Alright, it's been a while but we're back again to cover the PC Gaming Show, the Xbox Showcase and the Ubisoft Forward. After this, that's it, that's all, we're done here. PC Gaming Show The Most Questionable Stuff 3. Road to Vostok (???) Choosing to look down on a game for overt familiarity from the word ‘go’, even if all it has done at this point is have its existence announced to the world, is not inherently an act to be proud of. Much of gaming iterates and builds upon what came before, much of the medium as it stands (for good or ill) exists because someone looked at a past work and were inspired to develop their own take on the material. How many excellent games would cease to be if people decided that “it’s just a clone of X” was a valid argument in itself? I establish this now to make it clear that I do not roll my eyes at Road to Vostok for taking the form of a sparsely-populated shooter set in a post-apocalyptic wilderness area… but rather because it loo
Today I’m debuting our first of several on-going segments - A Look Back, where I… well, take a look back, duh. Specifically, we’re gonna be discussing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. For starters let’s get into what kind of world we were living in when Modern Warfare exploded onto the scene. We were four years into the War on Terror, and six years out from 9/11. Two world changing events whose ramifications and influence crept their way into every aspect of culture - film, television, literature, comic books, and yes, VIDEO GAMES. War and its particular brand of brutal violence became a sort of norm, rather than a niche interest, in the world of gaming. You couldn’t throw a stone five inches without hitting a game about MASCULINE, OLD FASHIONED AMERICAN MEN FIGHTIN’ THE GOOD FIGHT AGAINST THE FOREIGN AGENDA. Even if the games weren’t necessarily set on Earth or fixated on stereotypical images of terrorists, the imagery and themes on display - ranging from widespread urban destru