Where are my M-Rated Handheld Games?
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is among the best handheld games ever made. For one thing, it’s a delight to play, with its incredible driving mechanics and perfectly chosen touch-based minigames. It also doesn’t pull any punches. It’s gory, and it’s loaded with proscribed drugs and dildos.
In other words it’s a GTA, but something about this one feels…naughtier. Playing it on the train I’m always wondering if the person next to me is sitting aghast as I take “that thing that girl from Friends learns with on the TV” and pervert it with gang wars and heroin empires.
I think that’s great, and I want more of it. So I crunched some numbers to see if things were looking good for me. And guess what? They’re not.
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Tags: chinatown wars, esrb, grand theft auto, joe keiser, m-rated, manhunt 2, nintendo ds, psp, rated m for mature
Where Is L.A. Noire?
Rockstar Games, home to all games controversial and critically-acclaimed, have seriously started promoting their wild west sequel Red Dead Redemption. During my weekly Hulu fix the other day I was offered completely commercial-free viewing if I watched the Red Dead Redemption trailer once. The same trailer took the place of an entire commercial break during the premiere of last night’s new Breaking Bad (a program which I am quite familiar with). It’s refreshing to see a game get this sort of mainstream push so early, especially in a franchise that precious few people are familiar with, and the trailer never once drops the words “Grand Theft Auto”. Still, watching the CG spaghetti western teasefest unfold, I couldn’t help feeling like I was forgetting something. Oh, that’s right, L.A. Noire!
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Tags: australia, derrick sanskrit, grand theft auto, l.a. noire, platform exclusives, ps3, Red dead redemption, rockstar games, team bondi, the getaway, where is, xbox 360
Where is Tecmo’s Deception?
Thanks to a friend of mine with good taste in gaming, I’ve recently been playing a lot of Madworld for the Wii. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s certainly fun; there’s just something about mutilating the human body in creative ways that really appeals to me, even though I’m not a sociopath. That being said, we haven’t seen too many games focus so intensely on dispatching your enemies using painful and overly-elaborate methods–which is why playing Madworld brought back warm, fuzzy memories of my time spent with Tecmo’s Deception series.
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Tags: bob mackey, deception, kagero, tecmo, trapt, where is
John Constantine, our superhero, was raised by birds and then attended Penn State University. He is currently working on a novel about a fictional city that exists only in his mind. John has an astonishingly extensive knowledge of Scientology. Ultimately he would like to learn how to effectively use his brain. He continues to keep Wu-Tang's secret to himself. 
Derrick Sanskrit is a self-professed geek in a variety of fields including typography, graphic design, comic books, music and cartoons. As a professional hipster graphic designer, his recent clients have included Nerve, Pitchfork and MoCCA, among others.
Amber Ahlborn - artist, writer, gamer and DigiPen survivor, she maintains a day job as a graphic artist. By night Amber moonlights as a professional Metroid Fanatic and keeps a metal suit in the closet just in case. Has lived in the state of Washington and insists that it really doesn't rain as much as everyone says it does.
Nadia Oxford is a housekeeping robot who was refurbished into a warrior when the world's need for justice was great. Now that the galaxy is at peace (give or take a conflict here or there), she works as a freelance writer for various sites and magazines.
Based in Toronto, Nadia prizes the certificate from the Ministry of Health declaring her tick and rabies-free.
Bob Mackey is a grad student, writer, and cyborg, who uses the powerful girl-repelling nanomachines mad science grafted onto his body to allocate time towards interests of the nerd persuasion. He believes that complaining about things on the Internet is akin to the fine art of wine tasting, but with more spitting into buckets.
Joe Keiser has a programming degree from Johns Hopkins University, a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, and a fake toy guitar built in the hollowed-out shell of a real guitar. He writes about games and technology for a variety of outlets. One day he will stop doing this. The day after that, police will find his body under a collapsed pile of (formerly neatly alphabetized) collector's edition tchotchkes.
