The next next generation of gaming has now been announced. One comes with a fairly predictable name, the other seemingly the result of a drawn out cocaine bender in which the executives at Microsoft forgot they’d already released two consoles. To no one’s surprise both platforms see a fairly tight-knit release, battling it out to truly and ultimately fuck up our credit scores for the foreseeable future.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that, given the price points, you’ll be able to play all your old favourite PS3/360 titles on this new wave of electronic money shots… Yeah, you’d certainly think that.
Oh Xbox you Greedy Greedy Whore...
May 21st 2013, a day that will live in infamy for gamers on a budget much like yours truly. On that day, Xbox revealed its brand new system to the masses. The Xbox 3 err…Xbox One…but not the first Xbox which I used to call Xbox One. One by one business execs (who probably haven’t played a game since the first Super Mario Bros.) demonstrated all the new fancy do dads, bells and whistles and racing stripes of the Xbox One. Telling the audiences, “look see, you can now watch TV through your Xbox One gang”, and “Here is a DVR so you can now show your friends how much you suck at Battlefield through twitter”.
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In this episode of Luxmo our boy Luke Riley jets across the big blue and visits our other boys, Sully and McFalls in the great white north. They eat lots of food and drink lots of alcohol. They also take their vitamins and say their prayers. All of the above happen on this podcast.
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Luke Riley, Sully Fisher, and your host Lou Chou explore an x-rated, genital-centric side of Mordor, and also offer up alternative uses for Vicks Vaporub. Also, video games. Maybe. Possibly.
Anyone who read my article yesterday will know that our YouTube account, GamingBSUncut, was recently terminated. For details you can go here, but, long story short, YouTube turned the lights off, took its ban hammer, and inserted it sideways into our precious poop chutes. This makes two places GBS has been kicked out of now (you’re welcome, iTunes), and like a trouble kid who can’t hold down his place at school, once again we wander the streets of the internet. Well, very briefly anyway.
I’ve taken a bunch of our videos and uploaded them to my own channel, youtube.com/user/LouChouTube, I’m not going to say this’ll be our official YouTube channel.
So it happened. Out came the ban rifle and bang bang, down we went. While I’m sure only a small margin of you from our YouTube channel also visit the site, it’s better than nothing to address those few and at least give a handful of people some answers – perhaps you could even tell other people you know who visit about the situation.
Why we were banned is a question rattling around my brain. The actual nail in the ‘Tube coffin came via Part 4 of our Let’s Play: Rapelay series. This is perplexing, at least to me, because it was one of the more tame offerings we had created.
Getting hard means getting good
I get a real sense of satisfaction from overcoming challenging ordeals in games, despite the fact that they aren’t tangible accomplishments (as my CV will attest). Some people take it further and advocate playing under self-imposed restrictions, but I usually don’t find that as rewarding unless there’s a goal to work towards. It can be something as simple as an achievement or a trophy – just the acknowledgement that what I’m doing is something the people behind the game put some thought into.
Ultimately, I think there’s a limit to how tough a game can be. When you boil down single player and co-operative experiences to their base elements they are essentially puzzles, with players trying to figure out the solution that will allow them to progress.
