Information Regarding DmC: Devil May Cry: An Update

(Originally posted for The Voice of Heard on August 27, 2011)

Since posting my last entry on DmC: Devil May Cry, a reboot for Capcom’s popular video game franchise being developed by Ninja Theory, I did a little more web surfing for additional information; some bits of which I may have known earlier but haven’t posted yet; and others that I haven’t known before or wasn’t aware of at the time I wrote the entry. After doing a little more research, I have found some more of the said information regarding DmC: Devil May Cry.

The Devil May Cry Reboot: The Backlash and A Potential Failure for a Video Game Franchise

(Originally posted for The Voice of Heard on August 22, 2011)

This is the logo when the original Devil May Cry was released in 2001.

Left: Dante in Devil May Cry 4. Right: Dante in DmC: Devil May Cry promotional art.

If you have read my entry on journalism, then you may be familiar with the reboot of Capcom’s video game franchise Devil May Cry and the backlash it is receiving from fans for the changes being made under the Western developer Ninja Theory. Before I discuss the issue with the reboot in more detail, I will give a brief history of the past Devil May Cry games.

The Televised Video-Gamer Stereotype: The Inaccurate Portrayal It Really Is

(Originally posted at The Voice of Heard on July 16, 2011)

Are you familiar with the video game player stereotype? The one portrayed on TV as a lazy, couch potato who spends most of his/her life in a dark basement playing video games for many hours at a time and who is uninterested in other people? As a gamer myself, I find such portrayals as inaccurate in terms of what they do and offensive in terms of who they are as human beings who just happen to play video games as a hobby and a past time. In my old blog, I have covered this issue on a number of occasions, including the ones below:

My Review of Grand Theft Childhood

Perverseness, Obesity, and Depression: Just A Few More Forms of Negative Stereotyping of Video Gamers

I have decided to write this because I just came across a 1up feature called Why Television Hates Video Games, which covers the whole issue of stereotyping video game players on television shows, as well as portraying the video games themselves, console and otherwise, in technically inaccurate ways. News stories regarding the “risk” children face when they play their PlayStation Portables (PSPs) and Nintendo DSs (Duel Screens) are also discussed. The feature can be found here. On another note, I have also covered other issues regarding video games as featured in some news stories, which I will discuss as part of my next feature.

Old Video Game Posts from The Voice of Heard

More than a month ago, I received a notification from WCCA TV13, the local TV station that launched the start of my blogging, requesting that my original blog, The Voice of Heard, be removed from their hosting services since it was not being updated. Upon reading it, I immediately copied and pasted all of my published posts going back to early 2011 as Word documents. In the process, I decided it would be best to re-post some of them in my other blogs; in the case of Cyberjack, all of the posts I've done on video games, with comments included for the sake of completion. With a few edits, image replacements, and link fixes, these posts from The Voice of Heard will be released in a couple of days under the label 'The Voice of Heard (old posts)'. Stay tuned!

I am not Bill Gates: The Misleading Economic Myth of the Asperger's Engineer

After finding a desire to have a career in video games less than four years ago, I enrolled in a game development curriculum offered by Becker College in the Fall of 2013. Two and a half years later, I graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Game Design and attended the commencement ceremony as a formality around five months later. During that time, I have gained valuable insights in the process of game production, development, and design; I became aware of the various software programs involved in those processes ranging from illustration programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to game development programs such as GameMaker: Studio, Unity, and Unreal. More importantly, I have acquired enough general know-how to make my own games while also exploring additional options that would make some of my ideas possible. My learning experience was and continues to be invaluable but it was not without hurdles that were compounded by my Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism which impairs my abilities to communicate and socialize while also causing me to process information differently from normal people.

Political, Social, and Moral Ideology vs. the Video Game Industry and Community

From top-left to bottom right: Jack Thompson , Leland Yee, Ronnie Lamb, Anita Sarkeesian, and  Joseph Lieberman 

I'll start off by saying I am completely open to diversity in video games. Depending on the quality, I'm willing to play any game made in North America, Japan, Europe, and even Africa. During my years as a gamer, I have enjoyed playing a number of genres, including First-Person Shooters (FPS), Role Playing Games (RPGs), Beat'em-Ups, fighting games, hack-and-slash action, survival horror, platformers, turn-based strategies, real-time strategies, and the occasional point-and-click adventure. In those games, I've played the role of a variety of characters ranging from cyber-enhanced supersoldiers and supernaturally augmented demon hunters to medieval knights and ordinary people in bizarre circumstances. Overall, I've had a blast with them regardless of their gender, race, creed, and nationality. And I'm willing to spend my hard-earned money on more diverse games as long as they are well-made, well-designed, and deemed to be overall fun. In all the time I've spent playing video games, I have never developed any thoughts of committing suicide, sexual assaults, or public shooting sprees in any way; for that matter, my sense of reality and morality has never diminished and never will. Yet, this is exactly what's been implied by over-protective parents, politicians, social scientists, and pop culture critics when they bring video games into the mass media spotlight and propose various forms of legal restrictions, content regulation, and implementing their agenda in the development and production process based mainly on misinformation and cultural bias.

When will there actually be good video game movies?

Ever since Super Mario Bros. and Double Dragon received Hollywood film adaptations that met with financial flops and critical scorn, video game movies have a reputation of being inferior to the video game source materials on which they are based with very few to no exceptions. Fans who are most familiar with that sort of reputation are sure to remember how the first Mortal Kombat movie tipped the tides of video games movies a little bit, how the Resident Evil films managed to get away with profits in spite of numerous negative reviews among critics and fans, and how Uwe Boll's filmography of House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and Bloodrayne left the foulest of tastes in the mouths of audiences who have seen them. Such movies were so bad that numerous top 10 lists have been made to determine the worst of the worst, like what WatchMojo and GameTrailers did for their lists. So why do movies based on video games tend to suck?