Recent content by Gearoid Reidy

The League of Cyber Nations KM: Cyber Nations is funded through donations and through Google Ads that display on the site. I've received offers from companies wanting to display banner ads and pop-ups on the site, but I've declined all their offers. I just don't want to clutter up my website...

gcason - that's an excellent list. Another addition (and I forgot this myself) was the fuss about Pokemon and other trading card games causing murders on school playgrounds, or turning our children into Nazis and/or psychos. Fortunately, I think just about every moral panic for the last decade...

Cheeze_Pavilion - I would think your example, while valid, is more related to political correctness gone mad than our sensitivity to violence. But sure, they don't make cartoons like Tom and Jerry anymore, do they? On the other hand, prime time TV, for example, is far more violent than I ever...

Kid, You Shouldn't Be In Pictures The announcement last week of a movie based on The Sims [http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=25353] was greeted with understandable puzzlement by the gaming community. Games with almost no story whatsoever - like House of the Dead or Doom -...

Review: Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings Revenant Wings had two things against it to begin with: the fact it had disguised itself as an RPG in order to sneak into my DS, and that it is initially similar to the last Square-Enix DS effort I played, the execrable Children of Mana. Children of...

Let me clear a few things up. First of all, any suggestion that government regulation is what is needed was mistakenly inferred, and not implied. And although I am not in favour of government regulation of games content, please do bear in mind that not everyone reading or writing on the...

Knowing Your Enemy "Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherf---er in the world," goes a line in Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash. "If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for...

The Mother of Reinvention I didn't think I would live to see the day the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could dare to show their faces in public again. The bankruptcy of ideas in Hollywood has finally caught pace with my childhood, and at the rate remakes are currently happening, 2008's big...

Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village I fancy myself as a natural gamer ? I can pick and play pretty much anything going and be cruising after five minutes. Work out how to get that coin on the mountain? No problem. How to get in, grab the key, shoot everybody moving and escape alive...

Tellingly, the most popular Japanese social networking site has a category for just that. There's also a game-related TV channel (if memory serves, it has a lot of information about Pachinko too, though).

Incidentally, here's the link to the original article that got cut off: http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/2010.html

It's a bit sad that we have to think of well-written dialogue as a bonus rather than a given, but your point is definitely valid. 24? Well, I rarely expect competency from a licensed game, much less anything revolutionary, so I wasn't really surprised.

What?s the Story? Just under a year ago I wrote my first article for The Escapist, bemoaning the state of story, character and dialogue in gaming, elements almost invariably relegated to the nether regions of planning, somewhere between settling on the audio effects for blood squelching and...

Guns. Not So Many Guns. Futurism is a dangerous science, but here?s an interesting experiment at Pointless Waste of Time ? the 12 best games of 2010. While the list is an admirable attempt to expand the imaginations of developers, it does raise some questions about what we really want from...

Yakuza 2: Enter the Dragons (*) If there?s one label that?s misplaced in gaming, it?s "mature." There is nothing so deeply ironic as gamers wishing a given console had more "mature" games like Grand Theft Auto or Devil May Cry, titles which would be considered at best adolescent in any...