items.
• Joystick: Pretension +1: Left 4 Dead in The Treme. FTA: "...last Sunday, while watching the new HBO series Treme, I was struck by an intense sensation of familiarity. Its a feeling I call Sega Vu  -- the feeling that you've been somewhere or done something because you've been there or done that in a video game."
• Yahoo Games: Racism and homophobia in gaming: Hate speech corrodes online video game experiences.
• Kotaku: An Open Letter To Roger Ebert. Kotaku calls out Ebert on his own trashy past work, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. If you've ever seen it, you know what I mean. I was going to embed the YouTube clip here, but I just can't. It's not that the fake nudity is that objectionable, it's that the crappiest video game ever made is more art than Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. I shit you not. Here's the tamest picture I could find:

• Digg (Xbox Live forums): "Why has my son been suspended from Xbox Live till 12/31/9999?"

You're doing it wrong:

• Yahoo News via Slashdot: China's Research Ambitions Hurt By Faked Results.
• Maximum PC: Security Shootout: 10 Top Antivirus Apps Put to the Test.
• ITWorld: The end of free content?
• Ars Technica: School IT allegedly took "thousands" of pics in webcam case.
• MaximumPC: Yahoo email safe from warrantless search - for now.
• Ars Technica: Why the Library of Congress cares about archiving our tweets. Oops.
• Tom's Hardware: Did Steve Jobs Steal The iPad? Genius Inventor Alan Kay Reveals All. Also, check out Why Apple Fans Hate Tech Reporters.

 Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

 

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