Sometimes, it’s best not to take oneself so seriously.

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Just recently two major articles hit Kotaku.com and Jezebel.com regarding one of the most offensive games ever made: RapeLay.  I loathe to write about what the game is about and leave it to the reader to click the links above to read the synopsis.  A major uproar ensued and Amazon, Overstock and eBay no longer allow the sale of that game.  What is sad however is that this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to those kinds of games.

But what I found most surprising is how little the Jezebel commenters are aware of the culture that surrounds the game itself.  Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Japan knows that there is an astounding amount of deviant sexual behavior found in their comic books, animation and films – not to mention video games.

What is even more disturbing is how these games influence some of the top makers in the big AAA-industry.  I mentioned Hideo Kojima on how he treats women in Metal Gear Solid 4, but there are others too.  The producer of Star Ocean himself wanted to make erotic games and tried to ask permission from the previous president of Square Enix.  He was told an emphatic “no”, but I can’t help but think that he tried to get away with as much as possible with his character designs and story:

Space ROX V 0.5

Of course, the point of any game is having some adversary to fight – be it enemy ships or floating space debris. Here I’ve taken the particle effect I created for the thrusters and blasters and applied them many-fold on a bunch of asteroids.

The animation for shooting the laser blasters has been modified to have multiple frames for the flash point, and the guns were syncronized.

The next objective is refining the control scheme and creating collisions.

Something of note – it seems that the up-arrow-key, the left-arrow-key in conjunction with the spacebar does not seem to work. Oddly enough, if you use the numeric keypad arrow keys (at least on my keyboard) the limitation goes away. To offset this, I also enabled the A, W, and D keys to do the same function as the arrow keys.

Redoing the control scheme is something that is on the list as well – perhaps using the mouse to shoot which will eliminate this arrow key issue.

Also, an inherent flaw in Actionscript 3.0 is a notable lack of a “Collection” class. Unfortunately the built-in “Array” and “Object” classes does not allow me to recast a stored object back to the original object type. I borrowed Michael James William’s Collection class to handle the multiple asteroids floating around.

Check it out!