Clearly, this is only $2.50 worth of gaming.

Have you played Terraria?  I have, and it is a darn good time.  I gladly payed my ten bucks for it, and haven’t looked back.

This past week, when Steam was having its annual “We Hate Your Wallet” sale, Terraria was on sale.  Apparently, it was only supposed to drop as low as 50% off, meaning $5.00.  Considering how many hours I have sunk into this game, that is a great deal right there.  However, at some point, some number got fangled up in a Steam spreadsheet, and for about five hours, the game only cost $2.50.

One of the three (yes,3!) people who work for Re-Logic, the game’s developer, noticed this, contacted Steam, and Steam fixed it.  No big deal, right?

“Wrong!” shouts the entitled gamer.

What the fuck?  The best thing about this is the extreme lengths people in this thread are willing to go to justify their rage and/or punish Re-Logic (again, a  company of three people who didn’t screw up here at all).  You get to a point in the thread where the gamers start complaining that they put the game in their cart, but by the time they checked out, the price had gone up.

Which is so incredibly unlikely that I can’t help but say “Bullshit!”  And yet, rage on they do.  Rage away, entitled gamer.

But, leave it to Screw Attack, a site that specializes in vids made by embarrassing gamers for embarrassing gamers, to bring us the one video that best (if most unintenionally) summarizes E3 for all.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is the Top 5 best and worst of E3 2011.  So, let’s break down some of what we saw in this little video, shall we?

Well, the video starts off with a shot of some booth babes, so we probably already know what we are getting into.  But just in case you don’t, here’s each item on both lists, with some commentary:

Best:

Oh, wow, orchestras can play "our music" too! Yay!

#5: Oh wow, a full orchestra plays some Zelda songs!  This is so amazing!  Obviously never been done before (except on some of the Zelda soundtracks and in various other contexts), and completely amazing as…what exactly?  Sure, it’s nice music and all, but, um, so what?  But apparently, it was “emotional”.  What the fuck is wrong with gamers?

You should really be invested in what happens to the heads of large companies, right?

#4: EA snubs Bobby Kotick (of competitor Activision) from playing the demo of Battlefield 3.  Why the fuck does anyone care about this?  Does it make IT news when Bill Gates won’t let Steve Jobs fuck around on a Windows 8 demo?  No, because it doesn’t fucking matter.  Companies are protective of their IP from competitors.  This is basic capitalism, and not something gamers (who get screwed by basic capitalism in so many ways) should be excited about.  Certainly not “hi-larious” as the Screw Attack commenter claims.

This is, of course, one of the best things about a video game advertising convention, isn't it?

#3: Thought we could get away on this list without booth babes?  Think again! The THQ Saints Row 3 Car Wash is apparently one of the best things about E3.  Remember, this has nothing to do with video games at all aside from a cheap promotion, and this particular group of gamers lapped up that cheap objectification of women as eye candy eagerly, and wanted more.

Hey, they fucked up and are admitting it in public. This is SO AMAZING.

#2: Sony kissing ass after the PSN hack.  Wow, this should not be a highlight at all.  Sony president comes out and sucks up to a bunch of journalists by telling them they are “the lifeblood of the company”.  I don’t think he actually grasps how true that whole statement is.    You know what would be a highlight?  Sony not letting my (and millions of other people’s) information get hacked off of their incompetently secured servers.  Yeah, that would be a highlight, but instead sucking up to the sycophantic “games journalism” industry is supposedly “extremely classy”.

Remember when the DS was just a portable? Not any more!

#1: The Wii U being “designed for hardcore gamers” by being “revolutionary”.  Holy shit, I didn’t think people actually fell for PR this hard.  First, the controls aren’t revolutionary at all.  It’s a tablet controller that makes the home console into what amounts to a giant DS, but with your TV as one of the screens.  Secondly, the appeal to “hardcore gamers” was showing a bunch of games that will be released on other systems BEFORE THE WII U ITSELF IS RELEASED.  Think about this for a second: The Wii U’s big selling point to hardcore gamers is that it will play year-old ports of games that come out for systems they probably already have.  And this is exciting?  What the fuck is wrong with people?  This is pretty much proof positive that if you put enough marketing and the right names behind anything, gamers will lap that shit up like thirsty desert dogs at an oasis.

Oh, but if you thought the “Best” list was bad, the “Worst” list should bring your expectations for future Screw Attack content down even further.

Can anyone really be surprised by this performance?

#5: Oh HA HA the Kinect actors are not so good at fake playing Kinect!  THIS IS SO FUNNY.  You know what is funny?  That you are analyzing the performance of what amounts to little more than a live advertisement like it matters at all.  And I am analyzing your analysis of it…oh no, staring into the abyss.  Oh hey, and they advertised a football game, which of course gets a lot of gamers all into a tizzy because they don’t want those dreaded jock stereotypes from high school invading their playland (and note how the commenter in the vid tries hard to dismiss said jocks and “graymers”, ugh).

Remember, if you aren't Nintendo, making further entries in a franchise is wrong.

#4: Halo 4 gets announced, and this guy gets mad about not “finishing the fight” in 3, except that, you know, you actually did finish the fight of the Halo universe in 3, but that would mean his cheap little joke would need a rewrite, and that is no good.  Yes, MS is milking Halo, just like Nintendo milks basically everything they have. Though he briefly brings the big N, he says that since Nintendo never marketed Zelda as being “done”, they are OK.  Let’s note that Halo 3 was not marketed as the end of the Halo series (Bungie announced there would be more games in the series before 3 was put out), just the story that infamously ended with a cliffhanger in Halo 2.  Also note that 3 more games have indeed come out since then.  Yeah, saying you are making a bunch more Halo games isn’t the most original thing, but at least MS is acknowledging that they plan on milking it as much as possible, as opposed to Nintendo/Activision/etc., who want us all to believe they aren’t just going to keep pumping out franchise games as much as possible.  Final note: “milking the Chief’s tits dry”? Really?

Yeah, this guy was probably annoying. Why should anyone care? OH SHIT HE CAN'T SAY CLANCY!

#3: OH SHIT THIS GUY CAN’T SAY TOM CLANCY! THIS IS TERRIBLE! Oh god, fuck off, gamer nerd.  Because of this, he “sucks my balls”.  Thanks shitty nerd humor.

...because what matters about your over-priced game toy is that it uses a cell phone provider you don't like.

#2: The PSVita uses AT&T, which some people boo at.  ”How do you get booed at your own press conference?” might be the most important question this gamer ever has asked, though I’m sure he doesn’t get why.  But really, it’s a valid question.  When you fill an auditorium with hundreds of people who you are basically paying to be there (through any number of “perks”) and who you are spoon feeding the info to that they use to make a living, you might get a little pissed off it they boo you.  I could easily imagine some Sony Exec flipping out at that moment, yelling “Fuck you, you little shits, I have bought your enthusiasm with cold, hard cash so shut the hell up!”  Such is the sycophantic nature of the “game journalism” industry.  News, indeed.

Man, if they wanted "hardcore gamers", naming it after something that made them a shitload of cash is probably a bad move, right?

#1; The Wii U!  Why call it the Wii? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because the Wii sold ridiculously well, and Nintendo (being a capitalist business, not that there is anything wrong with that) wants to rely on brand recognition (something they do constantly, though this guy hates that much less than when MS does it) to make a SHITTON of money, again!  Oh, “hardcore gamers” don’t like the Wii?  You know what, Mr. Gamer, Nintendo doesn’t really care.  They don’t.  Most of those gamers bought a Wii anyway, because where else will you play Zelda, a series no “hardcore gamer” can be without.  And most of those same gamers will buy a Wii U, even if it was called the Nintendo Holy Shit Gamers Are Idiots Ha Ha Ha.

Oh, but he ends by saying this is all a joke, as if that excuses being an idiot.  So yes, if you ever thought Screw Attack or E3 could yield anything intelligent, I’m sorry.

Holy shit.  I think we just hit the jackpot of horrible rape-related humor, trafficking in so many shitty ideas about rape that I don’t know where to begin.  But let’s break it down for a bit, shall we?

Here’s the situation, in case you haven’t been paying attention to this game at all (good call, that): at the beginning of this game, Duke is getting felated by these two twins as he beats his previous game.  Later on in the game, he comes across them having been abducted by aliens, and subsequently raped and tortured.

His response?  ”You’re fucked!”  Sensitive, caring Duke there.

Of course, it actually gets worse, because then the twins talk about having to lose the baby weight from getting pregnant by an alien.  Because that is what should really be the concern.

There’s so much offensive horrible shit going on there that even Trenchbloat got offended by it.  Yeah, the guy that makes horrible racism and sexism into jokes regularly got offended by it.

Look, we all knew this game would be offensive.  Its predecessor was full of the kind of standard misogyny that was sadly commonplace in games then (and still largely is).  But holy shit, did it have to go this far?

Or, in the words of an equally disgusted fellow gamer player, ”This is where you look at gamer culture and let it burn, realizing there are very good reasons why outsiders don’t respect your hobby.”

Judging by this year’s E3, we have a LONG FUCKING WAY TO GO.  So let’s dive in, shall we?

Tomb Raider

Sweet jimminy Christmas, did e3 get off to a hell of a start this year.  This little gem showed up during the Microsoft press conference and, well, see for yourself:

Wow, someone heard the phrase “torture porn” and just thought that what was out there wasn’t quite porn-y enough, so they got together with some other dudes and made this game.  Or maybe they noticed the videos on youtube of Lara Croft dieing?  Either way, somebody saw some dollar signs, and we get this.

Now, Lara Croft has always been an embarrassingly over-sexualized woman, no doubt, but at the very least she was always portrayed as strong and capable in any situation, so that while she met stupid gamer expectations of female physical sexuality, she at least maybe challenged a little bit of the stupid gamer bias against strong women.

Would’ve helped if she’d been in some better games, but hey, what can you do?

But now, she is getting the famed “Other M treatment” or what may come in the future to be known as “the Anya“, in which a previously strong female game character is made weaker and more palatable to the gamers.  Why is this? Oh, there are probably a shitload of reasons (fear of strong women being the obvious one) that plenty of people with far better understandings of feminism and fucked up male sexuality can explain, but let’s just note it and move on.

Gamification

Hey, remember Jane McGonigal? Or this guy?

Yeah, apparently so did most of the companies showing things at E3 this year.  Games that reward us for just existing seemed to be par for the course.  Someone took it to a new level and  decided turning actual real life things into silly games seemed like a good idea too.  Gamification goes both ways, I guess.

On the first point, look at just about any game shown to see the achievement mentality taking over.  EA’s press conference was itself wrought with this kind of bullshit it mind.  And boy was it ugly.

As for the gaming of real-life activities, look no further than Disneyland.

This might be the saddest image I have seen all day.

Yes, now you (yes, you!) can use your hundreds of dollars to buy a video game system and the proper accessories to simulate for your kids the experience of going to a place that will cost you thousands to visit (and I am sure the game will completely satisfy any urge they might have to visit it).  Let your kids give virtual air hugs to the virtual person dressed up as Snow White.

There are so many fucking layers here.  Of course, the various people who have written on Disneyland as a Mecca of Hyperreality will probably have a fucking field day with this game.

And the show goes on…

I’m sure there will be more to come, and feel free to share links to things in the comments.  I don’t have time to keep up with all the “news”.

This is it, we have finally found the most pathetic post on the internet [ed. for the moment, never underestimate them gamers]. Over at Eurogamer, they reposted a story from the Daily Mail regarding video games being cited as a reason for divorce proceedings. Other than both Eurogamer and the Daily Mail having some extremely sloppy journalism as usual, the comments section was particularly ripe.  Here there emerged a person very enraged who wroate a post so selfish and reeking of nerd entitlement that we had to double check that Tim Buckley did not write it.

He didn't really write this, did he?

Someone just tried to justify, on the internet, that he does not want to be in a relationship because she won’t play videogames with him.  Let that sink in for a minute. This guy is so entirely bitter about watching a TV show with his girlfriend/wife  for about two hours every Saturday night complains that she is not interested in video games and therefore not good enough for him.

Incredible. Someone who you love and probably loves you back not particularly interested in your hobby? Clearly, she is a completely horrible person who DESERVES to be alone.

Someone doesn’t get that relationships are about compromise and doing things that sometimes aren’t the most pleasant (and watching a crappy reality TV show is honestly incredibly low on that scale).

But nothing stops gamer entitlement. Not even love.

A "right to enjoy them"? WHAT. THE. FUCK.

You know who really needs an advocate in the modern world?  People who have enough money to waste that they can throw it away on overpriced entertainment, but feel somehow they are oppressed in their ability to enjoy themselves properly.  These people have a RIGHT TO ENJOYMENT, don’t they?

We really need to find some advocacy group that can really defend these poor, beleaguered gamers and really stand up for this underrepresented minority.  Who can do that?

Enter the Gamer’s Voice, or these people:

This is the group that will defend your "right to enjoy" your overpriced luxury items, you shithead.

While a bit of their site seems devoted to some minor consumer advocacy (how to replace your faulty games, which is OK enough, sure), a lot of it is dedicated to shit like the “right to enjoy games”.

Here’s a hint, people:  You have no “right to enjoy” anything.  Your enjoyment of something is completely of your own free will.  Now, if they meant “right to purchase”, they might have an argument, assuming they were getting at issues of censorship and such in the marketplace.  But once you a buy a game, you can do what you want with it, be that enjoy it or not.

However, framing all of this as some sort of civil rights issue is just belittling to the actual civil rights issues out there entirely.  Games are not a right at all, but are a privilege.  Yeah, they are one that I and a lot of other people take part in, but at the end of the day, if we don’t have games, not a single fucking one of us will have lost any sort of rights at all.  Compared to the various ways actual oppressed people the world over are treated, not having games and “enjoyment” is a pretty minor fucking complaint, don’t you think?

Jim sterling makes really "great" and "insightful" videos where he dresses up as his strawmen and argues with them.

Been awhile since I did one of these, eh?

Somehow Jim Sterling figured out  how to keep making his shitty videos full of delusional crap in which he theoretically illuminates some aspect of gaming (which never needs to actually be illuminated) by spouting off his useless opinions on the matter and acting as if somehow this was actually worth saying.

Not only did he figure out how to still do this, but he figured out how to get paid for it TWICE.

And so we get shit like this.

Now, say what you will about the Escapist (we could write a lot on how embarrassing Yahtzee is), but I hoped they would be better than that, and thankfully, their commenters try to be.  Ever since Sterling showed up there, there has been a never-ending stream of “Oh God, this is terrible” comments on the site.  Keep in mind, these are the people that are largely pleased with Zero Punctuation, so let it be said their standards aren’t even all that high.

All that being said, this video is a doozy, even for Trenchbloat.  His premise? “Games are not movies!”.  No shit, really?  His target? Heavy Rain.

I don't even think you can actually be said to "play" this piece of shit, can you?

Picking on Heavy Rain for not getting what separates games and movies is just a bit too easy, one would think.  But then again, when dealing with Jimbo, nothing is too easy.

Of course, he talks about how people think movies have better stories than games, and how somehow this does some sort of “disservice to games”.  Of course, he points out different movies as having worse plots than games.

I can’t even begin to point out how stupid that is.

And then he goes onto talk about how comparing games and movies is stupid because games somehow had a different origin.  And you shouldn’t compare them.  Ever.

But then he says that games are superior as a medium for storytelling.  So don’t do these comparisons, unless you are going to say games are better.

So fucking stupid.  So fucking Trenchbloat.

Holy shit, this might be a female game designer.

Reader allen sent me a link to this lovely fucking thread over on TIGSource.  When you start a thread with:

I have yet to see a girl game designer. It seems rather od that there are close to none out there. 

you can only go up, right?  If the starting poster can’t even bother with Google, someone will take care of it, right?  There are quite a few after all, many of whom have made major contributions to all types of games, from major studio releases like Portal (Kim Swift) to smaller (and no less wonderful) indie games (such as Anna Anthropy).

And while some of the members of the TIGSource forums step up and handle this business, it is not without some major fucking bumps along the way such as:

There are a few, but at least half of them were born male. Don’t know if that makes a difference.

Protip: It doesn’t.  Gamers rarely understand how gender works, though.  And make no bones about sharing their completely misinformed opinions.  Which leads into such nuggets of wisdom as:

My philosophy is such… Do you have a vagina? Can you give birth to a baby? Then you are a woman. Can you impregnate a woman? Then you are a man.

None of this has anything to do with game development or such, however. Any gender segregation outside of natural roles is pointless..

Ya hear that people?  If you are trans, or happen to be infertile, or happen to have gone through menopause, etc., YOU HAVE NO GENDER.  Humans are obviously completely driven by only one purpose, reproduction, and so your value as such is attributable only to how much you contribute to that purpose.

There are even a few rational voices occassionally in that thread, but man, that does not make idiots like the above-quoted look any less idiotic.

Meet BurnYourBra, an African American woman who also happens to be pretty good at Super Street Fighter IV.

BurnYourBra is on the left.

In a recent interview published over at EventHubs, This player reveals all the variety of things she has been called over the course of her brief career as a competitive fighting gamer.  It’s some pretty horrific stuff that I don’t want to reprint here, but suffice it so say, it’s horribly racist/sexist/homophobic/all of the above.

And all because she can beat some ass at a fighting game.  What the hell?

I genuinely feel pretty shitty for what this person has to put up with, and that she even has to try to tolerate it.  But, if you think this is abnormal or something, Kotaku has you covered on that front.  Commenter Demosthenes does a good job of being one shameful fuckhead, and pretty much proving how shitty gamers can be.

Thanks to reader moseslmpg for the tip.

This is not to say this game isnt embarrassing on its own (it is), but holy hell, Destructoid...

Where to begin with this giant piece of stinking shit?

Ostensibly a preview of The Witcher 2, this article goes on way too long, says some amazingly stupid things in confoundedly idiotic ways, and just is perfectly emblematic of the level of quality usually present when gamers are told to write something about their hobby of choice.

Amazingly stupid things:

After waking up next to the lovely Triss Merigold — who happens to sport the best areola and shaven vulva textures of any game to date

Wow.  Good to know what this writer cares about in his game, and that he has apparently seen enough of these in games to form a judgement about them.  I can’t even begin to imagine how one becomes an expert in these kinds of textures.

Soldiers idle, train, and talk about rape and glory

So this is supposed to be getting me enthused about this game?  I know, The Witcher is not the most mature of games at all, but should we really be bragging about it?

These former acquaintances are happy enough to fill you in on some of your previous dealings with them, including tales of even more rape and murder. If you are sick of JRPGs or anime tropes that deal with sexual innuendo involving 12 year old girls, and prefer a brutal and adult medieval fantasy world, this is the game for you.

See above.  ”Adult” indeed.  Again, I am not necessarily mocking the game.  It is what it is (an adolescent power fantasy, which is all most games are anyhow), but should this really be something that gets praise?

Anyhow, you get the idea.

In confoundedly idiotic ways:

After the White Wolf is being brought to an interrogation chamber

Let me be a grammar nerd for a second and point out that I have no idea what tense that is supposed to be.

until a “monster” enters the fray changes the mathematics of warfare

I think you might be missing some words there, buddy.

In short, Destructoid needs to hire two editors: one for grammar, the other for shame.

Thanks to bza for the heads up.