andPOP - Pop Culture With Substance

While Kanye West may have claimed to Jay Leno to be keeping a low profile on things after his Taylor Swift-MTV Video Music Awards debacle, the new video clip he posted on his blog begs to differ.

The promo video released on Wednesday, Sept. 23 for his new “Fame Kills” tour with Lady Gaga is anything but low profile, according to MTV News.

The video clip, posted by West under the headline, “What Happened to All the Rock Stars? Fame Killed Them!” is a slow motion film featuring a topless Gaga covering herself and wrapped in the arms of a black man while soft, moody music plays in the background. When 30 seconds of this pass, the name of the tour appears on the screen along with a voice that says, “Fame Kills!” and then “West + Gaga” flashes across.

West first made an announcement about the tour earlier this summer at an appearance on “The View,” but it wasn’t a sealed deal until last week. The “Fame Kills” tour is set to begin on Nov. 10 in Phoenix and wrap up Jan. 24 in Dallas.

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Spider-Man has an equal opportunity costume in Web of Shadows.

Ok, so for the past week or so I’ve been on a Spider-Man: Web of Shadows binge.  Nothing but web-slinging through New York, symbiotes and ass-kickery.  It has been awesome – definitely the best “comic-book superhero” game I’ve played in some time, if not ever (I wasn’t going to include comic-book just now, but then I remembered inFAMOUS and Prototype).  So that got me thinking how many bad superhero games I’ve played. That got me thinking about how much worse those games could have been if they were about even crappier superheroes – I mean, even Spider-Man 3 had Spider-Man in it, right? So, with that in mind, I’d like to present:

5 Superheroes That Should Never Be in Video Games

*disclaimer – if a game has already been made that should contain one of these characters, then there’s no need to mention it – the damage has been done. READ MORE »

This past week on Penn and teller’s show, “Penn and Teller: Bullsh*t” they tackled the topic of video games, and namely video game violence. Now, I’ve dabbled in my own research dissecting violence in video games and their effect on the youth from a strictly ethical point of view (no psychology or any other brain rape involved) and it all came down to a small number of children not being able to tell the difference between real life and fantasy… Either that or negligent parents who provide their kids with M rated games at the age of 10 (more on this later).

In this episode, Penn and Teller (I still don’t understand why a show that revolves around debate and speech has half their talent being a mute) talk about the huge amounts of revenue flowing in from video games, the wave of violent crimes depicting video game copying and those deemed to stop them (Jack Thompson, Hillary Clinton, and some guy with a balding pony tail) but also take the reverse approach and provide a 9 year old gamer with a real assault rifle… how can it go wrong? The 28 minute video begins by making a strong comparison, video game violence to us is like three stooges violence to our parents, makes sense already doesn’t it? With every generation there comes a form of entertainment (or violence) the generation before doesn’t quite understand, while three stooges rarely ever dealt with guns or murder, I peg this as just the progression of the times, desensitization from the news, and newer technologies taking precedence. READ MORE »

This is the summer of the Fighting game!! YES it IS!!
So today I will be going over some of the new releases in the last four months or so, and give you reasons to pick up a controller and knock the other guy out.

And if none of the new releases tickle your fancy, then I have got a list of old greats that are sure to keep the fighting spirit ALIVE!!!! SO BROTHA LETS GET THIS STARTED!!!

In the last little while we have had some old franchises return, some new updates, and some classics sent our way. In fact, if I can honestly count the number of hours I have spent playing a fighting game this year; it would rival if not beat the combined total amount of time I have spent sleeping last year. THAT’S A FACT! READ MORE »

Now, I’m just gonna start typing and see where it takes me. This is a free for all blog rant and I have no intentions of a specific topic this week.

I just stared at my computer screen for five minutes… this isn’t going to work.

I like video games, I like them alot. Not to a point where I would rather sit down on a weekend evening and play instead of being social… but a few titles out there have gotten me close to that point. I also play a lot of games, one of the perks to this job is that playing games and reading about gaming news is part of my job description! So this past week I went to my local EB games to trade in a few titles and pick up something new, I must have spent a good 45 minutes looking through the Xbox 360 used section, new section, PS3 used section, new section, Wii used section, new section, DS used, new, PSP used, new (as you can tell, I try to save some cash where I can) and after going through every one of these sections, I didn’t really see any titles I would be willing to spend the cash on! READ MORE »

What’s your favourite game? I know, it’s a tough question to answer for some of us, and a question I get asked almost every time I have an interview regarding any form of game related activities. In fact, it’s such a difficult question for me to answer that I often ask people I interview for andPOP positions just to watch them squirm as much as I do when I have to come up with a quick meaningful response. Do you base your answer on memory? What’s popular at the time? Do you want to sound sophisticated so you refer to some obscure art title? What if the game you say is your favourite turns out to be a personal worst for the person asking you? With such a simple question comes so much drama, and to a point, it gets a little ridiculous.

Personally I would probably have to say my all time favourite video game would have to be Punch Out for the original Nintendo… or Final Fantasy 7 for the Playstation… or Metal Gear Solid for the Playstation… or General Chaos for the Sega Genesis… or the latest Smash Bros title. At least I can narrow down my choices to my top five favourites of all time. Why did these become my favourites? READ MORE »

Alright!! It’s Friday!! And you don’t care what you read at work as long as the day goes by real quick, am I right?

Well from now on every Friday I’ll be ranting about video games and I’ll try and tackle key issues surrounding our industry as well providing you with some heavily opinionated takes on different games.

So then, today I’ll be taking a closer look at what I think is the most value I have gotten out of a game since F-Zero GX…

BURNOUT PARADISE!

Its sort of funny now that we look at the current next gen racers, a number of  years ago we had so few big budgeted racers to pick from. Aside from the Project Gotham Racing and GT series gamers who wanted a causal and very arcade foray into racing had nothing but the Need for Speed and Midnight Club series.  And I won’t be counting all the wonderful kart racers or fantastic Futuristic racers here. READ MORE »

CHEATS – The Gamer’s Moral Compass

Up, Up, Down, Down, Up, Up, Up, Up.  And all of a sudden, I can level select in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 on my Sega Genesis.  So what if I don’t earn my way to the Ice Cap Zone?  I’ve played this game 50 times already – it’s been done.  But you’d never catch me sprinting through GoldenEye or Quake with God Mode on – ruins the game for me.  So my cheating in games is based on convenience and sportsmanship (after a fashion).   But am I the rule, or the exception to it?

Cheats and secrets have been around in games since 8-bit systems.  I really wouldn’t be surprised if there was a cheat to make your Pong paddle bigger (and I’m not referencing the herbal medicine junk email we get every day).  Back on the Genesis and NES/SNES, we had Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat codes to unlock characters, and Battletoads, Sonic and many other codes for level selection.  Later, on platforms like the N64, Playstation and PS2, codes became a way to unlock secret features of the game, features that you couldn’t unlock without the codes.  A great example of this is Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for the N64, which had a code to unlock the Naboo starfighter from Episode I.  However, LucasArts only released the code after the movie had been released in theatres – so noone was unlocking that baby by accident a few days before opening weekend at the box office.  Cheats and secrets are still a big part of games, but as the core gamer demographic grows out of the desire for codes (and more importantly, grows out of hard-core gaming into casual gaming), these become more rewards than hustles.

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Hey andPOPpers, Josh again with my weekly ranting. This week’s topic, how do you play video games? What is your ideal setup? How long is a good gaming session for you? When I play, it all depends on the mood I’m in, what kind of game it is, and what happened earlier in the day. If I’m having a crappy day, bad traffic, annoying people, and I’m just in a downright foul mood, I like to cause some havoc. Take my anger out on virtual citizens of a cyber world. I may go home, crack open a nice frosty coke, plop on the couch and pop in some Horde mode of Gears of War 2 and just slaughter alien scum for a good hour or two. If I’m awake and relatively bored I might go back to my old MMORPG ways and play some online final fantasy 11 (either on my PC or Xbox depending on the mood) and slash 3 to 4 hours off my day. When the mood strikes and I feel like watching a movie but want that interactive vibe to it, I would usually play some good, theatrical, and beautiful Metal Gear Solid 4, pop in my Jabra earpiece (that came with Warhawk for PS3) and play with that much more involvement… and yes, if I want to be 100% in the game, I may even toss on my eye patch every now and then. READ MORE »

Hey andPOPpers, Josh here again and today, I think I’ll rant about the big news of the month, E3. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, the biggest North American video game trade show came and went, and with it, a slew of previews we all expected to see as well as a few big surprises came our way. While I was unable to attend this year, I watched from the comfort of my couch and desk as the news rolled in, and while I got excited for what’s coming our way I couldn’t help but get a little disappointed that while the people there had to deal with crowds, line-ups and costs, they would ultimately be the ones to say they played these games a year or even more before they came out.

So for the past week I’ve been watching the live E3 press releases of the big three: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft; and I must say, for the most part I was surprisingly impressed with what was announced and shown at these press conferences. READ MORE »