Burke's Joystick

One of my favorite go-to gaming genres is the first person shooter.  I think the reason why I so enjoy this format is because it is low effort gaming in the extreme.  What I mean by that is that unlike other genres that often require greater mental effort on the part of the player to effectively participate in the gameplay, such as strategy games or role playing games, shooters are more about muscle reflex ("twitch") than they are about deep thinking.  I mean, you don't have to be a genius to figure out how to place a crosshair on a target and pull the trigger.  Now, that is not to say that there is no mental effort required; that would not be true.   As I have pointed out before , most shooters are realistically brutal in their presentations of real world warfare. The player who willy-nilly jumps onto the modern virtual battlefield without using any brain cells will soon find himself to be the first causality on that same field of battle.  Shooters ...

Lately, I've been pretty harsh on the world of PC gaming, even to the point of labeling the industry as being  downright disreputable . I still stand behind those sentiments. And little, if anything, has changed in the intervening months. Things are still pretty rotten around these here parts, perhaps more so as we now can add disreputable indie developers - who hype projects, pocket lots of crowd-sourced cash, and ultimately release  mediocre  products - to the mix. It's all enough to make a man want to take up chess again....  Be that as it may, there is one aspect of the shameful record of modern gaming that I do feel I need to revisit in the interest of fairness, and that would be EA/DICE's Battlefield 4 . As I have pointed out time and again over the last few months (most notably  here  &  here , amongst other threads ), BF4 was a good poster child for everything that is ailing the modern games industry: it was a title that seemed to be...

"This week Vice President Joe Biden spoke at a senior center in Iowa. Which explains why the seniors were like, 'Is this Hell?'" –Jimmy Fallon   Poor Joe Biden.  Personally, I think our VP is a rather nice fella.  Unfortunately, he just isn't the sharpest tool in the shed.  We knew this long before he was ever VP - I mean, he was caught plagiarizing time and again.  Then there are all those wonderful gaffes caught on film: And liberals like to make fun of Palin.  Wow.   Well, ol' Joe did it again with this incredibly racist statement a few days ago: Remember when Bill Clinton complained that Team Obama "played the race card" on him?   Well, it looks like they were planning on going back to that well in their desperation to talk about anything but Obama's abysmal record.  Unfortunately for them, this time they went too far and needed to put Joe back in the attic .  Now, what has this got to do...