Simulate the simulation
The other day on the TeeVee, I saw a commercial for a video game that simulated paint ball. It had a paint ball gun that you pointed at the TeeVee to shoot other paint ballers (no, it did not fire paint balls). I found it odd because paint ball is supposed to simulate playing war or cops & robbers or whatever. Now, we have simulations of our simulations. Strange. Or maybe we have to simulate simulating stuff because if they made a first person shooter for kids (the obvious target of the game) that was based on war or cops & robbers and actually featured shooting simulated people as opposed to simulated paint ballers, some soccer mom somewhere would shit her pants.
I want The A-Team first person shooter game. No matter how many times you fire your gun, you can’t hit anyone. But you always manage to affect the environment in such a way as to stop the bad guy, who is later seen knocking the dust off himself while coming out of an overturned a car or a wall you knocked onto him so that you know that he survived. Then the police come and take them away and you escape. And you learn the valuable lesson that unions are evil and union busting is good.
December 21st, 2005 at 2:39 pm
I’ve seen at least one paintball game for the XBox .. I thought about getting it because it looked fun..
Judging from the screen captures on the back it looked like the game tried to represent the more obstacle/point-based aspects of paintball games, as opposed to the “just kill the other guy” aspect of other FPS games where the only obstacle is .. getting killed.
December 21st, 2005 at 5:24 pm
I’m reminded of the one futurama visual gag of being at an arcade and having in a row: skeeball, virtual skee-ball (someone wearing VR helmet and gloves and going through the motions of playing skee-ball), and virtual virtual skeball (someone wearing VR helmet while siting on a chair).
December 21st, 2005 at 9:02 pm
Damn, you have to talk to some game developers, now I want the “A-Team Game” for Christmas!
December 21st, 2005 at 11:37 pm
Ah, Futurama. I heard rumors it’s coming back!
December 28th, 2005 at 3:56 pm
As a paintballer, I can say that paintball nowdays (and especially the speedball variety as portrayed in the video games) has as much to do with cops and robbers or war as Chess does. Sure, it started out with that goal, but it has its own peculiarities. That is why soldiers and cops generally suck at paintball, especially at first. Paintball has a lot of sacrifical and high-risk moves that you would never try if you went to the hospital or the morgue for trying them out.
warrior + Paintball == pwnd