Mattel, are you listening?

I posed this on Matty's forum here:

Alright, Matty. You've given us a really cool Ecto-1 Exclusive by finally getting us the Rookie. Props for adding on the trap and some other equipment to the tool belt too. But I want to see the Female Rookie from the stylized version made. Ok, so it's going to be a whole new sculpt? I got that. But I can think of four easy uses of this sculpt.

#1 - The Video Game Rookie (Female)

#2 - Real Ghostbusters Janine  - Won't need Annie Potts' permission

#3 - From IDW's Ghostbusters series, the half-sister of Gozer... Rachel Unglighter

#4 - Extreme Ghostbusters Kylie (Stylized by IDW's Ghostbusters Tristan Jones)

Just for Fun:

Don't Call Me Old School

It would be fair to say that, from the instant I heard about Transformers: War for Cybertron to the day I finally purchased the game, I was in a near constant state of anxious bliss. The Transformers video game franchise needed some serious reinvigorating, and I'd been looking forward to a G1-inspired offering, honestly, since I first learned about console gaming in 1985. I tried to pace myself, playing from one checkpoint to the next and then taking a break, but I still burned through the game in just under 48 hours. It was a fantastic game, but disappointingly short. Happily, I had unlocked characters to play in other game modes, and I was looking forward to trying them out when I finished the main story.
But there was a snag.
All the other game modes were made to be played online. I had unlocked characters for use in modes I couldn't play. Add to that the fact that the character creator is also only for online play and my frustration began to mount. I'd payed full price for a game I could only play part of. I played through it again, desperate to get the most out of it, but its limitations began to show. The let-down took a good while - months, perhaps - but when it finally fell upon me with its full weight, I was dismayed and bitter with the state of the industry as a whole. But there was one more surprise waiting.
I went to my friend's house to play the co-op mode with him. I didn't care if that mode was limited to a few screens of time trial combat; I just wanted to find more fun in the game. But we couldn't play co-op. Even when we were sitting side by side in the same room, we could not play together unless we had X-Box Live. Neither of us do.

For some time before this profound disappointment, I had been worried about the increasing popularity of online multiplayer. It seemed to me that more and more games were being developed with an emphasis on online play to the detriment of their single-player campaigns. The industry attitude seemed to be incredulous as to whether anyone would want to play a single-player game when he or she could sign on and deathmatch with people from all over the world, and I felt left behind. My experience with Transformers: War for Cybertron hammered this home in grisly fashion, if you'll pardon the hyperbole. The reality was stifling: I had payed 100% of the price for less than 100% of the game. X-Box Live was no longer a choice - it was a necessity if I wanted to get my money's worth. In all honesty, I find this to be oppressive. I don't want to play online. Why must I pay full price if I can't play the full game? Why can't I enjoy the game in its entirety unless I get in on an increasingly popular fad?

But that's just it. Online console gaming isn't a fad. It's the new state of the industry. Even my dad has X-Box Live. Am I stubborn, clinging to some imagined golden age during which one could play Contra or Ikari Warriors at home with a friend or a sibling and have a blast? I don't want to be stuck in the mud, but it feels like online gaming is being forced upon me. These days, a game that doesn't have online play is likely to have points taken off in reviews. There are even games now that one cannot play in any fashion unless one buys them in an online store. What does the future hold for gamers like me, who just want a simple, intimate gaming experience and aren't interested in competing against other players online? Sometimes I think that I should simply get with the times, as though I am a fan of 8-tracks railing against the increasing popularity of cassettes that is making obsolete my preferred method of listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan's Texas Flood. But most of the time I feel like a gamer who is resisting, and who will always resist, the onslaught of runaway consumerism in the guise of fun.

Video Games and Art - Defending Roger Ebert

You may have noticed the disappointed and defensive noises video gamers made last April when film critic Roger Ebert wrote that video games can "never be art" in his regular column for the Chicago Sun. A small community of gamers who read the Sun Times or follow Ebert's blogs spread the word to a much larger community of gamers who, in all likelihood, can never remember whether Ebert is the fat one or the skinny one (and probably aren't aware that "the skinny one" died 12 years ago), who promptly kicked up the standard call-to-arms that you might hear ringing across the internet's hills and dales whenever someone has the gall to express a subversive opinion. That description may not necessarily be fair, but I'm exercising my editorial rights here because, despite an initial surge of indignation, Roger Ebert is a man I greatly respect and I have actually come to realize that I agree with him in a way.

"Video games can never be art." This is the most-cited quote from the article. Ebert refers to art as defined by Wikipedia and compares games to the works of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare. This is, of course, the statement that caused all the uproar, and I'm still on the fence as to whether or not I think it's true. One could certainly point to games like Shadow of the Colossus, Mass Effect, or Little Big Planet in order to make a case that video games are as deserving as A Midsummer Night's Dream to be called art. There is, at least, art in video games. The Assassin's Creed series pays very close attention to detail when designing the fantastic vistas - views of such places as ancient Acre and 15th century Italy - that are, in part, its hallmark. It's difficult to perch atop the iron cross crowning Florence's tallest church and be unaffected by the beauty of the game's design, even if, directly afterward, you dive into a hay bale and leap out suddenly to stab a soldier in the neck. The soundtrack and the storyline in the Mass Effect series rival those of many of the big screen features on which Mr. Ebert has made his living. From one perspective, how can anyone say that, in the wide realm of art, there is no place at all for video games?

But there is a deeper question here. Who is really qualified to make objective statements about what is and is not art? Few would argue that the Mona Lisa, King Lear, or Paradise Lost are not works of art, but there are styles that straddle the line. Dadaism is one such example; it is anti-art. The dadaist movement, which began around 1914, intentionally defies artistic conventions in the pursuit of generating works that can effectively comment on art itself or on the artistic process. Is this art? If it could be said, objectively, that van Gogh's The Potato Eaters is a work of art while it can also be said that art can arise from a movement which aims to create "non-art," as it were, then we should be feeling a little bit of cognitive dissonance. My point is that the definition is ambiguous, and I don't agree that Roger Ebert is in any place to tell us what can and can never be art. I tend to think that games are art, but I won't go so far as so to say that my opinion is the only right one.

There is a resolution to all this. Ebert has apologized for speaking out, though he still maintains that he is correct. We should now be quoting this passage:

"Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren’t gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care."

And this, at long last, is my point: we don't need to reach a consensus. Whatever video games might or might not be, those who enjoy them should and will go on enjoying them. It doesn't matter whether or not video games can be objectively said to be art, and it doesn't matter what Roger Ebert thinks about that issue. Thus, though he seems to render his entire argument meaningless with the above statement, I defend him. I defend his right to opine about something that I cannot imagine he really knows much about, because he does so with the caveat that his word is not law and that his opinion shouldn't be too terribly important to us anyway.