What should have been a Wednesday episode is now available here.
The cast is several shades of livid about the theatrical adaptation of Max Payne. How it happened that Max has moved from an unapologetic revenge tale known for stellar gunplay and justifiable homicide to something so ponderous and uptight is well beyond us. This is hardly the first time we’ve seen Hollywood drain the blood from a compelling game world, and you might say our best defense against disappointment is to expect this treatment at every turn; to accept corruption as the default state of affairs. You may well be right, but Max Payne’s tragedy should muster a sense of rage from someone, and if it can’t be from the man in question then we can damn well provide it from the gallery.
We’re also pretty grouchy about…whatever it is we managed to focus on during the second half of our program. Microsoft is toying with technology that will allow real-time censoring of objectionable content over Live’s voice service. We’re not terribly sore about MS censorship, but we expect that something like this, if implemented, wouldn’t work to any useful degree, and would more likely degrade the general experience. The additional point is that, to us, objectionable content is far less about dirty words (of which we’re quite fond) than it is about the people themselves – people responsible for the kind of ingenious douchebaggery that technology cannot selectively repress. We’re unable to segregate ourselves online with the same degree of finesse and reliability as in the world, and sometimes the existing solutions feel woefully inadequate.
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One reply on “The Minimum Payne Episode”
The day one can reach through the headset and smack the douchebag on the other end will be one of the happiest (and funniest) in gaming history.
I haven’t heard if this will be optional, though I would hope that it would be (much like text censoring in WoW, which I always disabled), or else Microsoft is playing Big Brother in a big way. My favourite scenario was the one outlined on the Giant Bombcast, where not only can you choose whether or not to censor, but what to censor, allowing for hundreds of comedic possibilities.
Jason in Calgary