Burke's Joystick

I confess to knowing next to nothing about The Hunger Games .  So when the movie was announced last year, and a subsequent wave of excitement swept across the internet, I was intrigued to say the least.  As I dug into it a little more and learned that the novel involved a futuristic death sport, I found myself becoming excited as well.  It's not because I am a sadist but because I am a gamer - that is what most games are about these days (but more on that later)!  So, I was also enthused...well, until the movie premiered and I started seeing things like this: Photo from:  http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/03/05/hunger-games-fan-event/ Screaming teenage girls and soccer moms are not exactly the first things I think of when the term "death sport" enters my mind.  I started to have serious misgivings....

The results are in for Burke's Joystick first official poll!  If you recall, the poll question was: If  Barack Obama was a character from a video game, which character would he be?  The choices were: Pac Man Capt. John Soap MacTavish from Call of Duty John Henry Eden from Fallout 3 Jim Raynor from Starcraft Kane from Command and Conquer Gordon Freeman from Half-life Arcturus Mengsk from Starcraft Commander Shepard from Mass Effect Vladimir Makarov from Call of Duty The people have spoken!  The result:  Arcturus Mengsk from Starcraft! This is a wise choice.  Truth is, the political rhetoric of Arcturus Mengsk, versus the latter reality, are quite similar to what we have experienced from Barack Obama.  

[Note:  I am sorry that I haven't had much to post here the last week or so.  Don't worry, this blog is not done yet!   Rather, I just needed a break to handle some matters.  Eyestrain headaches were starting to kick in from the writing I was doing here and elsewhere, plus I found myself spending more time that I thought possible finding and installing a new video card toy for my old PC - what a difference it has made in my CoD:MW3 performance already!   Lastly, it is the closing days of summer, so I didn't want them to go to waste as I have all fall, winter, and spring to blog! Moving on.... One of the reasons I love modern gaming is that I find it to be a hypothesized science fiction future made real in the here and now.  We don't look at it this way because like most science fiction that has become science fact, we sort of just accept it as another humdrum facet of the modern world.  I mean, imagine taking such incredible title...

The big day is here for millions of fans:  Blizzard has released Starcraft II! Yawn. Okay, okay…to be fair, there is nothing wrong with Starcraft.  I just don’t care for it.  I played the original and found it to be a fine RTS (with great cut scenes!), but it never really hooked me in the way it did others, especially those crazy South Koreans .  I think part of the reason is that I am a fanatical Warhammer 40K fan and Starcraft comes across as a thinly veiled copycat of that awesome game universe (if I recall correctly, one of the original devs even admitted that they did base Starcraft on 40K after learning they couldn’t afford the GW license…how things have changed over the decades).  It does have its own merits, but I just can’t get over the glaring similarities (e.g., Zergs = Tyrannids;  Protoss =  Eldar;  Terrans = Space Marines).   This does not mean, however, that I won’t be giving it a try at some point.  I’m a sucker fo...