Don’t worry, I’m not gonna phi­los­o­phize about real­ity. At least, not this time. It’s more a short text about wak­ing up in a deceiv­ing world. As some of you know, I like games and I like to play. No mat­ter what kind of game you’re relat­ing to, I’m inter­ested. Fur­ther­most, I like play­ing com­puter games and I want them to be chal­leng­ing. My favorite type of games are sneak­ers, adven­tures and plat­form­ing games, like Thief, Bro­ken Sword or Prince of Per­sia. I also like to play first per­son shoot­ers and strat­egy games. You see, I’m quite open-minded as far as com­puter games are concerned.

Cur­rently, I’m play­ing the fourth install­ment of the Bro­ken Sword series which seems like one of those old-fashioned point-and-click adven­tures again. I really like that style and the chal­lenge it poses, namely think­ing in a lat­eral way. When I went to check out my favorite sites today, I dis­cov­ered an arti­cle called Read Any Good Games Lately? over at The Escapist. It’s a really good read you shouldn’t miss (If you’re not into com­puter games see this arti­cle about Uwe Boll instead – you won’t rue it either, I promise.).

Now, where was I? Ah, yeah, good games. Have you seen, played or heard of such a game as of lately? Don’t bother with ads like those for Gears of War – they don’t count. Over the last few months I’ve played some titles which weren’t chal­leng­ing at all. I only bought or bor­rowed them because I know the fran­chise. As of lately, such games have become really bad. I don’t wanna wait for months until – finally, with the sixth patch – I can play them. I don’t wanna play games that just don’t live up to the hype or the fran­chise. For instance, ever more games based on suc­cess­ful movies and TV shows are pro­duced. Most def­i­nitely these games aren’t chips of the old block.

These games exist only to gen­er­ate an addi­tional source of rev­enue. They’re not here to enter­tain because they sim­ply suck. Of course, there are excep­tions – not every game mod­eled after a suc­cess­ful fran­chise is made to merely gen­er­ate money. There are some games out there really try­ing to enter­tain their audi­ence instead of just show­ing off some awe­some graph­ics. There are games you can busy your­self with for dozens of hours instead of being only good enough for a mere seven hours expe­ri­ence. Hope­fully, peo­ple will con­sider this while devel­op­ing future titles. I know that many gamers are think­ing the same way …

Finally, there are some news regard­ing one of my favorite games. I already wrote about the orig­i­nal game here, you may wanna have a look at it. This time, it's all about the suc­ces­sor which – accord­ing to the newest trailer – lives up to it's pre­de­ces­sor. Direc­tor Cory Bar­log writes on his blog that all the pri­mary work is done and all that remains is to work out the bugs as the game is in the Qual­ity Assur­ance stage right now. Some lucky peo­ple are going to get the demo in early Feb­ru­ary and I'm gonna envy them. Well, I'll pick it up in March if they can keep the release date.

God of War II: Divine Ret­ri­bu­tion smoothly con­tin­ues where its pre­de­ces­sor left of. Kratos is the new god of war, far more ruth­less than Ares ever was. Because of what Ares did to him his tor­ment con­tin­ues, even after he became a god. To end his suf­fer­ing he must embark on a dan­ger­ous jour­ney to the far reaches of the Earth and alter that which no mor­tal or god has ever changed – his fate. Dur­ing his quest he has to plunge into bat­tle wher­ever he goes to fight legions of mon­sters bar­ring his way to a peace of mind. The game is rated M for intense vio­lence, blood and gore, and strong vio­lence. I guess there's more to come but ESRB doesn't have all the infor­ma­tion yet. Nonethe­less, there's no other game out there fea­tur­ing such a well thought-out sto­ry­line as well as an impres­sive set­ting and a lik­able anti­hero who hap­pens to be a real bad ass.

Me and a work­ing col­league today dis­cov­ered that our points of view regard­ing some top­ics are quite oppo­si­tional. Dig­ging deeper I fig­ured that the dif­fer­ence is to be found at the very base of his beliefs. He actu­ally thinks the world can be viewed as “good vs. evil”. I told him that this is plain ridicu­lous but he didn’t budge. Any­way, that explains quite a lot I didn’t under­stand before.

This view of life cer­tainly has its mer­its, I grant him that. But it sucks if you crave for a bet­ter under­stand­ing of things like he says he does. Good forces ver­sus bad forces. Just think about it. It’s such an intrigu­ing con­cept, under­stand­able for every­one. It’s so sim­ple and effi­cient that “the play­ers” still employ it as a means of manip­u­la­tion. Isn’t it a pity that so many peo­ple fall for this “We’re the good guys” bull­shit? As a fact, nobody can be absolutely good or evil. We define what’s good and what’s evil, what we like and what we don’t. We cat­e­go­rize things and so it seems unlikely that evil guys can do good and vice versa.

We had quite an argu­ment about that until he finally gave in. As usual, some things can’t stand before the harsh facts. Strangely, I don’t feel good about that. Have I utterly destroyed his point of view? Isn’t it way eas­ier to believe in an illu­sion, if you know that things actu­ally are worse? I cer­tainly have the impres­sion that peo­ple don’t really want to know. That they don’t really look because they want to let them­selves get fooled. That’s some­thing to think about …

What the hell? A game star­ring the two teenage shoot­ers in the Columbine High School mas­sacre back in 1999? Surely, this game must be dis­taste­ful and dis­turb­ing, stem­ming from a sick mind. Undoubt­edly, this is one of the most con­tro­ver­sial games right now. Accord­ing to the guys from Wired it’s not that bad at all. In fact, the cre­ator tries to offer a new way to think about Columbine. As a game, it sucks and is com­pletely with­out merit. Super Columbine Mas­sacre was designed with an old-fashioned graph­ics in mind, offer­ing only low-resolution char­ac­ters almost look­ing like noth­ing more than ani­mated pixels.

Instead of a first-person shooter with awe­some graph­ics all you get is sim­ple MIDI tunes, pix­e­lated graph­ics and an aston­ish­ing amount of detail. Obvi­ously Daniele Ledonne painstak­ingly researched the two killers’ sto­ries and recon­structed some dia­log from what they actu­ally said on the day of the shoot­ing. The player gets to see how unbal­anced these guys were and how fast they changed their moods. There’s one para­graph that espe­cially hooked me up:

And they peren­ni­ally break into bit­ter recrim­i­na­tions about the pop­u­lar kids they feel have tor­mented them. “If you could see all the anger I’ve stored over the past four fuck­ing years. I’m going to kill you all,” Kle­bold seethes.The upshot is that Ledonne has done a sur­pris­ingly good job of paint­ing the emo­tional land­scape of the pair — whip­saw­ing from self-pity to pompous grandios­ity and blind­ing rage, then back again.

There’s def­i­nitely some artis­tic inter­est to it because it shows a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing about the mas­sacre. The offi­cial site states that “this game is intended to deepen the under­stand­ing of the shoot­ing and it’s pos­si­ble causes”. Thus, it’s not the “self-indulgent killfest that some have deemed it”. If you wanna take a look for your­self, here’s the trailer for the game which you can get over at the offi­cial site.

Some ques­tions remain: Does the “game” live up to its expec­ta­tions? Is it the tool to pro­vide a deeper under­stand­ing rather than a mere first per­son shooter? Does it have a place in our soci­ety or should we ban this mon­stros­ity into oblivion?

Yes, there is. Not that there are lotta new things in it but the style is awe­some. Check it out over at Yahoo! Movies. If it’s too slow – at least it was ago­niz­ingly slow when I tried to stream it about an hour ago – there’s a faster mir­ror up here (Be sure to scroll down and get trailer 2.). If you’re inter­ested in his­tor­i­cal facts, I’ve already writ­ten about it here. Enjoy!

It’s well over a month since I last wrote some­thing. I’ve been quite busy and I spent some days off – in other words: I didn’t feel inclined to write some­thing. You know, just hav­ing a good time for myself, relax­ing in every pos­si­ble way was just too good to be true. I really enjoyed it and so I didn’t do much except read­ing books and watch­ing TV shows and movies respec­tively. I wish it could’ve gone on for­ever. Last Fri­day we went out cel­e­brat­ing one of my best friend’s birth­day and we got seri­ously drunk. Beware of these “all you can drink” offers. The cheaper they are the more you’ll wanna drink. How­ever, I didn’t end up with a hang­over, there­fore, I haven’t drunk too much. Presumably.

Any­ways, all that counts is that I’m back and ready to write about stuff that inter­ests me. I’ll come up with some­thing for today. In fact, I already have some­thing in mind. I just need some time to write it down. As of now, time’s pretty scarce. Sadly, I’ve taken on too much work in too lit­tle time. If there weren’t so much respon­si­bil­ity involved I’d gladly step down but then the idiots would be back again, rul­ing my work­ing life once again. That I couldn’t bear. Well, either work, work needs to be done and the faster the bet­ter. With this in mind, see you later on.