Well, I wasn't exactly the flag waving type to begin with, nor am I now, but some people were even before September 11th. I wonder if these people feel about the trendinization of flags the same way I felt when South Park became trendy, or the PowerPuff Girls? Suddenly everyone's got the merchandise, and everyone has a sticker on their car, and is pretending like they were always into patriotism and freedom like a bunch of posers. How long before Patriot Pop-Tarts come out? Or Freedom Crunch Cereal?

So, in an M-rated game like... oh... let's say Max Payne, why is that that I can happen upon a hooker performing a blowjob on a drug-dealing mob boss, who is all the while going on about how he strangled two guys with a game controller cable, and then proceeed to blow them both away in a hail of bullets, but no one says "fuck". I mean, I run with a pretty non-mob-boss crowd, and they say bad words occasionally. It really says something when violence in games runs rampant, but an actual curse word or pair of bare breasts is practically unheard of.

On the other hand, I've just started on Ico, and that game really makes the case for a video game as art form. It realy comes together well in terms of having good art direction, music and gameplay. That rarely happens, unfortunately. Often times, games where I must protect other creatures leave me frustrated with their stupidity (Goddamn lemmings!), but the ephemeral princess in Ico at least has the excuse of being unfamiliar with the physical world. Plus, she's actually willing to exert a little effort.

More craigslist hilarity. I think this is the setup for a brilliant Chevy commercial.

Okay, the last three game manuals I've read have all contained spelling errors. Devil May Cry was the worst, they can't even be consistent about them, sometimes referring to an event which occured "two millenia" ago and other times referring to an event that occured "two milleniums" ago. Argh. Even in the voice-over! I admit, it was pretty funny back in the days of "A winner is you!" and "All your base are belong to us!" but these days, it just makes the game industry look stupid.

I know I don't actually proofread my site very much, but I'm just running a blog here, not publishing manuals for software. If a layperson like me can find these things without even trying very hard, then what are their proofreaders doing? Do they even have them? Are they trying to fondly recall the days of automatic Japenese-to-English generating humorously unintelligible statements? I don't know.

And furthermore, both Game Over and The First Quarter, two books published on the industry, are chock full of factual, grammatical, spelling, and format errors as well. How does anyone expect the game industry to be taken seriously if they can't even get an editor to look over their stuff once? I'd like to think this improves my chances, being someone who actually knows how to proofread and doesn't rely on spellchecker, but I think this just means that no one cares about spelling or grammar any more. The publishers don't, and the players don't, it's a vicious cycle.