Well somethinginthesea.com has recently updated to Mark Meltzer’s study. Normal enough you might think, except for a pretty weird, evil-loooking lunchbox near the side of his desk. In case you haven’t looked at the site recently, Mark Meltzer is the bloke who’s investigating these abductions of little girls around the world.
When we last left him, he had taken a very blurry picture of the Big Sister, which might been exciting in itself if it weren’t for Game Informer plastering a great big picture of her literally days before the reveal on the site.

Anyway, after that, a year has passed (1968) and his own daughter got kidnapped by the Big Sister. His wife divorces him, blaming Mark and his crazy research. He’s then sent to a mental facility. When Mark gets out he goes to track the Big Sister down for REVENGE and because he wants his daughter back. He tracks her to Hudson River in New York and traps her in a net. Which clearly isn’t effective because she slices through it and then smashes his leg, breaks his ribs and leaves 16 stitches on his neck.

Now, the Big Sister has broken into his office and left the weirdo lunchbox there. Meltzer thinks it’s a BOMB, though why he doesn’t get rid of it is anyone guess. It’s up to you to unlock this strange box/BOMB thing.




Which is something I have been trying to do, for about 2 hours now, gnashing my teeth in frustration and wasting loads of paper in the process. Mind you, I could just wait for someone else to post the correct combination on the net, but then that’s cheating isn’t it?

In any case I think it could make a great Collector’s Edition Box for Bioshock 2. And I personally think it’s a bit more intriguing then whatever heck Kojima’s doing.

EDIT: According to people clearly much more used to code cracking over at 2K forums, the message on the back of the box is (it repeats over and over again):

I can't rember my birthday do you remember my birthday I have a new birthday

Except no-one really knows what Big Sister's birthday is.

I’ve been checking out http://somethinginthesea.com/, and someone has managed to hack the map.
This
hacked map was posted on the day of the site’s launch, and so far, all the updates match this map.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/260890/map.swf

However, the single unmarked X in the middle is not Rapture. If you remember, the co-ordinates of Rapture
were given in the first game (the flashbacks during the would you kindly reveal): 63° 2' N, 29° 55' W. Putting
the co-ordinates into Google map shows this:



What the X actually seems to mark, is the hypothetical location of Atlantis:



Also, the latest updates reveal that that the kidnapper can leap out of a 3rd storey building. At first I thought
the kidnapper was a lonely Big Daddy, but I really can’t imagine a Big Daddy leaping, can you?

EDIT: The site has updated again.

Remember when Eurogamer and Kikizo reported that the game contained racial imagery? Here’s a quick recap of what they reported:

"At one point you and Sheva glimpse a woman struggling with a group of Majini on a balcony overlooking a street. She's a white westerner - prominently, unmistakeably so, with waist-length platinum blonde hair, idealised Anglo-Saxon facial features and a skimpy black lace night dress. She screams for aid, but is overpowered and dragged back into the building. When you eventually reach her, she has been impregnated with the Los Plagos virus and must be destroyed. As our chums at Eurogamer have pointed out, the scene dovetails smoothly with that classic racist trope of the brutal black male 'corrupting' the white man's womenfolk. There's zero justification for the woman's appearance in the plot - the scene exists, as far as I can see, purely to outrage and titillate players whose cultural background is saturated with such unwholesome ideas."



The Kikizo article was forwarded to Sue Clark Head of Communications at the British Board of Film Classification, who responded:

"In the version [of the scene] submitted to the BBFC there is only one man pulling the blonde woman in from the balcony, and I can't say the skimpiness of her dress impressed itself on me. The single man is not black either. As the whole game is set in Africa it is hardly surprising that some of the characters are black, just like the fact that some of the characters in an earlier version were Spanish as the game was set in Spain.
We do take racism very seriously, but in this case there is no issue around racism. Just for information, were the distributors to be supplying a version of the game which we had not classified it would be illegal under the terms of the VRA [Video Recordings Act]."

I am now utterly confused as to why the two websites exaggerated said scene.

Thoughts?

The Minus World has some ideas on casting in the unlikely event that a Street Fighter IV movie is ever made:













You can find the rest of the cast here:

http://the-minusworld.com/2009/02/27/street-fighter-iv-the-movie/

Let's hope Hollywood execs don't take this seriously.

I found some game art while browsing the net, and thought you guys might want to see them:

This was pretty much the only image that would fit here. I thought it was very creepy, having the Jasmine Jolene poster in the background while Andrew Ryan is murdering her.


Atlas Bloodied I always thought his hair was brown, but most Atlas fan art portray him with blonde hair. It's just a very striking picture.

The brother of Chuck Norris I don't know if you've seen this one before, but i liked the caption.

Fallout 3 poster

More Fallout 3 art

I haven't played Fallout 3 yet, but I really want to, it looks awesome.

As we're getting closer and closer to the release date of RE 5, the mainstream media are getting more aware of the game. So I wasn't really surprised to see this posted on a website called Racialcious:


"One of the first things you see in the game, seconds after taking control of Chris Redfield, is a gang of African men brutally beating something in a sack. Animal or human, it’s never revealed, but these are not infected Majini. There are no red bloodshot eyes. These are ordinary Africans, who stop and stare at you menacingly as you approach. Since the Majini are not undead corpses, and are capable of driving vehicles, handling weapons and even using guns, it makes the line between the infected monsters and African civilians uncomfortably vague. Where Africans are concerned, the game seems to be suggesting, bloodthirsty savagery just comes with the territory.

Later on, there’s a cut-scene of a white blonde woman being dragged off, screaming, by black men. When you attempt to rescue her, she’s been turned and must be killed. If this has any relevance to the story it’s not apparent in the first three chapters, and it plays so blatantly into the old clichés of the dangerous “dark continent” and the primitive lust of its inhabitants that you’d swear the game was written in the 1920s. That Sheva neatly fits the approved Hollywood model of the light-skinned black heroine, and talks more like Lara Croft than her thickly-accented foes, merely compounds the problem rather than easing it. There are even more outrageous and outdated images to be found later in the game, stuff that I was honestly surprised to see in 2009, but Capcom has specifically asked that details of these scenes remain under wraps for now, whether for these reasons we don’t know.

There will be plenty of people who refuse to see anything untoward in this material. “It wasn’t racist when the enemies were Spanish in Resident Evil 4,” goes the argument, but then the Spanish don’t have the baggage of being stereotyped as subhuman animals for the past two hundred years. It’s perfectly possible to use Africa as the setting for a powerful and troubling horror story, but when you’re applying the concept of people being turned into savage monsters onto an actual ethnic group that has long been misrepresented as savage monsters, it’s hard to see how elements of race weren’t going to be a factor.

All it will take is for one mainstream media outlet to show the heroic Chris Redfield stamping on the face of a black woman, splattering her skull, and the controversy over Manhunt 2 will seem quaint by comparison. If we’re going to accept this sort of imagery in games then questions are going be asked, these questions will have merit, and we’re going to need a more convincing answer than “lol it’s just a game.”"

So, I looked up where this quote came from - Dan Whitehead, Eurogamer - and read the whole review of the game. It started off normally, talking about the control scheme, the chapters he played, the gameplay, etc and was surprised that he chose to end his review on this note, which has now been used to further the racist debate.

Edit: Sorry, I didn't realise I was advocating censorship :P. A better question would be: do you agree with his views or not?