Welcome to another episode of our Throwdown podcast. This is a show where we discuss video games, pop culture and tech in an honest and uncompromising fashion. You won’t get any bullshit here.
Video games have been accused of being too violent for about two decades now. Titles like Mortal Kombat, Postal, Grand Theft Auto, and Call of Duty have been targeted by the media and politicians as being nothing more than “murder simulators.” Despite a lot of data which says that video games do not make people more violent, this notion still persists. This conversation was recently re-ignited with the release of a game called Hatred. The object of this game is to kill for the sake of killing. No story appears to be evident; you play as a mass murderer who kills… that’s it.
The game itself has already been discussed at length–especially on The Co-Op Podcast #96–so we’re not doing that. Instead, we look at the bigger picture and ask “Are video games inherently violent?” Most games contain violence and the way you interact with many game worlds is by killing whatever inhabits it. Why is this the case and what games exist that have no violence whatsoever? This forms the basis of our main topic.
Before we got into violent video games, we talked at length about GamerGate. This was inspired by my most recent editorial where I decided not to use the hashtag or reference the movement because it is hindering my efforts to promote the virtues of gamers and games. Some of us are getting a bit tired of the movement since it has no clear direction or goal but Brett Does a good job of explaining what it’s trying to ultimately do.
We brought along two of our friends from video game site 2D-X.com. Editor-in-Chief Tim Torres and Features Editor Gabriel Zamora join us to discuss Smash Bros. for the Wii U. The game had a big Nintendo Direct today and since the fellas are huge fans of the series, I wanted to have them on to tell us what they thought. We couldn’t just have Chris Sealy shit all over it after all.
Pop Culture news this week is Marvel Centric once again. We talk about their latest event announcements for 2015 which include Armor Wars, House of M, Infinity Gauntlet, Old Man Logan, and most recently, Inhumans: Attilan Rising. Of course we talk about the elephant in the room which is the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer which was recently leaked and then officially released. Needless to say but we were pretty excited over it so we discuss some of the more interesting things we saw in it.
This week I was joined by: Emilio Lopez, Brett Murdock, Chris Sealy and Ed Mason. Thanks to our special guests Tim Torres and Gabriel Zamora from 2D-X.
AUDIO VERSION
Thanks as always to Shawn Daley for our awesome intro and outro music.
Make sure to subscribe to Throwdown on YouTube, Soundcloud and iTunes. Follow Throwdown on Twitter as well.
