There's More to Video Gaming Than Bullets and Blood, Says GameZnFlix CEO

There's More to Video Gaming Than Bullets and Blood, Says GameZnFlix CEOJohn Fleming, CEO of GameZnFlix, Inc. (OTCBB: GMFX), an online provider of video games and movies for rent or purchase, said today that video gamers can't be stereotyped.
"Ask someone to picture a typical video game player," says Mr. Fleming, "And they'll imagine an 18-to-24-year-old male living on pizza and swilling Mountain Dew while shooting all manner of imaginary enemies in games such as 'Doom,' 'Halo,' 'Grand Theft Auto,' 'Street Fighter' and the like. The reality is, there's a lot more to video games than bullets and blood."
"Take the 'Final Fantasy' series as an example," says Mr. Fleming. "These games seem to be as popular with females as with the guys, yet two of that series have made GameFAQ's 'The 10 Best Games Ever.' And a majority of the popular Nintendo Wii titles seem to be enjoying success with all ages, yet have nothing in common with the shoot-em-ups."
Non-violent games such as "Guitar Hero," "Dance Revolution," and "Super Mario" remain top sellers according to industry sources. According to its publisher, the best selling game of all time, the life simulation game "The Sims" by Electronic Arts, is played by a predominately female audience.
"The other day," continued Mr. Fleming, "I was looking at one of the games we carry called 'Cooking Mama Cook Off.' It's kind of a cross between 'Super Mario' and TV's 'Iron Chef' with a bit of 'Speed Racer' graphics thrown in. You actually improve your culinary skills by creating meals from 10 different cuisines in order to score points. It's the furthest thing from violent video gaming, unless of course, you count the chopping of the vegetables."
About GameZnFlix, Inc.
GameZnFlix is primarily an online video game and movie rental service that also allows its subscribers to have access to VOD movies for purchase. With memberships starting as low as $8.99, subscribers can rent both video games and movies with no late fees or due dates. Membership for rental services is located on the Internet at www.gnfgames.com ; and VOD is located at www.gnfdigital.com. A subscriber can purchase titles at a discounted rate at www.gnfgames.com.

Tell Congress to Keep Wild Horses

The American west has its own mythology and its own rich history in literature, film, and television—one that no other U.S. geographic region can ever hope to match. Can you imagine an entire section at a mall bookstore devoted to novels of, say, the Eastern shore?
And if any one animal symbolizes our own—or even the world’s—fascination with the American west, it is, without doubt, the horse. Many of these wild animals were tamed, and they, in turn, helped Americans tame the dusty frontier that lay west of the Mississippi. The horse, both wild and domestic, has earned its rightful place in American hearts and minds through the writings of Louis L’Amour and Larry McMurtry, the films of John Ford and Sergio Leone, and even through television dramas such as Bonanza and The Lone Ranger.
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Is it any wonder then that thousands of Americans and more than a dozen celebrities—people who were likely influenced by the same Western arts and culture that shaped us all—have been willing to step up and support The HSUS’s and other groups' efforts to restore protections for America’s wild horses and burros? According to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), only about 35,000 of these wild animals forage on U.S. lands today. But thanks to an amendment quietly slipped last year into an appropriations bill that gutted a 34-year-old ban on selling wild horses and burros for slaughter, that number was recently decreased by 41 mustangs. (Another 52 horses were in line for slaughter, but were pulled before the captive bolt pistol was fired.)
America's Contradictory Relationship with Wild Horses
Wild horses have a long history with North America. Fossil records show they were living in North America millions of years ago, gradually spreading to Asia likely via the Bering land bridge before losing a battle to the elements and becoming extinct on this continent. In the early 16th century, European explorers reintroduced the horse to Mexico, and the animal eventually found its way north into territories controlled by Native Americans and Europeans. Many of these horses formed wild herds; by some estimates, there were more than a million wild horses roaming North America by the turn of the 20th century, likely because humans had killed many of the horse's natural predators.
The horse's main predator in the 20th century was man. By 1971, when Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Protection Act and President Nixon signed it into law, there were approximately only 60,000 wild horses left on U.S. lands, their numbers drastically reduced by wholesale roundups and massacres. The act, championed by a Nevada resident nicknamed Wild Horse Annie, was designed to halt the killings. Americans roundly supported the act, reportedly flooding Congress with letters, a volume of mail second only to the number of letters Congress received about the Vietnam War.
But the act created to protect wild horses has slowly been eroded by the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that manages U.S. lands, under the theory that there are too many free-roaming horses and that they need to be managed. The BLM first created 303 herd management areas, but over the years, that number has been whittled down to 201. The BLM has also established "appropriate management levels," which allows the agency to round up horses by buzzing them with helicopters and corralling them into pens for eventual sale through the BLM's adoption program.
The underfunded adoption program, however, has been largely a bust, leading to crowded holding pens that don't give the BLM any wiggle room to round up more wild horses, which ranchers desperately want so that their beef cattle can graze without interference. The stealth amendment in last year's appropriations bill was the latest attempt to appease ranchers; the amendment requires the government to sell horses older than ten years or those who have not been adopted after three attempts. Guess who typically buys these older mustangs? Middlemen, or "killer buyers," who then sell the animals to one of the three foreign-owned slaughterhouses in the United States that process meat for overseas markets.
The losers in this game of backroom legislation are, of course, the horses. It has already cost the lives of 41 mustangs. It could cost thousands more.
The sad fact is that all of this is completely unnecessary—the covert legislation, the animal deaths, the hard feelings from horse lovers across the nation. The BLM could easily deal with America's wild horses without a drop of blood being spilled. The agency could reopen the 102 herd management areas that it has zeroed out; it could adopt immunocontraception programs to keep herds from becoming too large; it could funnel the money from its helicopter round-ups into a mass-marketing budget for its adoption programs; it could simply leave the horses alone, with an acknowledgment that Americans value their equine history as much, if not more, than their beef.

Gamebytes: Ghost Reacon Advanced Warfighter 2 for the Playstation3

By Jeremy HohmanFriday, October 26, 2007 10:25 AM CDT
The year is 2014, you and your team, strapped with the most advanced technology available, are heading into Mexico to stop a civil war. Not very complicated, huh? There is a very nice plot, but do you honestly care? I don’t. Let’s blow stuff up!The equipment itself in this game is very revolutionary to the tactical-shooter niche.The UAV3 is a special camera drone that acts as your eye in the sky. By pressing the ‘select’ button and pulling up your map, you will be able to send your camera-drone by placing the cursor over a designated area and pressing up on the direction pad. Once overhead a target you can lower the camera to spot enemies. A new ability that has been added to GRAW 2 is CFV mode. By pressing the R2 button you will be in first person view of your teammate’s positions. By pressing up on the direction pad you can send them to a specific area or regroup by pressing down on the D-pad. Another piece of equipment is the M.U.L.E—simply put a mobile weapons shop. A shop that you will drive and run down your enemies; on the outside, there is a first person gun camera that allows you to attack enemies without compromising your position. Not to forget and leave out the basics: assault rifles, sniper rifles, smoke grenades, satchel charges, turrets, night vision, and everything you could possibly need to take out a nation of bad guys.On the other side of the spectrum, GRAW 2 can infect players with game burn-out. Gameplay can get a little slow at times by fighting opponents that don’t offer you any challenge, running for periods of time without any action, and dealing with teammates that you can’t put into position without them being seen. Learning the controls of the game will take some practice. What makes them a challenge is in this game they utilize every button; therefore, memorizing what each button does and applying that in the heat of battle can be a little tricky. Using the first person view to control your teammates is cool, but useless. For one you are limited to what you see by not being able to control the camera. Although you can switch between teammates, this still does not help because they will still stand wherever, usually in the open. Using the UAV3 camera is helpful when pin-pointing your target, but be careful. If your UAV is spotted it can be shot out of the sky; once you locate your target, regroup it by pressing down on the d-pad.Six Axis Controls stink! To use them, one must move the base of the controller up or down to move forwards or backwards, tilt the controller right or left to turn in these respected directions. Don’t attempt to use this feature; turn it off in the options screen. Trying to maneuver the M.U.L.E with this is a pain and not very accurate. You’ll wind up getting frustrated and lose the excitement of what you’re supposed to be doing.There is some staggering in frame rate in certain scenes, but nothing too crazy.The audio for the game is not bad, but not the best: speaker distortion was common throughout the game.The graphics for the PS3 are similar if not better than those on the 360.Multiplayer mode offers 32 maps spanning from night to day scenes and lots of options that aren’t available in single player mode. If an online battle is what you’re looking for than this should satisfy your appetite for destruction.Despite some issues, GRAW 2 succeeds in giving you a real feeling of being part of an elite US team. All in all, if you were a fan of the Socom series for the PS2 and looking for a decent multiplayer mode for the PS3, you have found it.Ghost Reacon Advanced Warfighter 2 gets a B-Jeremy Hohman is the writer, producer and host of GameBytes a 30 minute weekly game news and review show. To see Jeremy’s latest pod cast or to rent & play the game reviewed simply go to; http://www.gnfgames.com/