Grab bag: Robots, Shooters and Death Incentive

Inspired by the late, great Transbuddha's (now even greater dadsbigplan) "Internet Sausage" feature, I'll be delivering random bits of weird gaming news and thoughts every Tuesday.

Um, this is pretty much the coolest thing ever: a flying, camera-equipped robot that can be controlled by an iPhone and can play augmented reality games. It's rumored to cost somewhere between $50 and $200 (and, well, there's a big difference there), but if you're a gadget nerd and want to feel like you're Q from a James Bond movie, you need to check out the Parrot A.R. Drone.

This is a pretty eclectic week of releases.

On the Wii front, you have one of my most anticipated releases of the year, Fragile Dreams, which appears to be a moody and lonely exploration game through the end of the world. I'll be playing it this week, so check back for a review. There's also a pretty cool looking JRPG in Resonance of Fates, and the big release is the hyped shooter Metro 2033. While it's cool to see that Metro 2033 is supposedly incredibly immersive, I just can't find myself getting excited for FPSs like I used to. What do you all think? Are FPSs this generation's real-time strategy game (i.e., a genre that has way, way too many games pumped out in a small time frame)? While I'm all for a tightly controlled FPS that's a lot of fun and generally not too gory (I'm not big on gore), I think that if developers collectively decided to take a break from making FPSs for a while, I might be more willing to try one again. Kind of like my current frothing for a good real-time strategy game, preferably on the Wii or for one of the HD motion control systems (dual analog just doesn't cut it).

Finally, Spike (the purveyor of all things fine and cultural, as evidenced by their show MANSWERS), have released a video about how to get your girlfriend into gaming so that she's not whining about you playing them all the time!

Watch here.

Wow, OK, besides being incredibly sexist and insulting (as a recent study showed, almost 40% of gamers today are female), this video's assumption that female gamers can't deal with the death of their characters reinforces this "concerned mother, weak female" stereotype. Perhaps if the majority of games were developed with anyone other than teenaged males in mind, this wouldn't be such an issue.

Now, for the other side of the coin: I don't know that I necessarily need death to be the primary motivation for completing a task in a game. There have been several games that have used alternate motivations (Eternal Darkness springs to mind) to keep you playing to the best of your ability. I think that, sure, death can be a part of your game if it makes sense with the world that you've created, but death isn't something that hangs like a pall over every movie or book, for instance. What if losing your job or being forced to spend time in prison were your motivations? Not really all that different from a death sequence in terms of gaming logistics, but at least it's something that's different from the simple "Game over" screen (or, in Little King's Story, the awesome "Life over" screen, where your nemesis Kampbell presides over your funeral. Take that!).