I was recently invited on to the Singapore-based video games podcast, Staring at Screens. Hosted by showrunners David and Joel, this week’s conversation was on female protagonists in video games. We examined which female protagonists we liked best, the lack of choice of good female characters to play back in the early days of gaming, archetypes, and other such things. Here’s your chance to hear how awkward I sound when I know I’m being recorded. Also I hate the sound of my voice. Also, if you could listen to my brain directly, bypassing my voice, I’d rather that happen.
I’m about 30 plus hours into a JRPG about high school teenagers fighting inner demons. Let’s jump after the cut together to find out more about this amazing game. Warning: Spoilers afoot!
Space Oddity by David Bowie, covered by Chris Hadfield
This video is truly dear to my heart. I love David Bowie, I love Space Oddity by David Bowie, but even more than those two things, I love Chris Hadfield, astronaut and Commander of the International Space Station, for his cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Performed and recorded from believe it or not, outer space.
No green screen or CGI, everything you see is real footage taken from inside and out of the ISS. It’s beautiful, and truly a testament to how far we’ve come, not just in space travel, but also the power of the Internet and social media. It also helps that Hadfield is a damn good singer in his own right.
Between Two Ferns/Spring Break Anthem by Zach Galifianakis/The Lonely Island
I love Between Two Ferns. I think it’s Zach’s most inspired comedy sketch concept.
I love The Lonely Island. I think for “pseudo-rappers”, they are actually damn talented, and their videos are always just the most funniest sh*t.
Who would’ve thought they’d do a mash up such as this. But I think this is probably one of the smartest comedy music videos in the entire universe. So watch it, and then read my list why.
Watched it?
Good. So why do I think this is one of the most amazing videos ever:
1. James Franco is a star on Spring Breakers which is being parodied in the music video, but not actually mentioned in the interview at all.
2. Between Two Ferns is about the sometimes-moronic nature of interviewers who don’t know shit about the people they are interviewing, and the sometimes inane questions they ask of their interviewees – clearly James Franco has had more than a fair share of these
3. A lot of talk shows have a music segment, and frankly, it sometimes strikes me as awkward or downright weird how they go “Okay, that’s nice to hear, now let’s stop talking and go listen to a bunch of people who have been standing around over there waiting to perform.”
4. “Name one?” “Ed Norton” “Oh, why don’t you marry him?” – and then amazing how The Lonely Island always gets the best celebrity cameos.
5. Spring Break Anthem by The Lonely Island is actually a damn good song. Especially when they sing-
6. “- and marry a man!” Thereby turning this song on its head for all the people who you’d think it was originally intended for, like broskis, and frat boys, and jocks, and the lot. This is called cognitive dissonance: overt masculinity “banging chicks” vs subverted homosexuality “gay weddings”. It’s also a song about “bros”, and how homo sometimes bros can get.
7. Spring Breakers (if you haven’t watched it, you should) is a movie about cognitive dissonance, so this music video is about cognitive dissonance.
8. The Lonely Island continues their trend of rapping about shit people should actually be thinking about, wrapped up in seemingly “dumb” songs.
As James Franco ends the interview by saying, “That was awesome.” Yes it was.
YEAHHHHH I’M STILL ALIVE AT THE END OF THE SEASON!
Intrepid Big Gap writers Perr and Junch finally sit down and properly figure out what they thought about the season finale of Walking Dead. Perr’s been doing a great job catching us up to speed with individual episodes, but the magnitude of the season finale requires a little more gabbing. Read below the cut to see see what they thought.
If you read my Top 10 games of 2012, you’ll know that Far Cry 3 was the top of the pile for me. And now, Ubisoft wants to take my top spot again with this mind-blowingly OTT 80s throwback camp sci-fi dinosaur-robots cyborg-armed epic shooter DLC Blood Dragon.
I hate DLCs with a passion. I think if it should be in the game, then it should’ve been in the game from the start. But this transcends the game. So I will allow it. And then I will explode into a billion little nano pieces of awesomeness.
This is a pretty funky looking game. I remembered reading about it way back, but it seemed to have fallen into obscurity, until now. The full game’s out.
The basic premise is that you control a small squad of spy folk tasked with various mission types, from assassinations, to infiltrations, to thievery, etc. and the interesting game mechanic is you control all three spies from a single screen in first person view. There’s also multiplayer coop which looks to be a hilariously good time, especially when you can see the shenanigans your friends are getting up to, and shout at them for doing things wrong. The graphics look positively kooky, which is great.
There’s an interesting discussion developing in the aftermath of Bioshock Infinite’s release, led primarily by Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku, who says in his comprehensive breakdown of the game that the “ridiculous violence stands out in such sharp relief when placed against the game’s thoughtful story and lovely world”. His article carried such a strong tone of incredulity that Ken Levine went so far with the violence, but I’m here to argue that that was exactly the point, and if anything, that’s the only part of Bioshock Infinite that worked best for me. Why? Continue reading →
Never has a game troubled me so much as Bioshock Infinite did, after I finished it. And that’s not “troubling” in a good way either. Word of warning: this review is spoilers galore. Most of the time, the reviews I write are intended to convince people to play or not to play games, without ruining it for them, but because this one’s plot is inherent to the entertainment value of the game, it has to be discussed in full, even down to the major twist at the end. Continue reading →
Hideo Kojima announces Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain, confirming Big Boss’ return 9 years after the events in Guns of the Patriots. This trailer is fantastic, showing off Hideo Kojima’s talent for making game trailers. Okay, he’s a genius at game designing and directing too, but yeah, this trailer is the bomb. WATCH IT NOW. Continue reading →
