I really do love using actual game footage because that’s what makes it a video after all but as a busy college student, without an editing studio and staff backing me, I just don’t have the time or energy to download all the necessary footage and then edit it in, only to discover later that YouTube took down the video due to copyright infringement.

So that’s why our future episodes will contain images instead of footages at time. There will still be footage since I still have good amount of video files saved into my computer from having made so many videos of this kind but I feel that some will feel more like a slideshow presentation than like an actual video.

Because we have such a small following, perhaps it’s not a big deal to worry about but I will be honest in saying that I’m not completely satisfied with myself to take this route, but I hope those who watch it still enjoy the discussions we have and enjoy the Artificial Idiocy episodes.

Oh, btw, our latest episode is now up!!!

The most recent controversy is regarding the leaked gameplay footage of a massacre in LAX which the player can choose to take part of, being a part of terrorist NPCs. It’s a brutal footage that has become viewable to public (at least for a short while before reaction from Activision) thanks to the typical European gamer that is not ashamed of having illegally downloaded the game and who is thus willing to post his recorded footage on YouTube. Infinity Ward is wise in allowing this level to be skippable since this really is very emotionally provocative.

The political climate regarding terrorism in the Middle East – especially from the American perspective – has been a loaded one and so a level forcing players to mow down civilians along with a group of terrorists has more implications than many gamers seem to realize. Majority of comments from gamers seem to follow the sentiment “oh, it’s just a game; if you can’t stomach it, you’re a pussy” but I don’t think anyone can really deny just how uncomfortable and stirring it is to be put into such a situation, virtual or not. But this is exactly what Infinity Ward is going for. After all, in that level, you’re not playing as a terrorist per se but as a CIA agent infiltrating the terrorist circles so in order to not blow his cover, he is forced to participate in this massacre. It’s a powerful emotional situation but can it be too burdensome? Personally, I feel that it would be so I will admit that I myself will probably choose to skip the level but the important thing is that IW allowed such an option. But of course, the controversy remains because if majority of gamers find this level to be fun, then the messages MW2 conveys to those gamers would definitely be problematic.

Modern Warfare 2 thus is an odd case of being extremely hyped but every time more information about it is revealed (e.g. third-person multiplayer mode, no dedicated servers on the pc version, dlc already ready to be released…), the hype level seems to decrease, not increase. This is totally the opposite of how hype trains are supposed to work. Controversies for games such as Grand Theft Auto actually increase the amount of attention and hype the game receives but in the case of Modern Warfare 2, controversy seems to be a very, very bad thing. For one, the boycott petitioned against this game is bigger than any previous gaming boycotts in history, and unfortunately for Activision and Infinity Ward, the boycott is a logical and powerful one, one which I find myself agreeing to.

Of course, all the controversies in the world will not prevent MW2 from selling millions and millions but I jus wanted to point here that I, like many people out there, get less and less excited about this game the more I hear and read about it. And what’s worse is the fact tha I personally wasn’t THAT interested in this game in the first place.

I wasn’t as eloquent as I wanted to be but I think in the general scope of things, these videos were a success. The few comments I’ve been getting on YouTube and GameTrailers were extremely productive and supportive. Maybe I’m preaching to the choir with these videos but I’m just glad that now there’s at least four videos that foster an actual discussion about these games, not in relation to which one’s better or which console is more desirable, but in relation to how they are shaping the industry.

Yes, I am personally disappointed that the first two parts don’t contain any actual game footage but just screenshots. But this is my only method to bypass the strict copyright guidelines that YouTube imposes on their users. In that sense, I’m glad that my two other videos on this did not get taken down.

Currently, I have decided to make four episodes out of the recording. Yes, we had that much to talk about this time. All three topics are kind of related but at the same time, I think it would be better to have them as separate episodes rather than have it as one episode and split it into many, many parts.

The four things we mainly talked about were: (1) Gaming as being something more than just having fun, or even the possibility of games being much more than just being fun; (2) Gaming vs life priorities – figuring out how to fit gaming time into our busy life schedules; (3) Finishing a game – why sometimes we end up moving onto another game without finishing it; (4) What is a casual game/gamer?

We talked about so many games that it’s going to take me much longer than usual to find the right game footage to edit into the episodes. Downloading the footage also takes quite a long time.

In any case, even though we weren’t able to meet to record this week, we really didn’t need to because we have so much awesome stuff to eventually publish.

And this time, I promise you, this time around, while the discussions were very thought-provoking and intellectual, there are also plenty of instances where we have some good laughs.

We were finally able to meet on Skype on this past Sunday for recording. One of our intended topics on gaming being more than just being for fun ended out rather horribly so we ended up botching that topic, but the next topic we talked about led to a really intriguing discussion.

The discussion started out as and was supposed to be about how we’re managing to put in time for gaming while being so busy as college students, but it eventually somehow led to how we should define casual gamers/games.

Are we becoming casual gamers because we’re starting to play games in short bursts? Because some of us are spending more time on our portable systems like the PSP and the DS? Or is casual gaming only defined as playing games that are generally perceived to be casual such as Peggle? And if that’s the case, then how about games that played in a hardcore manner but can be considered to be generally casual, such as Guitar Hero? Furthermore, what about this notion that a lot of popular hard-core games are coming to include more and more casual elements, the examples being Forza 3 with its rewind feature, Alan Wake with its chapter selection, and Prince of Persia with the no-death feature?

Yeah, I still don’t know how we went from talking about time management to such a complicated and convoluted discussion but that’s what our next episode will be on. It’s the most digressive episode ever.

I (Kwonstein) haven’t even begun to edit our most recent recording so I’m still undecided to either make it into two separate episodes or to make it one episodes separated into four parts, but I think it’s safe to say that it will turn out to be very interesting.

I find these two questions really intriguing, especially as I find myself getting lured into all this social media craze, namely with twitter. It turns out that twitter is one of hundreds of such sites like it. There’s stuff like friendfeed, buzz, and all bunch of other stuff that I can’t remember the names to. It just happens that twitter and facebook are the most popular ones out of the bunch and probably have the largest communities.

I bring up the example of twitter here because it really made me realize the importance of an online community. I tried out friendfeed after some weeks on twitter and I found it to be an incredibly better service. It had a search engine that also acted as an archive, a reply functionality so that communication with other people was easy and can be then transformed into an active discussion, videos and links were allowed to be embedded, and different updates could be easily filtered and categorized. Twitter offers none of this by itself and requires other 3rd party add-ons and applications for it to offer comparative services. Yet, the ending to the story is that I forgot about friendfeed and stuck with twitter.

The reason is simply that more people (that I was interested in) used twitter. There is a huge community to follow and be followed by in twitter, inferior services or not.

In a sense, I think that’s a good way to view Xbox Live. Sure the competition PSN/Steam may offer comparative prices for free, but if you have online friends who only have 360s, even if XBL was perceived to be of lower quality, I bet that you would still stick with paying for XBL. In a way, it’s a bit offensive to think that a company would charge money for you to play with a community because that community is not the company’s own creation, but to be a part of the community, the price in the end may not actually matter all that much.

Of course, there’re all these other arguments about how Xbox 360 offers a more complete online experience compared to everything else out there – especially with features like party chat, an easily manageable inbox that even allows voice messages, netflix integration, trackable and comparable user profiles – but I think what matters the most is the community. Those features and benefits do indeed make Xbox Live a great experience but no one can deny that the free competition PSN often offers quality services and features not to be found on Xbox 360, such as dedicated servers, a more liberal sharing of user-generated content (as evidenced by games like LittleBigPlanet, SingStar, and Buzz), web-browser integration (e.g. Prince of Persia, MGO), and an unparalleled amount of players online simultaneously without any sort of lag (think of Resistance 2 and the upcoming MAG). Compared to that, is XBL really worth paying for?

That aspect we didn’t get to talk too much about in our episode but of course, the answer will be different for everyone. Everyone loves to have a heated discussion about that.

But regarding just the community itself, I feel that’s less of a debatable issue. If you prefer one community over the other, regardless of whether you’re paying for it or not, you will most likely want to remain being a part of that community.

P.S. For those of you who were curious…
The intro song used for the episode “Paying for Xbox Live” was – “Oblivion” from the PSP game DJ Max Fever, and the outro song was  “A Tearful Farewell” from the PS3 game Valkyria Chronicles. As mentioned before, keep on eye on that because in each upcoming episode, the intro and outro song will always be from a different game.

Just in case you readers out there are dying to know what topics our next episodes are going to be on, I’m making this post to let you know.

First off, we’re thinking of going beyond just a gaming topic this time, but talk about a particular thought, that perhaps gaming isn’t just about having fun. I (Kwonstein) recently made a vlog on a topic like this and I guess you could say that this episode will include Raistlinhawke’s and Atobe-sama’s responses to it.
Embedded below is the vlog I posted on youtube:

The other topics we are going to hopefully touch on today are:

-Gaming vs Life Priorities where we’ll discuss how gaming is in regards to time management and just being busy with life events especially since we’re all college students with work and internship and the like.

-Gaming tie-ins and what we think of them. And by gaming tie-ins, we mean to include stuff from Sonic the Hedgehog comic books down to WoW restaurants and Modern Warfare 2 energy drinks.

-The current price of various kinds of games. We could really take this discussion to wherever, whether it be to talk about how some kinds deserve a lower/higher price point or even talking about whether we’re satisfied with how many games are priced.

-PS2 Backwards Compatibility on the PS3. Will it never happen on the newer models? Will PS2 games just be resold on the PSN? Does any of this actually matter? We realize that we’re probably too late to talk about this but it can still turn out to be an interesting thing to talk about we feel.

Knowing how our recording usually end out, we’ll probably just talk about one thing and then the rest of the recording will probably turn out to be random and irrelevant chat. But that’s how we do our recordings; we still have a good amount of fun while doing it.

But yea, here’s to hoping we actually meet to record today and get to talk about some of this stuff.

250GB USB External Hard Drive – around $60.
I don’t need anything bigger than that really. Since I make a lot of videos nowadays I also download a lot of footage from Youtube to put into my vids, I definitely need something like this. Plus, my PS3 is a 60GB model and right now, I only have 14GB of free space.This is probably the first thing I will get when I have the money, and since it’s only about $60, it’ll probably be real soon.

Digital Voice Recorder – around $50
This isn’t too high on the priority list but I definitely would really like to have something like this. There are times when I just have a lot of crazy thoughts swimming in my head and I am at the same time without paper and pencil (or a computer) to record those thoughts. I also need to record some conversations I have with people for school/work purposes.

MacBook – around $1200 after taxes and warranty
Both Raistlinhawke and Atobe-sama are pretty anti-Mac but I personally love Macs and if I had the money, I would go out and grab one right now. I find Mac programs to be so much more user-friendly and secure and the Apple hardware itself is pretty amazing stuff, never mind the fact that its built-in webcam can’t be any worse. Apple Customer service is also like no other and when’s all said and done, as long as it’s not used for gaming (which is one area where PC wins without a doubt), that MacBook is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for me, a person who’s so sick of all these Blue Screens of Death, the awful Windows Movie Maker, the expensive MS software, the clunky and sometimes even deceiving interface, the 2nd worst customer service ever (Dell and HP are tied for first in my book), the unreliability of 90% of hardware running Windows, the insecurity… (I could go on and on)

iPod – about $60-$200
Or any MP3 player really but my positive experiences with Apple points me toward the iPod. And yes, I still don’t have any portable media device like it, unless you count the PSP. >_>

I don’t think I would go for the iPod Touch although that really is pretty enticing, because all those touch-screen games are the rage these days and I want to try a whole bunch of them out.

XBox 360 Arcade – about $300 after taxes and warranty
Now we’re really starting to talk more about a “wish” list and not about a realistic “to buy” list. I’m not planning on getting subscription to Xbox Live Gold since I’m not much of an online gamer anyway never mind the fact that if I play online, I would prefer to play on my PS3 because the online games I’m really into happen to be Ps3 exclusives – SOCOM Confrontation and LittleBigPlanet.

In either case, the 360 still appeals to me because it still has games I can’t experience anywhere else. I would love to play – Ace Combat 6, Lost Odyssey, Culdcept Saga, Fable 2, Shadow Complex, Trials HD, Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, and Star Ocean: The Last Hope, Forza 2, Project Gotham Racing 3, and Forza 3.

Some of you are probably confused with such an eclectic list but you have to understand, I prefer to play multiplatform games on a system that doesn’t have such a high chance of overheating (and on a system that doesn’t charge me $50/year for playing with other people), and I’ve already played the big hits like Mass Effect, Halo 3, and Gears of War. I liked Mass Effect a lot though the 360 version felt like a beta test version for the PC version but Halo 3 and Gears, ugh, not a big fan at all.

But just for those games in my list, I would like to get a 360. Lost Odyssey would be the one I’m looking most forward to play.

Nintendo DS Lite (black) – about $130
I actually had a black DS Lite before but I lost it somehow. I speculate that it fell out of my backpack. In any case, I want one again, especially since I still haven’t experienced stuff like The World Ends with You, FFIV (remake), Ace Attorney 1 & 2, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, Hatsworth, Rhythm Heaven, Knights in the Nigtmare, and Suikoden Tierkris.

Desktop PC – $400 – $700
Just for gaming really. My current Vaio laptop can barely run Fable: The Lost Chapters at 20 frames per second, and that’s at the lowest settings. So I just want a computer that can at least play Viva Pinata at medium settings and that wouldn’t cost more than $700.

PS3 – about $350 after taxes
This is the last one on the list because it really is nothing more than a wish. After all, I already own a 60GB PS3. Most of you would think I’m crazy for wanting yet another PS3 but my life really would be pretty awesome if I had two, one to leave at my parents’ home in California and the other to use in my apartment in NY. The original 60GB PS3 is a big heavy mofo so carrying it from this airport to that airport is more of a hassle than you think (or maybe I’m making it to be more of a hassle than it actually is).

So that’s my nerdy wishlist. Right now, external hard drive and that digital voice recorder seem like really close realities and perhaps even the iPod but at this point, everything else is unfortunately just a part of the wishlist. I really do want that MacBook though…

*from Gametrailers

Dearthpathfinder
Great stuff….keep up the good work and people tend to get worked up over a review rather than using them as a guide to how good a game is.

*from Youtube

my reply:
Ah, so you would argue film reviews aren’t so personality-based either.

My take on it is that film reviewers know what they’re saying is an opinion, though a very justified opinion. I brought up the fact that game reviews are segmented in a scientific manner to suggest that game reviewers heavily focus on the technical aspects of a game. I personally dont like this method (because i also see it as a unified experience) but with games, this approach makes a lot of sense.