Welcome to show 130.
This week it is just The Daddy and Duke as Chinny is a bit poorly! That being said, the show must go on, and The Daddy finished up The Darkness 2, played Band Together on the iPad and talked about all the PC games played at the first ever Veteran Gamers meet-up, Duke played mostly the Dawnguard DLC and has maybe, finally overdosed on Skyrim.
VlaDOS gave us the new Penny Arcade game to play and we also had some in depth discussion regarding the whole Tomb Raider Rape comments fiasco.
We round out the show with emails and Facebook comments.
Enjoy!
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Gamertags
Chinny – 360 ChinChinny, PS3 Chinny1985,
The Daddy – 360 Big Daddy Blast, PS3 xXBig-DaddyXx
Duke – 360 Dukeskath, PS3 Dukeskath
Category: 
fantastic debate on the rape part in the new lara croft game.
Here’s the thing.. its been done in movie’s to great effect many times. surely it can cross over and have an impact in a game? the one that stands out for me is the film true romance.
The danger, I think, is that it so easily becomes just one more link in the chain fence of rape culture.. Like “Oh, here’s a vulnerable woman, she’ll nearly get raped at some point in the game.” Of course it can be done to show something important about a story, but it usually feels like a simplistic plot device.
I agree, it’s a sloppy plot device. Why does a woman have to be raped before she has an excuse to be tough? As a female this sort of thing puts me off, be it in a game or a film. If it’s done well and it’s not salacious, fair enough, because it happens and it’s devastating. But I can think of more bad portrayals than good It’s much too sensitive and emotive a subject to mess around with. Given that Lara Croft already has a reputation for being every teenage boy gamer’s wet dream I have serious misgivings on how this is going to be shown. That the PR machine is already back peddling does not bode well. And does the ‘gaming leads to violence’ brigade really need any more ammo?
Agreed it was a great debate but there where a few things out of context in the argument
The response from the guy high up in the company saying that the dev who mentioned there was an attempted rape in the game came as a response only a day or two after the initial comment, its wasn’t as if they waited until there was a massive backlash before distancing themselves from the comment, they acted as fast as could have been expected.
They have already stated that the “Rape Scene” has already been shown and it isn’t taken any further than gameplay videos already out there (which sexual assault is implied in but there is nothing graphic – Heavy rain was far more graphic in this regard therefore i think that this is a whole lot of fuss over nothing but it was a point we where always going to get to sooner or later and a debate that needs to take place but maybe over a more severe case than the one shown)
When the dev talked about wanting to protect Lara he might have meant to express that as the players character not because she is a woman (i was doing a presentation about how violence in video games is represented in the media and i came across a study that indicated that the players heart rate hit its peak when the players character was in danger/dying – this may have been what he was trying to express that the situations that the character was placed in during the game is more extreme than normal and therefore more likely to be an intense experience for the player, if he thats what he meant he expressed it poorly but he isn’t a PR guy he is just a dev i will give him the benefit of the doubt)
On another note i built a gaming rig recently (saved about £100 over retail PC of same specs so worth it, but took me like 2 weeks of research and shopping around to be able to Build/Know what the hell would be appropriate for my needs/understand what the specs meant. so its a substantial time investment) mine cost £600 plays Battlefield 3 on High settings at around 50 frames per second (Ultra highest but high is close enough for me to be happy), basically anything over £800-1000 and its a waste of money any more and you either need to run multiple displays or are spending more than necessary for any game currently out, that PC on the podcast has far more power than current software can ever take advantage of, it will be 10 years before software is optimised for anything approaching that sort of power. (To put it in perspective it has twice the RAM of my system and four 2GB graphics cards whereas mine has One 1Gb graphics card and mine performs well on BF3 and max Settings on most other games)
p.s. Battlefield 3 Looks amazing on PC i played the console version a lot but the PC version destroys the Textures are MUCH sharper and i know its sad but my god the particle effects are nice (has to be seen to be appreciate the difference) one note on the BF3 maps is that the console maps really aren’t much smaller at all the only difference is that the spawn points are taken in a bit on the Larger maps thats all really , its only on visuals and number of players the consoles are getting left behind really
p.p.s. If anyone is buying a PC and needs help on what means what i will be happy to give some help i’m no expert but know enough for a tip or two
watching the scene i didnt think wow lara croft could get naked here. i just thought o my god how is she going to get out of this predicament.
I haven’t seen it, and didn’t realise it was out there already in its entirety. That makes me feel much better. Also, I trust your judgement on this Andrew so if you say it’s not salacious that’s good enough for me, on that point at least. As for whether it needed to be included at all, we’ll just have to wait until the game comes out to view it in context.