Grumpygamer

Today the Manchester Cathedral row with Sony rumbles on with - to no one's real surprise - the Cathedral making it clear that it's after a large amount of cash from Sony.

Well I suppose that's par for the course, yesterday we got pride and today greed, perhaps Manchester Cathedral is trying to work its way through all the deadly sins.

Yesterday I suggested the cynical might see this whole row as a way of Manchester Cathedral skimming some money from Sony and today that's clearly come true as the church has admitted in addition to wanting Sony to apologise and alter the game, it expects a large donation from Sony.

Of course you don't have to go far to read utter nonsense about the subject. I frequent several Christian message boards where the lack of knowledge about videogames has lead to many offering some of the dumbest arguments since that Creationist museum opened in America last week.

Of the several bouts of stupidity there are two that really stand out. The first is the incredulity that a game would centre around Manchester Cathedral. Yes, they believe that the church is in fact the sole setting for the game and all action takes place within, rather than it being a rather brief interlude when passing through Manchester.

The second odd view one reads on Christian message boards is the idea that the inclusion of Manchester in the game, and the cathedral, was to appeal to those involved in gun-crime in Manchester.

So here we have a high profile game designed for the global market, but the design decisions were made to appeal to a few gun nuts in York, Manchester and Nottingham? If Insomniac was so cynical to design a game to appeal to those involved in gang-banging gun crime you might have thought it would steer the action towards a larger demographic - perhaps setting the game in South Central LA?

It's quite funny really. If Resistance Fall of Man was a TV show it'd be akin to an episode of Doctor Who (old Dr Who, where he was a Timelord, not some tosser hanging out in modern London all the time). But because it is a game there are ill-informed fuckwits falling over themselves to condemn it.

If their going to kick up such a fuss, let them clear the fecking aliens out of the cathedral.