Tag Archives: kill

The lust to kill

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It’s been in my mind since I was around twelve years old, that one particular question came to my mind again, again and again. How would it be to murder a human being?

A lot of people might come up here and yell, that this is pervert thinking or that I my mind is freaked out. But I personally believe that everyone feels the lust or at least an interest to murder someone. There’s no doubt that man always enjoys the feeling to have the ability to control another one or is able to influence one to satisfy ones personal needs. Even the ubersocial crowd tends to be completely non-sociable when they get the possibility to gain the lead and as an result of this the control of someone else.

Humans in groups always tend to create some kind of an hierarchy and nevertheless they are not far from abusing their abilities depending on their role in the group. Or their capabilities in thinking. It’s nature’s law that the stronger one kills the weak one. With evolution, the development of the human brain and ethical values man lost the awareness of this particular law. Which is good, otherwise mankind would have been already erased from this planet and some other species would have taken place.

The recently mentioned ethical values are one of the main reasons why most of today’s common people even deny to think about murdering someone else. Most of them don’t waste a single moment to even try to imagine, how it would be. When you try to talk with someone about this topic, you’ll get a view with eyes of spotting on you fulfilled with many question marks.

For instance, a lot of people, especially those who raise children have a weird and strange tendency to become murderers or see murder as something to correct failure behaviour in this world. I’m talking about pedophilia. A lot of parents or other people with straight and fixed “correct” ethical values defend death sentence and want it back when it comes to judge pedophiles. This is, for me, like burying the trash as deep as you could under ground just to keep it out of sight.

...Murder in the Dark...

Man denies to watch the beast right into the eyes. Man prefers to stab it from the back and shovels it somewhere not to be found. Those who face the beast keeping their ethical values are the ones who can get a neutral point of view and measure murder with all its consequences in a correct matter. The small group of people who gets overwhelmed by the beast are the ones who finally tend to truly murder.

With this said in a exaggerated metaphorical way I personally come to the conclusion, that everyone can be a murderer. Without a doubt, murder is caused due to a chain of different events and circumstances that finally channels. You can’t measure murder by putting one tag of a reason on it. You always have to count and seek every single part of the puzzle to understand why it has come to this item.

According to this, the complexity preexistence, I also tend to say that everyone can be a murderer. Maybe it’s also a lack of intelligence that some people cannot even image how it would to kill somebody else. This intelligence barrier is quite good, because stupidity always leads to disease.

For a very long time did I think that this aversion against the imagination of the act of murder is something instinctive. This would come in contradiction to nature’s law and its methods to keep balance within a species and between several species. It’s more a result of the way we grew up and the values our  parents gave us we’d to live by every day. Also a thing of society and nowadays the media. Mass media has such a giant influence on people’s view on certain thing. Just compare people’s ethical values in Europe and the USA as to violence, murder, usage of weapons and torture.

The USA teaches their people that dismemberment and such things are normal, even war. On the other hand, they pretend that a nude body, women’s breasts are worst thing. You should not even speak about it. It’s the complete opposite in Europe. We take the human body as naturally given and have to shame to show it or to watch it. We consider violence, dismemberment, murder as wrong and that is what it totally is – wrong. From an ethical point of view and when it has nothing in common with the balance keep of one particular species.

Man has developed too much to follow these animalistic values anymore. Man prefers not to kill the weak ones. Man prefers to kill the different ones. But these are things you have to argue with on a much larger scale, when it comes to things like genocide. And still, what about the single human being?

The bar’s set much higher to murder someone in a “small environment” than it is to kill thousands of people. Is it, because swarm intelligence only works out on the lowest level? Like “good” mass media does? Keeping the standards low that everyone can understand and take part of the big discussion? Being part of the game?

Man likes to see masses get killed but denies to imagine to kill a single human being. Even when man has the ability to stab it from the back.

Game of the week #8/2011 – Amnesia – The Dark Descent

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After games have left the uncanny valley, talking about scary does not always mean the horrible graphics, nowadays it can also mean that the game itself and his whole plot and story is scary and frightening. In the early nineties there were games like “Alone in the dark” that scared gamers to the bones. Nothing really was able to follow up this game and the first real horror game that can remember again was the ingenious “Clive Barker’s Undying”. Based on Unreal Engine I the look of the game still was almost artificial, but it was well scripted and was definitely able to give you the creeps. There were lots and lots of bloody and gore rich games in the late nineties and early new millenium years but nothing with a subtile horror feel. Even though games like “F.E.A.R.” and “Dead Space” are scary and claustrophic as well, in my personal opinion, they are still gory action games with a few frightening moments. The only game that had this special horror touch was “Silent Hill”, but it was stuck in the previously mentioned uncanny valley. If you really want to feel a cold chill floating down your back and shaking every single bone of your spine you should, no, you MUST play “Amnesia – The Dark Descent”.

First thing that I really like about this game, you cannot fight, you can only run away. But let’s start at the very beginning, you wake up in a probably abandoned castle and you don’t even know how you got there. You suffer from amnesia, only your name, Daniel, and after finding a note you get to know that your memory was erased with intent and that you’re the chosen one to kill someone in this castle. During the exploration of the castle you’ll find more and more hints that make you come to several conclusions why you are here. Needless to say, that there are lots and lots of bone chilling moments while wandering deeper and deeper through the halls and floors of this mysterious castle.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1nY_5-UrY4[/youtube]

Like I mentioned before, you cannot fight in this game. You have no real weapons. You can only run away and hide. Another important thing is, that you have to keep an eye on your health status. A rapidly beating heart is everything else than helpfull and also your brain might play some tricks on you. Did I already mention, that Daniel is afraid of the dark? As you can see, lots of elements that are actually needed to give you a nice and intense horror feeling with a nice dash of claustrophobia. I wasn’t actually able to play this game longer than thirty minutes because I found it too scary. Mostly played at the dark hours and home alone. Which is not a good idea, well, in this case it is.

The presentation of the game is up to date. Based on Unreal Engine III you’ll barely have anything to complain about and the level design is done perfectly as well. You’ll also find some nice physics elements which leads to the grade of realism that was missed in the horror genre for such a long time. I missed that aspect personally. So if you’re tired of being a nearly immortal super soldier fighting hordes of monster in the dark with oversized weapons, you should, no, you MUST play “Amnesia – The Dark Descent”. It’s worth every minute of play, because it’s very intense and of course something different in these days of stereotype game mass production.

Game of the week #7/2011 – Bulletstorm

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Yes, time for stuff. It does not happen very often that a videogame makes me laugh out loud and manifests a solid smile in my face while playing, but this week’s GotW is one of those. It’s ‘Bulletstorm’, the latest output by Cliffy B., realized with the Unreal engine III and developed by the guys from ‘People Can Fly’, that you might know from the ‘Painkiller’ series. ‘Bulletstorm’ is truely a FPS that puts the fun back into shooter gaming. After playing thousands and thousands of ultra-realistic first person shooters situated in a modern warfare scenario it felt like a kind of deliverance to play this particular game. I was a little sceptical before the release of ‘Bulletstorm’ if this game is not just only a pure feature-gadget-firework that lacks of fun in gameplay. I was seriously wrong.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvigZY44PCw&feature[/youtube]

First of all, for those of you who still don’t know, here’s short story introduction. You play Grayson Hunt, a space pirate from the black-ops squad called Dead Echo. After finding out that their squad was misused by the evil General Sarrano, who let them kill innocent civilians, the squad starts to revolt against Sarrano and calls for revenge. The real plot of the story starts with a crash landing on the planet Stygia and basically two things are left to do. Finding General Sarrano and kill him. And to escape from the planet.

During the escape you find lots of interesting guns and you also get a nice gadget plugged on your arm to grap enemies with a kind of tractor ray. You gain the most of the fun with the so called skillshot system. It’s not just only about fragging enemies it’s about fragging them with style. You can grab enemies with your little arm gadget. You can throw them in the air. You can push them into spikes. You can make them suffer on a slitted throat and gain points for ‘gargle effects’. You can shock them with electricity. You can shoot their balls off. You can slide them off. You can throw them off heights… etc. etc. etc. It’s just so much you can do, to frag your opponents with style and gain points for that. The earned points can be spent for new guns, ammunition and extra charge for your weapons. Each weapon has a secondary fire mode which is much more devastating, and fun, than the primary mode and mostly effective in boss fights. The boss fights itself are challenging, not too tough and of course a lot of fun.

The game is also rich of totally nice and funny events like escaping from a giant, I mean GIANT, mining wheel. Fighting a mechanical dinosaur in a miniature theme park. Fighting your enemies with the help of the mechanical dinosaur. It’s also nice to see, that the pace of the game is not always be held on high speed, and that it offers some moments to let you breathe. Which is actually good because the whole presentation of the game is just awesome. Even though it was made with the “old” Unreal Engine III, the game looks absolutely state of the art. It also does offer Physx, with some manual tweaks, and a DirectX10 render path, also with manual tweaks. For some unknown reason are the config files encrypted so you cannot simply edit them by using a standard text editor, you actually need a decrypter (!?). This seems to me, like the curse of the multi-platform development, hopefully we, the PC gamers, get rid of this with an upcoming patch.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehIGQZsniEw[/youtube]

To summarize, I want to recommend this game to everyone who is tired of the common, standard first person shooters stuff that gets released each and every day. This game gives you a fresh breeze into your face that soon becomes a storm of pure shooter fun that you haven’t experienced for years. ‘Bulletstorm’ has so many great ideas included and so many funny things either that your money is well spent on this game. I also want to mention again, this is not just a game that builts its innovation on a couple of newly introduced game gadgets. GO! BUY IT!

Links: Official website

Config decrypter

Duty Calls (commercial game)