As someone who is half German it was interesting to read this post on Joystiq by James Ransom-Wiley about how he couldn't get past the first five minutes of Call of Duty:World at War because of how the Japanese are depicted in the game.  That's certainly fine as we all have different tolerances for violence and the issue certainly seemed to hit home with him given his ancestry.  What really got my goat was that the fact that he then paints the Nazi's (and transitively all Germans) with the brush of pure evil but the Japanese (who committed nearly as horrible acts) get a free pass.

While no one in my family has direct ties to either World War (my great grandfather came to America before the start of WWI) I still feel some ties to my ancestry.  My family lived in Germany for a number of years and I've stood in the showers at Dachau and seen the horrors of a concentration first hand.  I've seen the monuments in Russia where the Nazi's wiped out entire villages and it's something that leaves an indelible mark on your soul.  It's something that we can't ever forget or allow to happen again.  For most Germans this is our cross to bear as there's not getting around it.

Personally I don't have a problem killing Nazi's in games like Call of Duty because I've abstracted them enough to realize it's just a game and that these are soldiers of an evil philosophy.  Not all Germans at the time were bad people and some fought actively against the Nazi party when and where they could (something that gets lost in all the WWII move and game plotlines).  If we really look at the mirror of history though it's not like we as American's were completely innocent (the fire bombing of Dresden comes to mind) of everything at the time.

Getting back to the point of this post it's a bit disturbing when you can paint one group as "evil" while another group is forgiven.  Especially based on comments like:

"I draw a disconnect between Nazis and Germans as large as the divide between "alien" and human. The Nazis have been transformed into monsters, which does not need to be justified in my gaming. But the Japanese Empire that bombed Pearl Harbor and the Japanese today, even Japanese-Americans, are very much intertwined in my perception. Those people are connected for me -- a part of me -- and I see them in World at War."

You have to wonder how much popular culture impacts a perception like this, if Saving Private Ryan was based in Iwo Jima would we still have the same perception of the Japanese?  They were just as ruthless as the Germans and Western culture is fairly ignorant of what the Japanese did to the Chinese during this period in time.  I'm not advocating that the Japanese were worse than the Germans at the time but we need to realize that there's a lot of history out there that hasn't made it's way into pop culture and that it's sometimes too easy to look the other way when it comes to personal history or things we are connected to.

Tucked away in the 2K Sports E3 media kit was this video showing off Rick Nash in a short skit.  It's a bit ESPN'ish but still fairly funny.

The Columbus Dispatch has printed my E3 summary article and you can find the online version here.  It's not perfect (probably could have talked about online video distribution but that trend started last year) but I think it turned out well.  

While flipping through albums on my Zune this week I re-discovered Queensryche's Operation Mindcrime.  The album just celebrated it's 20th anniversary and is considered to be one of the best metal albums of all time. 

What makes the album different is that the album tells a story and has been likened to a soundtrack without a movie.  Every few years I fire the album up and enjoy the musical mastery on the album and the album really holds up over time.  I had a bit of an epiphany driving home yesterday and realized that this would make an absolutely kick ass Rock Band download.  Between some blistering guitar solos ("Speak' and "I don't believe in Love") and drum sounds there's a ton of potential.  You could even do all the semi-cheesy voice over work as well.  I know that this will never happen but the world would be a much better place if it did.

John and I have both been having a lot of fun with the Pyro class in Team Fortress 2 lately so this vid hits a bit close to home

 

Found over on the 'Stiq

 

No John, this is not cool to do to your kid.... 

Dear EA,

I need to be able to pull this off in NHL 09

Thanks,

 ->Chuck

OK it looks like Cyril can take a victory lap around his apartment as this article backs up his arguments in my PS3/Blu Ray post.  Maybe we are looking at Laserdisc 2.0...

The Blu Ray player in the PS3 has caused Sony all kinds of grief.  From the added cost of the device or the shortage of Blu Ray parts which restricted supply in the early months of the system's release the Blu Ray player has been a bit of boondoggle for Sony.  Of course with Blu Ray movies continuing to outsell HD DVD movies by a margin of 2 to 1 it looks like that strategy seems to be paying dividends. 

I had an interesting conversation with my cousin over holiday dinner this year.  My cousin is a smart guy, he graduated from the the Air Force academy a few years back, has flown transport missions in and out of Bahgdad, and has just wrapped up a new degree at George Washington university.  He started asking questions about the PS3, not as a gaming machine but as a Blu Ray player.  Sure it was basic stuff but he wanted to know about the variety of movies, the extra features, and how you controlled the system.  For him the game playing was the icing on the cake as the ability to play Blu Ray movies was his mechanism for getting the PS3 past the wife.

We in the press sometimes miss some of the other arguments for getting a console and this was yet another eye opening example of how outsiders perceive the gaming market.  Sure he cared about playing games but his focus was on something other than whoc platform had the best exclusives and which platform was "winning" the race.

"This has way too many buttons" my sister said as she picked up my Xbox 360 controller.  "You've got a full keyboard [the chatpad], you've got these two buttons [triggers], these two buttons [bumpers], two joysticks, and these four buttons on the front".  My sister isn't the biggest gamer in the world but she and I did spend a lot of quality time on the Atari 2600 when we were growing up so here expressing such distress over Microsoft's Xbox 360 controller was a bit intereting.  I pointed out that she had missed the thumbpad and the fact that the joysticks could be pushed down for an additional button push which caused her to roll her eyes a bit.  Spying the Dualshock controller next on the end table she picked it up and repeated the fact that the controller just had way too many buttons for "normal" people to use.

This was a bit of a shock to me as my sister has a little bit of gamer cred (we both spent a lot of time with our Atari 2600 growing up and she played a mean game of Kaboom! back in the day) .I use both controllers on a nearly daily basis without any hesitance so this was something a bit unexpected.  While it pains me to admit it this does seem to lead some credence to Nintendo's philosophy of changing how people interact with the consoles.  Maybe we as hard core gamers need to realize that not everyone is used to the 10+ button controller and that the Wii and DS really are the way to bring in new gamers.  

We played a bit of Rock Band this weekend and that went over well.  After finally figuring out some of the timing issues we were rocking out in style with my sister and fiancee on lead guitar and bass respectively and myself banging away on the drums. This certainly re-enforces every tidbit I've read about the rise of casual gaming this year.  But the question is, do casual gamers become hard core gamers or does the road end once you get a Wii?  If it is a dead end then will the niche of hard core gamers get left behind in the race to bring new gamers into the fold or not.