A Week in Gaming With Adam Cook
It’s that time again, a week in gaming with GodisaGeek! All the founding members have had their say, Calvin Robinson discussed Mac and motion gaming last week and this week it’s the turn of reviewer Adam Cook to attempt mass communication. So please…sit down, take a sip of whatever beverage is to hand and please, for the love of God(isaGeek)…put some trousers on!
Who am I?
As one of the newer members of the blossoming GodisaGeek team I primarily review lots of games, but also post news as and when it breaks to me first. I lead a relatively busy life (wife, kids, job, etc) but I’ve always tried to find time for a bit of the ol’ gaming. I try to take an active part in the growing community we are trying to create here, including posting (and moderating) regularly in the forums (click here, register and join the discussion!) and you’ll often find me tweeting about the site (and football, also ranting and generally messing about), not to mention including obscene amounts of links to site content whenever I can!
StarCraft II
I don’t know if you’ve heard of this game at all but it’s quite good (as Aryel’s review points out). You’d think that everything that could be said has been said by now but until recently I had never played a proper RTS game (or so I’m told anyway) on a PC.
Much like World of Warcraft, I’d heard horror stories about StarCraft. People losing days and months playing it and I’d never seen myself as someone who could be sucked into such a game. However, thanks to a persistent enabler, I was convinced amidst much praise and hype to give the game a go. Quite frankly, my mind was blown. Being primarily a console gamer I’ve experienced high quality products for some time, but I don’t think I’ve experienced a product that has had such care and devotion to it as this.
Every inch of this game has been examined with a fine-toothed-comb to ensure that the end user, the person who spends their hard earned money on the product, gets an unforgetable experience. If it weren’t for the idea of including a “7 hour trial” code in the box for someone already purchasing the game, I’d never have tried StarCraft II and I’m truly grateful to have experienced it. I’m not even ready to experience the actual online yet, I’m far too green for that, but I can’t wait to delve deeper and deeper into the world. I never thought an RTS could be so immersive.
I’d planned to write my “week in gaming” about any number of console related things, but instead I have found myself waxing lyrical about StarCraft II. What a difference a single moment in time can make, who’d have “thunk” it? I’ve got the bug now though and I’m taking recomendations as to games I’ve missed on the PC. I’m already lining up Diablo and StarCraft (the first game) in the “to buy” list!
Parents and Kids and XBOX LIVE Oh My!
Back onto consoles now where I feel safer in my knowledge base and onto a more traditional semi-rant.
Party and Private chat are the single best feature to come to XBOX LIVE, but they shouldn’t be neccessary. It never fails to bring a wry smile to my face when a pre-pubescent American boy attempts an English (movie English) accent and asks if I’ve drunk any tea recently. Don’t think me xenophobic here, I’m not just picking on American kids but all of them. I don’t really enjoy getting racist insults (I’m a pasty whiteboy!) or being told I sexually assault my mother (it’s not assault if it’s consentual, that’s just incest) or even being told I’m a homosexual (being gay isn’t an insult, seriously, in this day and age…) but unless I stick to party chat (private friends only) it’s gonna happen.
Is it the kids fault? Not really, they are kids and when is all said and done this is in no way a rant againt youngsters. This is just the new form of putting a burning bag of dogshit on a porch before doing the knock and run, boys will be boys (there are no girls on XBOX LIVE, anyone appearing female is pretending to be a girl to try and trick you, honest!) and it’s what they do, it’s what we all did before we had all this technology.
However, when I was a young boy, despite doing those kinds of things, there were repercussions. I’d eventually get caught and I’d be in trouble when I got home. On Xbox LIVE, just like on the internet, there appears to be some strange lack of fear due to the relative anonymity a faceless console provides.
Again, I don’t blame the kids…I don’t really even blame Microsoft for not policing the service in the manner they claim to (this is my opinion, not the opinion of GodisaGeek on the whole), the blame has to lie in the hands of the parents.
Gaming as a hobby still seems to be frowned upon as something kids do in their bedrooms, whatever they are doing, they are doing together anyway, so who cares? It’s okay for 10 year old Billy to be playing Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty 19 (The Spacesex Wars) because all his mates are. If they are up there playing games, they aren’t mugging old ladies or having sex with some lass in a back alley with a fag in one hand and a can of strongbow in the other…right? Wrong!
Parents, pay attention to your kids, get involved, find out what they are doing on these consoles, show some damned interest in them and who they are conversing with whilst headshotting people from across the globe. While you are at it, check out what little Billy is posting about on the forums, you aren’t as anonymous as you think you are online and quite often, once it’s up there, it’s there forever.
Rant over, I’m off back to my private party chat where I can get called a homo pig raping vagina face by people I’ve chosen to hang out with and have facts and evidence to back up their claims. Oh yeah, and before anyone tells me, I know you can mute people, submit feedback, complain and everything else! 🙂
Have a great week everyone! 🙂
