Burke's Joystick

First, let me extend a heartfelt apology to Kaos Studios for ever mentioning their first person shooter in connection with this dreadful movie.  Sure, both shared the same idiotic premise of a North Korean invasion of America, but I am sure Homefront provided far more entertainment value than this dog of a movie.    Having said that, I will now briefly review Red Dawn (2012) .  You know what was the best part of this movie?  That screenshot above.  Everything else was rubbish.  Yeah, seriously. Now, I want to be clear about something.  As you probably know from reading my previous post, I am a HUGE fan of the original movie.  Therefore, I guess it could be expected that I would find fault with any film that tried to "remake" John Milius' classic.  I understand that.  However, let me assure you that I went into this film prepared to forgive a lot because I am one who believes that more of a good thing is no sin...

"Are these things real?...Did I see those brave and noble countrymen of mine laid low in death and weltering in their blood?  Did I see our country laid waste and in ruins?  Did I see soldiers marching, the earth trembling and jarring beneath their measured tread?  Did I see the ruins of smouldering cities and deserted homes?...Surely they are but the vagaries of mine own imagination."   - CSA Pvt. Sam Watkins, 1st Tenn. Infantry For shame, game devs!  For shame!  Do you not know that America is currently in the mid-point of the American Civil War Sesquicentennial celebration (i.e., 150th Anniversary)?  Where are all the new ACW games?!? It really grieves my heart to see how "America's Iliad " has been overlooked by gamers over the last decade.  I mean, we have so many World War II games being published on a regular basis that one can hardly throw a stone without striking a fascist stahlhelm .  Yet America's greatest strugg...

Interesting article today over at PC Gamer .  It seems that a collaboration between Digital Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz, along with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, has produced the "Game-O-Matic" .  What is it, you ask?  Well, according to its official description, it is:     ...a tool for creating short, simple games. Instead of designing how characters and objects behave and then spending hours coding it, Game-O-Matic lets you think about what you want a game to be about. All you have to do is create a diagram of relationships and choose which of the games it makes for you that you like best! As a practical matter, the program operates by taking user submitted nouns and verbs, and applying them to a selection of premade gameplay templates to create a simple game.  The result?  Crap.

I know we all like to idolize teachers, but in my experience the truly good teachers were few and far between in the government-run school system. In fact, out of my 12 year experience, I can only claim to actually having four good teachers (the rest were little different than the surly bureaucrats you meet at the DMV). Not surprisingly, two of the four had doctorates, with a third working on his doctorate at the time I was in his class. The fourth...well, I don't know much about him because he was my sixth grade(?) music teacher and I didn't take note of such things. Nonetheless, this man makes my list because he, too, managed to impart some wisdom that has stayed with me throughout the years.

Lately, I've been seeing a bunch of articles complaining about bigotry in gaming.  Articles about racism, gender discrimination and even about homophobia (literally: 'fear of man' - see how incoherent these modernist labels can be?) in games.  Now, for the most part, these complaints all came from the usual suspects: individuals who often come from the left wing of the political spectrum and are obsessed with a vision of a Utopia where radical egalitarianism reigns supreme.  When Mark Levin summarized the Big Government Statist in Ameritopia , I think he also hit upon the essential characteristics of  this personality type - a not surprising coincidence since most radical egalitarians are usually Statists, too: "It is observed that the Statist is  dissatisfied with the condition of his own existence....He is angry, resentful, petulant, and jealous....The Statist searches for significance and even glory in a utopian fiction of his minds making, th...

[Warning: Some minor spoilers follow] I should have known that when Hillary Clinton showed up in Black Ops 2, the game's interesting campaign was going to go straight to hell.  Oh, she didn't star as herself - which is strange considering how this game did not shy from including other real people in its cast - but as "President Bosworth".  Nevertheless, a s with Oliver North , the similarity of appearance was unmistakable.   Sure, she wasn't running around hiding the Rose Law Firm records , nor did she scream "what difference at this point does it make!" when the bodies started piling up due to the global terrorism unleashed by Raul Menendez, but the bug eyes sort of gave the game away (as well as her apparent affinity for the ChiComs...I, for one, found it strange that "President Bosworth's" first call after the attacks went to the Chinese premier.  Hmm.  Old habits die hard , I suppose).  Be that as it may, it was shortly af...

It's not easy being a gamer.   Here we are, participating in one of the most lucrative entertainment genres known to man, yet our beloved hobby is still largely ignored - or even ridiculed - by the majority of the Old Media, particularly television and Hollywood.  Simply, good game movies/shows are incredibly scarce despite the fact that many gaming franchises come with a millions strong fanbase that stretches across national boundaries.  Case in point: Warhammer 40K .  If you don't know, Warhammer 40K is a science fiction universe set in the far distant future, specifically, the 41st Millennium.  Unlike the sunshine and lollipops sci-fi futures of Star Trek and Star Wars ,  Warhammer 40K's future is unremittingly grim, as attested by this standard preamble to every 40K book (and there are many of those , including some New Zork Times bestsellers...praise the Emperor!): " It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuri...