Spoiler Alert for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 fans!!

This morning on Twitter, I saw a link come in mentioning Modern Warfare 2. I don't really give a rip about it and I've been skipping over most of the masturbatory OMG-look-at-this-new-feature news on it, but this particular tweet was from one of my recent follows who I perceive as being a pretty sharp dude, and his basic reaction to this piece of news was essentially "holy s**t." That in itself isn't usually enough to get me to click a link, but like I said, this guy has had some interesting things to say, so I checked it out.

Many video games are escapist in one sense or another and have to deal with the maximum agency afforded to the player, and in most cases we're talking about agency in the idealized, physical sense.  If the protagonist is not physically attractive or physically "able" (and this is to say nothing of the marginalizing of the physically handicapped or disabled in video games... perhaps a topic for future discussion), at the very least he/she is youthful... iconic of the kind of template for change and dynamic narrative-based character shifts we all look for in the classic bildungsroman that forms the basis for games ranging from Braid to Fable 2.

Over the past week or so, it seems like the issue of race in gaming has been picking up steam. I've come across two great posts on the subject, one from Paul Tassi and a sardonic take over at the Play Like a Girl blog. More pertinently, an illuminating study from the USC Annenberg School of Communication revealed that minorities—and particularly Latinos—are woefully underrepresented among protagonists and other characters in leading video games.

Beating Down An Entire City... And Loving It

HIGH It's dripping with testosterone and has machismo to spare.

LOW Accidentally stumbling into the last battle with a sliver of health.

WTF Four words: big yellow banana suit.

(Note: I could've used Mad Props as the title but that's already been done like a thousand times)

I stumbled upon a really sweet TF2 mod a few days ago. The red team spawns as various pieces of scenery (barrels, rocks, trees, etc.) with the scout's health, and the blue team spawns as pyros. Blue has to kill all the scenery scouts before time is up or else red wins. Needless to say, the sight of a tree running away from a pyro is pure awesomeness. If you've not played it, you don't get to sit with the cool kids at lunch. You also don't get to sniff dry erase markers with us during recess.

Mad Props (couldn't resist) to the mod author. The Steam group page has a list of servers to play on.

Yay!

Meh.

Nay!

Don't care.

Foiled By A Fence

HIGH Seeing the consequences of a choice I made much earlier in the game.

LOW Having to keep re-entering conversation trees that I haven't fully explored yet.

WTF Buying stuff from the same fat guy with the same bell around his neck a bazillion times.

Borderlands is the game everyone's talking about at the moment, although I have to admit that I'm a little bit (well, okay, a lot) puzzled at all of the positive buzz is getting. It's currently rocking an 84 at MetaCritic and no one has a bad word to say about it on Twitter. However, my experience was basically the opposite… it started poorly and failed to come together for me, leaving me bored and disaffected.

Touch The Void

HIGH The moody and atmospheric section in the ice caves, featuring a perfect use of the Wii remote.

LOW The meditation sequences, which feature a painfully imperfect use of the Wii remote.

WTF Am I seriously smashing pots for loot at the top of a mountain?

Swing Low, Ghoulish Chariot

HIGH Look at that castle! That giant jack-o'-lantern! The moon!



LOW Aw man, I plummeted into a track again. Darn those vertical drops.

WTF I put the game down and I can still hear the background tune in my head.