Tag Archives: new york times

Hopefully this’ll be the last word on the subject. The New York Times is the latest in a string of publications to say that Resident Evil 5 isn’t racist. Please let this be the end of it.

Let’s get this out of the way: Resident Evil 5 is not a racist game.

For at least a year some black journalists have been wringing their hands about whether the game, the latest in the seminal survival-horror series, inflames racist stereotypes because it is set in Africa. The answer is no…

So Resident Evil 5 exposes the perhaps uncomfortable truth that blacks and Arabs can become zombies too, just like anyone else. Blacks and Arabs do not have a secret anti-zombie gene. And just like all the thousands of white, Asian and Hispanic zombies that have been dispatched in innumerable other games before them, the African zombies must also be destroyed, or at least neutralized.

That it? Really? Get a lot more words through the link.

There’s a good article on the New York Times on the themes of Metal Gear Solid 4. It never reaches any conclusion, obviously.

Is the Sisyphean mission of Solid Snake — to rid the world of a robotic nuclear tank called Metal Gear — a parable about the futility of war or about its necessity? A critique of America’s domination of the global stage? A metaphor for the struggle between determinism and free will? If the creator of the Metal Gear Solid series, Hideo Kojima, has answers to these questions, he isn’t telling.

Have a read.

The New York Times recently interviewed Nintendo supremo Shigeru Miyamoto and called him the “Walt Disney of digital generation.”

“What’s important is that the people that I work with are also recognized and that it’s the Nintendo brand that goes forward and continues to become strong and popular,” said Miyamoto when confronted with the comparison.

“And if people are going to consider the Nintendo brand as being on the same level as the Disney brand, that’s very flattering and makes me happy to hear,” he added.

Quite a good interview, we think. Full thing through the link.

By Mike Bowden

“Hard-core gamers and the old-school critics who represent them are becoming an ever smaller part” of a ballooning games audience, the New York Times say in this editorial, citing recent NPD figures and “the soaring popularity of mass-market franchises like Guitar Hero and the Wii at the expense of critically acclaimed projects aimed at the same young-male audience the industry has relied on for years” as the death knell for gaming’s traditional audience.

Games like Bioshock, Mass Effect and Orange Box all failed to make the US top 10 for the year, the piece points out, despite achieving high Metacritic scores, while titles like Mario Party 8 and Wii Play, both derided by “traditional reviewers”, made the cut.

It’s interesting stuff. Good enough for a Friday night, anyway.

Via Joystiq.