2 posts tagged “gaming”
Another tragedy befell the nation this past Thursday as there was another school shooting, this one occurring at Northern Illinois University, 27-year-old Steven Kazmierczak enter a lecture hall on the college campus in black clothing, and revealed a shotgun and three handguns, and began to fire upon teachers and students, killing five students before he took his own life. Authorities and people that knew him are still baffled at how Steven, who graduated from the university in 2007, could have commited such a crime.
In what seems like a normal fashion whenever a school shooting takes place, Attorney Jack Thompson is the first on call often being referred to as an ‘expert’. He was immediate to blame that video games were the cause of Kazmierczak’s rampage that morning, using the one game that has been a constant in each allegation he has made after a school shooting: Counter-Strike. After Virginia Tech, Thompson blamed Counter-Strike, a game he refers to as a “murder simulator” as the catalyst behind Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter from the VT massacre (there were no games found in Cho’s living quarters, therefore debunking this claim). Authorities have yet to find any link between Kazmierczak and Counter-Strike, or any video game in general (violent or otherwise).
It has been easy for games to be blamed for crimes as their popularity increases year after year; Before CS, it was Doom that was the original posterboy for taking the blame.
Even though there are guidelines to prevent games with an M rating, similar to the R rating in movies, they are not laws; merely a rating system to help educate parents, who often buy their children games they should not be playing. The parents know nothing about the game; more don’t know how the rating system works, leaving little Johnny grabbing Manhunt and the game stores in turn coming under fire from the parents once they see their son or daughter playing the game. This is not the case most of the time, with parents often being asked if they know what the game is about; at that point, they are given a quick rundown at what the game is and does, therefore preventing a purchase from happening (I’ve stopped many a kid this way from getting Grand Theft Auto, and I’m damn proud of it).
Videogames come under fire more than other forms of entertainment like film, television, and music due to the fact that videogames are now a mainstream form of entertainment, more than the former items listed. With becoming this, developers are catering to a more mature audience with games that target that mature audience and appeal to the type of game they would like to play. Even though the amount of M-rated games is trumped by the mass majority of titles that are rated E or T, the main company that has taken most of the fire has been Rockstar Games, makers of the GTA series as well as the Manhunt titles.
While violent games are getting plastered with slander and therefore creating more attention, it is just one form of media that has been cut from the overall herd. If you take Manhunt, and place it side-by-side with the Saw and Hostel films, what you see in Manhunt is pale by comparison; one of the “executions” in Manhunt has you suffocating an enemy with a plastic bag, while another has you stabbing an enemy in the stomach; the latest film in the Saw franchise shows one of the characters getting killed by having his head get crushed by two giant blocks of ice; another person is shown pushing his face through a set of knives, digging into his skin and slicing him open. These movies are more graphic in comparison to what you see in any game today, but are not blamed due to the fact that gaming is now a common staple in today’s media culture. If you have to blame one form of media, you have to blame them all; sadly, this is not the case.
Hopefully, there is no evidence that links video games to what happened at NIU yesterday, therefore debunking Jack Thompson even more. Nevertheless, this is another blow to the industry as a whole.
My heart goes out to the friends and families that were affected by this horrible tragedy.
Sammy vs. Capcom; this game was to be the next successor in Capcom’s popular “Versus” series, following in the footsteps of X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, as well as Marvel vs. Capcom and its sequel, which is considered one of the best games in the series.
Originally announced back in 2003 at the JAMMA arcade show in Tokyo, the game was being developed so it could run on the Sammy-produced Atomiswave arcade board; the only other announcement was that it would be a fighting game akin to its predecessors. No other information was revealed about the game, including what systems it would be released on, or what characters would make an appearance/cameo.
By going back and looking at what properties were already out for each company and basing on when it would have been completed, the roster would have most likely contained characters from the Guilty Gear series, Spy Fiction, and Seven Samurai 20XX (the Sammy side of the roster), as well as people from Street Fighter and Darkstalkers, and the Resident Evil, Mega Man, and Maximo series to boot, with other lesser-know characters being included to flesh out the remainder of the roster.
Going in accordance with the last game, it would have contained a full player list of somewhere between 50-60 characters, with stages from each game represented and original stages made specifically for the game itself. It was never formally announced that this game was officially canceled in favor of other projects that were being developed at the time, or if it was placed on hold for an undetermined period of time.
One small side effect that seems to have carried over from this is the visuals were to have the same hi-res look reminiscent of the GG games, meaning the Capcom fighters would all have been rendered in the same sharp, crisp style that we are seeing in the soon playable Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix; this is the only thing that has carried over from the idea for that game, even though there is no real connection between both games.
Unfortunately, since no actual information has been released other than the original announcement, it is sufficed to say that this game will never come to fruition, or that it never had a chance.
