Cobb

ME3: Ended

Before I read the spoilers, I want to put down my thoughts about the ending of Mass Effect 3. I heard that there was a great deal of consternation and dissatisfaction with the ending of the game. People were saying that it didn't matter what they did at a certain point, they would get to the same ending - which was inevitable. 

I disagree that the ending was bad, and I discount the complaint that any sort of behavior in the game made not enough difference.

It was when I finally battled the Ninja dude at the Illusive Man's headquarters that I realized that I had taken the step that pushed me over the edge of the story into the concluding parts. It was just before I did so that I decided to be a complete renegade. I felt that after the fall of the Asari homeworld that there was no reason to be anything but survivalist. After all, the Asari were pretty badass. So from that moment on, I started to get tingly about what might happen next that would sour so many gamers on the conclusion to ME3.

It finally seemed to me that in London there might be one more boss battle against the main Reaper whose defeat would make the rest run away, or that suddenly that defeat rallied Earth troops. But it wasn't that bad ending. Then it seemed to me that the Crucible would destroy Earth as well as all of the machines in the galaxy, something like the dreaded Halo firing. No it didn't go pear shaped that way. Then, as I approached the beam in London, I thought maybe Shepard would die and the story would have no resolution - naah. Couldn't be that, but it came close.

The end that happened was good enough, but also confusing enough not to have been supported by the ledgends and dialog in the playing of the game. In other words, it kept me guessing, and now gives me time after the end to consider whether or not it sits well with me. Let me immediately contrast that with Skyrim.

In Skyrim, all you have is the fate of Skyrim, relatively speaking. There was no do or die situation - and so its main quest could be completed and you could still have things to do. This was not the case for ME3. And in that way there was but a singular destiny for Shepard, the consequences of which changed everything. The Reapers were so overwhelmingly successful that their conquest was part of a cycle, and this cycle had to continue or the galaxy would be transformed.  This was the revelation that was flubbed with the Illusive Man and finally given to the Catalyst-Child, and yeah that was kind of awkward if logical. But it all ended up with Shepard shutting down the Reapers via the Crucible because that was the only way Shepard lives to the conclusion - a conclusion which he couldn't live past. 

I think it's safe to presume that the Normandy landed on some planet other than Earth. It could have been made a bit more clear that the Crucible forced the Reapers to flee the Earth and then chased them down with a secondary blast of some sort and it was this secondary blast that blew the Normandy out of the sky. But that's a minor dig. The point was that it laneded in the next Eden in a galaxy with no mass effect relays.

Now that I think about it, this is rather like the ending of Fire Upon the Deep, which I finished a couple weeks ago.

Anyway, there's no DLC and the Mass Effect galaxy is dead, which for all the advanced fighting controls, got a little tiresome by the time I got to London. On the whole, the game held up well, and allowed me to get through it without being bogged down by tiresome intrigues and side-missions unrelated to the big picture. I can't tell you how annoying it used to be finding planets and buying probes and looting eezo just so I could fix something on the Normandy or amp up a pistol. I liked the characters better in ME2 and solving their problems was more interesting than listening to Anderson and Hackett jabber on. But that drove the plot that had to be driven.

In conclusion, it did really have to end this way, and because it did and because Shepard had to live to the end, the inevitability of shutting down the galaxy had to happen. Interestingly enough, I think it makes the Geth and the Quarians the new rulers of the Galaxy, as they are more accustomed to living in far flung spaces without contact to the Council.

Sobeit. 

Best Skyrim Parody

Skyrim Personality Profiles

Watching your kids play RPGs can give an interesting insight into their personalities, or at least their gaming personalities. I've noticed differences in our styles in Skyrim.

 

Sprite, who just turned 15 is a sneaky miser. She will not leave any piece of gold anywhere, no matter how much she has piled up. She is a level 14 Imperial and has just joined the Dark Brotherhood. She prefers using ranged weapons and will aim her bow forever before she releases the arrow. She has gone online to figure out every recipe for Alchemy. She tends to walk around with a lot of cash. She asks me all kinds of questions before she makes a move and has not ventured anywhere without knowing what's there first. She saves constantly and will not take any risk that she cannot undo and retry. Yes she's in the Theives Guild. She goes nowhere without Lydia, the Whiterun Housecarl, and generally does not fast travel. She almost never uses her shouts, and keeps lots of food on her.

Scholar, who is 16, is a paragon. She will not consort with daedra and gets mad at me when I do. She too is an Imperial and has joined the Legion. She has decided that Solitude is the best city and is saving 25000 in order to buy a house there. She is fine with the assassinations of the Dark Brotherhood and was the first one of us to join (she chose to kill the bad soldier). She prefers riding a horse to fast travel. When it comes to battle, she is all about heavy armor and two handed weapons. Just get it done. She's a clobberer. She prefers the miscellaneous quests and finds all kinds of interesting things to do. She has got shouts that none of us have heard of, like Kyne's Voice or something like that.

Boy is 17 and a gamer's gamer. So he games the game. He plays it like Modern Warfare - kill the enemy and move on. For him it's all about speed and progress. He's a High Elf and has a devastating One Arm. He has already taken over the Theive's Guild and claims to have a tremendous amount of money. He appropriately does not tell us his cheats, but has already found an (the?) Elder Scroll. He has no problems handling the machines in the Dwarven Ruins even though he's only Level 27. He is a Werewolf and loves beast mode, although I haven't seen him do it. He gathers every sprig and leave in Skyrim and keeps about 60 different potions on him at all times, never selling any of them. I think he's only doing the main quest, or quests he's found online that provide maximum rewards.

I'm a Level 34 Redguard specializing in Archery and Conjuration. I explore everywhere and do everything all at once. I'm the most likely to meet somebody in a town and already have the item the fulfills their quest. I spent 40 days as a vampire and hated it, coming to an insane conclusion which is a story in itself. I am mostly enjoying the metagame, considering what improvements have been made since Oblivion and am most impressed with the extent to which events between factions are more well thought out and consequential to the arc of the story. I'm in the Dark Brotherhood and intend to take it over. Almost never travel without a follower and I instantly conjure a dremora and an atronach when I meet a big enemy. I'm in the Blades and have brought three followers, and very much enjoy hunting dragons with the whole crew.   

 

Dovahkiin

Living In The Fourth Era

The last time I was in New York I asked myself some of the same questions I always do in the world's wealthiest and most powerful city. One of the answers was exactly the same - which is that I would still want a penthouse in the Beresford Building and I would still want to buy the Russian Tea Room and have it be the greatest jazz club in the world. If I had the money. There was a new answer which begged a question about the arts in Western Civilization, and the answer was on Madison and Park Avenues. We still make some of the best crafts ever. Say what you like about the "1%", when we are all dead and recycled, they will dig up Tiffany's with awe. There actually is something extraordinary about the best clothes and furnishings money can buy. We human beings still know how to make beautiful things, and they are still all around us.

It's hard to remember that when you listen to popular music and wonder at why nobody has taken the place of Stravinsky or Ellington. It's hard to remember when you see what is done with the most extravagant and expensive motion picture technology. The beauty is lost somewhere in the piles of money and technocrap, if it was ever considered. More and more television and film is done by cartoon, cartoon arts for cartoon minds. It's hard to remember that we know how to make beautiful, inspiring creations in media.

In today's headlines, there is a company called Carrier IQ that is being paid by AT&T, Sprint and just about everybody else to have a little bit of spyware in every smartphone. There's probably a not-so-sinister reason behind it. After all, if nobody knows where your cellphone is but you and the closest tower, it's probably not enough, and don't we whine about dropped calls? It's easy to consider, as an IT professional, the marvels of what we have done. The geek fascination is certainly arresting, but there's nothing beautiful or inspiring about that. So I have to think, given a little time, about what is the greatest and most life altering consequence of all of the digital technology we've built over the past three decades. What has Moore's Law really delivered? Any art?

Yes. Although it's easy to forget that all tools should serve higher human purposes, there ought to be truth and beauty. There ought to be art. But if you look around, most people have forgotten all about that. Say what you will about Facebook. Say what you will about Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, Sprint, Intel, Cisco, Dell, HP, Google and all of their greatest accomplishments. They have not created art - if they ever knew how, they have forgotten.

Fortunately, the people at Bethesda Softworks have not forgotten. Ever.  

Yes, now you know that finally this is about the Elder Scrolls. It is about Skyrim. It is about a continuing story, a never ending one, the story of the struggles of man for peace and war and ambition and shame and adventure and all that comes about when times change. 

You should be marking these years. There are millions of people making billions of 140 character phrases in a digital deluge of meaninglessness. They are lightyears away from approaching the million year million monkey Shakespeare contest, but Bethesda will be remembered. They are masters of their craft and we are now seeing what that craft can be. It is the new literature, and it is capable of being as profound as any opera, as any stage play. We only have to recognize.

I cannot say what edification can come from the fantastic quests with dungeons and dragons, good and evil gods and men. That is not the question to ask. What edification can come from living in a house by Frank Lloyd Wright, from wearing the finest Savile Row suit? There is something transcendent about the perfection of craft that reminds us of our fundamental creative powers. It is not that listening to Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations tells us something didactic, but merely that you witness the mastery. It is the opportunity to experience the genius in operation first hand. That is what it is like to live inside the world of Bethesda's creation. 

Bethseda is not alone in this arts and crafts movement. There are other great video game makers, people who craft the music, the animations, the voice craft, the logic, the feel, the stories of all sorts. But the most immersive, the ones that have the greatest opportunity to leave marks on us as experiences are the roleplay games, and in that genre Bethesda rules. 

We are living in the era when the greatest video games ever are being built. Recognize. 

MW3:WW3 - Commandos on Wall Street

This fall is one of the most extaordinary gaming seasons in memory, if not ever. The lineup of blockbuster games is superp.

There has been:

Rage, Forza 4, Gears of War 3, Battlefield 3, Dead Island and the upcoming Skyrim and Halo Anniversary Edition. I'll talk about how impressed I am with Gears later. But the most anticipated game since Halo Reach is now in my hot little mitts. It's all about WW3. 

I didn't expect that WW3 would have already started. We've already seen the previews. Check out this. 

 

I guess that's all I've got to say. How does it get better than doing commando duty on Wall Street? Just you wait until Chapter Two. This is the most astonishing action I've seen. More later...

Chris Crawford: Efficiency vs Effectiveness

Listening to the entirety of Crawford's Dragon Speech is truly going back in time to the very verge of the computer revolution. He is just about two years my senior in terms of the sort of intro the both of us got into computing, and demonstrates exactly the sort of personality that dominated the thinking about the future of what has become the computing universe.

 

"That is the basic problem that we face. The expository lecture is efficient."

When I listen to Crawford, especially as he speaks about Alan Kay, I am really kind of shocked into self-recognition at the kind of approach we took in thinking about how computing could change society. I think of Crawford as rather oblivious to the market, and in comparison, the current generation is obsessed with the market. 

This is something of another opportunity for me to suggest that today's social software tends to be democratizing in a simplistic and rather shallow way. We are finding hundreds of ways to get 17 cents worth of attention from tens of millions, rather than 1700 dollars worth of respect from hundreds of thousands. Which will advance us? How much effectiveness will we get out of the kind of interactivity that is become the defacto market standard on the web? I think part of the answer is how little traffic Crawford's website has garnered. 

At the very least, somebody ought to transcribe the Dragon Speech. It is an excellent marker in history. Crawford was thinking what we were all thinking. Now that we have the technology, Bioware is the closest to what Crawford dreamed. As great as Mass Effect is, is that the story we have always really wanted to tell?

 

Cow Clicker

It has been over a year since I last played Mafia Wars. I collected billions of stuff, and I think it has one truly great educational aspect. As you collect millions of dollars a day, you recognize how big a trillion dollars truly is. Aside from that, I follow Ian Bogost to keep my head straight about what is and is not a waste of braincells with regard to gaming. 

His Cow Clicker is a classic meme. Know it.

Cranky Over Gay Games

I get emails from the editors of The Root, a singular publication sponsored by Skip Gates, that continues and extends crackpot racial conspiracy theories for those who dig them. It's only rarely that I find anything that really interests me, but almost never enough to comment. Today, however, I've gotten forwarded a second missive on the same 'university study' about how the 'gaming community' is complicit in the assault against 'minorities'. I excerpt.

The GAMBIT study involved creating and registering gamer profiles with the names PROUD_2B_MUSLIM, GayPride90 and Black_N_Proud90, and playing Halo: Reach online with random players (for those who don’t know, the use of hate speech in gaming is usually associated with the proliferation of console multi-player gaming via the original Halo). As you can probably guess, the players using those names suffered much verbal abuse directed towards the identities their names indicated they had. Not only that, in player vs. player combat those with the minority-identified names were more aggressively targeted.

Good’s analysis of this study is, to my mind at least, indicative of the ossified privilege that is endemic to gaming as an industry explicitly designed to serve the sensibilities of disgruntled white teenage boys. Good looks at the hate speech and aggressive play and concludes that the minority-identified players brought the abuse upon themselves. Good writes – “If you’re looking to be called the usual filth-flarn-flarn-filth-flarn, those are some awesome gamertags, well worth the 800 Microsoft Points change fees.”

Good’s insinuation, as per his title, is that GAMBIT is involved in “intellectualized trolling” here, but his use of the term “trolling” is both disingenuous and fundamentally incorrect. Trolling, as those who have spent even a small amount of time on internet message boards will tell you, is a sort of forum sport in which a member posts something for the sole purpose of causing arguments and strife within the topic or thread. By definition, trolling is provocation – it is done solely to elicit emotion and negative response.

Thus, what Good is really implying is that being a Muslim, or black, or a woman, or a gay person, and being open about that fact to others, is an open provocation in the gay community, that being a minority player is something that you inflict on other people. There’s no real scandal in being called a nigger or a fag or a cunt in a game, or being singled out for aggression based on your identity – it wouldn’t have happened had you kept it to yourself. The onus is on the abused to prevent abuse. This is, obviously, a repugnant view to hold to, but it’s one that seems to be held as widely agreeable within the gaming community.

Obviously there's some subtlety involved in determining who's writing a review of a review of a study about what gamers say and think and the reasons they do so. Which is why, after a couple glasses of Jack Daniels, it was so easy for me to get some gut rumbles about the foolishness of the entire matter. I responded like Redd Foxx.. to wit.

All this reminds me of loud minority talk of the 70s after there was nothing left to burn after 68. At some point it continues on its own momentum driven not by substance but by the curiosity of people who really actually don't give a shit, and the fanaticism of people who do. It becomes a trope which actually challenges nobody because it's always priced out of the reasonableness of the discussion. 

One day somebody is going to make a gay game character that's as popular as the Master Chief, just like we might have said in 1974, one day a black man is going to win the Oscar for best actor. The problem is that in 1974 the black actors getting consideration were simply not in a position through a combination of skill and connection to win that prize, and so everybody suffered loud minority guff amongst films like Blackula and Super Fly TNT. And that is about the status of gay gaming right now. No amount of ranting and raving and critical theory, scholarly melioration or minority hermaneutics of any degree is going to create that great gay game. It's going to take the Denzel who was born to do it. And today that game programmer doesn't exist, or he's just batting in the bush leagues. So what. 

I imagine that it's difficult for people with iphones who can complain about having a dropped call (!) to try to imagine how millions of people survived before the advent of the boombox - how anybody could possibly appreciate monaural music collections consisting of fewer than 100 albums - how could we possibly find music to fall in love, get married and make babies to, and in that order. And with no black actors taking home the gold statue, how might we have found any self-respect? It comes as no surprise that such people, clueless as to what it might be like to face mandatory conscription, could lose sleep over being called an EPITHET by some anonymous teenager in a virtual game room. Such things are considered significant by this generation. It's weakness, I tell you. It's weakness because 55 year old men who have no compunction for giving you an actual illegal ass-kicking *say* it's weakness. Think of that the next time you say 'Kadafi'. You share this planet with true, honest to goodness badasses who do drink, smoke, curse, spit, cheat, and fight dirty. Love *that* neighbor, ya yellow whelp. 

One of these days, when you prissy little pricks get through a divorce, a heart attack, a child custody battle, an irs audit, a felony conviction, a civil suit, a foreclosure or a something more serious than a teabagging in Call of Duty, please write us another 1000 words about how much we need virtual alternate role models. 

Or fucking write the game yourself.

It makes no sense, of course, for today's gay gaming community - whatever that is, to emulate the black community of the 70s -whatever that was.  Nor does it really make any sense to dignify those 'communities' until such time as they manage to overthrow a dictator and convince the international community - whatever that is, to lob some cruise missiles in their favor.  

Habeas Corpus.

The Ten Great Video Games That Changed Everything

1. PacMan

2. Myst

3. Doom

4. Halo

5. Grand Theft Auto

6. Tetris

7. Warcraft

8. Virtua Fighter

9. Donkey Kong

10. Second Life

--

None of these are the best and they have all been superceded in what they can do, but each was a game changer in their own way. They each had a twist to them that changed the way people thought about video games and gaming. 

Obviously PacMan started this off. It was the beginning of the end of the domination of pinball machines and the first compelling videogame that intrigued a generation. There were other games in that era that were more innovative after the fact of PacMan. The great arcade games of the day, Asteroids, Defender, Atari Football, Zaxxon, Missile Command, Galaxians and Centipede were all the greats. But PacMan was the one that showed it could be done, that video oriented electronic games could beat pinball. But it was Donkey Kong that pushed the obsession to the next level and made Nintendo the King. There was no other game that sucked down so many quarters and hours after PacMan and brought a new generation into the arcades.

It took decades, really, for pinball to give up the ghost. And it probably wasn't until the early and mid 90s with the rise of the fighting games that arcades all over America realized that the money was all about the video. Virtua Fighter was the game that took button mashing to a new era. Now I am showing my bias because Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat were the other kings of the arcade in the days when The Fugees were singing 'Mona Lisa', but the sophistication of Virtua Fighter was the game that put a third dimension into arcade fighting.

On the techie level I'd be remiss to not give honorable mention to Castle Wolfenstein but it was Doom that changed gaming on the PC and got people shooting at work. Well, if you were in the computer business. Which takes us back to Tetris, a simple, beautifully obsessive game that showed us that.. well I don't know what it showed us. How easily we could be seduced by a simulation of gravity? 

Warcraft I just threw in there because I know it's big, but I never touched the thing. Most PC games, in their early incarnations just made me dizzy and gave me headaches. In fact, just watching a video of Doom makes me feel ill. It's why I stayed in the arcades and never gave much time over to PC gaming until, Myst.

This list and idea exists because of Myst, which I think more than just about any other game, completely blew away all the competition and made everybody aware of how fantastically beautiful, musically engulfing and intellectually challenging a video game could be. Myst was the siren call of the future and we knew finally that we were in a new era. Pong and PacMan were invented to keep us all seeding the market with money so that Myst could be born. Myst, single-handedly created immersion.

Grand Theft Auto was the sandbox game that proved that virtual gaming could be purposeless and sometimes it was better just to do nothing but be bad. It shifted the mind. I didn't arrive at the series until Vice City which was nowhere near as good as San Andreas, where it all got perfected, but it was GTA that made the sandbox real.

Halo made the XBox. It also marked the beginning of a universe that actually bore some reality to mature science fiction. Second Life was immersion part two. And that's about all I have to say about that.

Mario. Zelda. Tomb Raider. Final Fantasy? All kiddie garbage. I'd put the Sims in there before any of that stuff which I think is all at the level of Super Monkeyball and Sonic the Hedgehog. 

Madden. Half Life. Metal Gear. Resident Evil. All honorable mention, but then I'd have to talk about Starcraft and Sin and Black & White and Civilization and whole bunch of other very good, even excellent franchises. But they didn't change the world. They just gave it flavor, and bottom line they dont make the top ten. I gave you Warcraft so get off me.

Now in the modern era of gaming, which basically means the current dominating consoles PS3, XBox360 and gaming boxes, I have some choice choices. But that's for another day.

The Last and Only Funk

Toejam & Earl was the one and only funk themed videogame to make it to the XBox. Everything else is derivative. Props to the man who saved these.

 

Ebert vs Gamers

Here is a comment I wrote that's too big to fit over at NewSavanna. Check it out.

You may have heard that Ebert’s been kicking up a fuss about video games. He doesn’t think that they can ever be art. This little tempest in a teapot led him to Tweet and then blog a simple question: “Which of these would you value more? A great video game. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.” The answer came back 13,823 to 8,088 in favor of video games.

And so Ebert posted that result to his blog, while also admitting that there was nothing remotely scientific about his procedure. It’s just an informal question, with an answer that didn’t please him. And he launches into a defense and justification of literature without, however, saying anything more against video games. For the moment, that’s done and gone.

Right now there are legions of video games that allow you to walk in the shoes of characters with different backgrounds. The best of these provide and extraordinary experience. None so legendarily riveting as one of the early Call of Duty series that put you on Omaha Beach. It was, in just about every way, equal to the cinematic experience of Spielberg's opening to Saving Private Ryan, except that your character dies. You die over and over again from acts of violence whose origin you are incapable of determining. There is no strategy or tactic you can use to think your way up the beach. You simply die 10 or 12 times, and then by sheer luck you live and continue the game.

There are few ways to express the horror of war that are more impressive than that. You get your orders, you have your rifle, you move forward through chaos expecting to win, and you lose. Over and over again, you lose. You contribute a pile of bodies to the gory landscape as you recognize that there actually can be no war narrative as subtle and compelling as your game experience. Nobody survives it.

The power of historical simulations in the narrative form of Call of Duty may be instructive, depending on the intent of the authors, but nothing is quite as immersive as those 'period pieces' we refer to as sandbox RPGs.

An RPG is a role-playing game. You inhabit a character which is either a pre-selected individual whose skills you can modify slightly through gained experience, or whose appearance and characteristics you can modify greatly. A sandbox game in one in which you are given a very large area in which to play - a realm as it were, and whose specific narrative is addressed at your leisure.

In a game like Call of Duty, you are assigned missions and you work with your squadmates (either real people online, or AIs) to accomplish them. There is nothing else to do and you must walk a narrow path. For example, you are walking through a shallow river in a jungle on a Pacific Island - your mission is to destroy a Japanese weapons depot. Enemies snipe at you in the river canyon. All you can do is evade them, shoot back and get to the ammo dump alive, then blow it up. Mission accomplished. Next mission.

In a sandbox game, you are in a wide open space, 1945 Brooklyn perhaps, and now home from the war you are to find a job in the mob. But you can stop and shop, talk to neighbors and waste as much time as you like interacting with people who are non-essential to the primary plot. These may be mini-missions, like find a cheating husband, or a missing child which only serve to shape your character independent of the primary mission. It is almost unanimous that the two greatest sandbox RPGs are Grand Theft Auto 4 and Red Dead Redemption. One set in contemporary NYC and the other on the border of Texas & Mexico circa 1900.

Games such as these challenge designers to create a verisimilitude that will engage gamers as long as a good book would. One generally expects to finish a straight mission based game like Call of Duty in under 10 hours. But a sandbox RPG like Mafia 2 or Fallout 3 contain easily 60 hours of immersion. To complete every main and side quest in such games can easily take double that amount of time. And recall that in most sandbox games, your actions change the character. So often gamers will play the entire game as a good person and then replay the entire game as an evil person.

The opportunity for critical evaluation of video games as literature is enormous. The difficulty is that the bulk of the industry is perceived callously by intellectuals, who are invariably not gamers. And because games are sophisticated, it's not easy to become one.

One commonly cited reason that games are dismissed is because of their violent content. It is reasonable to note that violence is part of the attraction of many many video games. But the same can be said of Western movies. A war simulation as a first person shooter is about as hacked a genre as cowboys and indians. But there are better and worse, and the proper role of the critic is to nudge the art along.

I think this will inevitably happen because the bandwidth for games is so broad. Unlike with hiphop, I think the lack of intellectual criticism will not hinder the aesthetic value of video games. They are much too expensive an enterprise and require too much collaborative creativity to continue on momentum alone. And quite frankly, outside the MSM, there is some serious gamer crit.

Even though he is employed by Microsoft, a cat named 'Major Nelson' sets a fairly high standard for commentary. The most widely know critics are G4TV's Adam Sessler and Morgan Web. They've been in the business for over a decade, and more and more often, in almost every one of their daily shows called X-Play they queue the phrase 'brutally honest review' for games you know are going to suck.

There are artists in the realm of video game design and production, and while blockbuster titles tend to make all the moola, there is an 'indie' spirit that is alive and well in the industry. But overall, the industry is just at that point where technology is beginning to matter less and less, and richer stories, characters and experiences are required. I don't think you'll find anyone who could dismiss the richness of the worlds created in games like Bioshock and Mass Effect 2. Is it art? If anyone could possibly consider Roger Corman an artist, then video games have been art for a long time. Is it fine art? It's getting close.

Halo Reach: Full Satisfying Circle

Aha.

Halo Reach is a very fine conclusion to the Halo series. And I say that strictly based on the aha moment I had coming to the close of the campaign. The discovery of my player's identity as the Master Chief, the one chosen by Cortana, late in the game was just  magical. I said "I got it".

I have to say that makes Reach the most consistent and satisfying prequel I've ever played, watched, or read. History comes alive in the Halo universe on Reach. I say this having the benefit of one aspect of the Halo universe that goes very often without much fanfare, and that is the I Love Bees audio drama. Over the past couple weeks, the first previews of the final installment played. One of them was a live action trailer showing families on Reach the first day of the Covenant invasion - at the moment the battle began. It immediately drew me in emotionally to the idea of humanity threatened, and echoes of I Love Bees surfaced. That, my friends, is fine sci-fi.

Reach is the saddest installment. And while I'm sure it will end on a note of hope as the Pillar of Autumn escapes the doomed planet, there is nothing that quite has the emotional impact of fighting with a squad that gradually gets ground down to one. There is urgency in the arc of the story that is missing from most of the ODST. Only in a few parts of that mission were soldiers involved in protecting civilians. The most dramatic of these scenarios is actually in the Halo Wars RTS where the player is responsible for protecting evac ships. That theme is resumed, if only through cut scenes, in Halo Reach - and again, it adds an element of tragedy. Where ODST finds one wandering solo through a maze of confusion in New Mombasa, puzzling things out with plenty of time - the tragic urgency of Reach penetrates your gaming skull.

Reach has everything. It's hard to imagine how many features they packed into the game. When you compare it to the prior Halo games, it makes you think - wow, they sure have gotten better over the past 7 years. It also makes you appreciate how much compute power is packed into the XBox 360 as a platform, and how extraordinary it is to have the network capabilities it has. There are all sorts of vehicles, there are a huge number of different game types. There is a broad selection of skill loadouts that allow you to change tactics on every respawn. There are multiple cool ways to play co-op or competitively. There are custome games - and it all works well without any degradation or much change in the feel of the overall Halo playing style. It very much feels like Halo, even though I still want to melee with the B button.

Somewhat new to Halo is a lot more flying. From personal jet packs, to VTOLs to space fighters, there are many ways to engage aerial combat. The space fighting is inspired. Speaking of which, Reach has a gigantic moon. What's up with that thing?

Anyway, it's good that Halo is back. They grossed 200 million in the first week and there are half a million players online at any one time on average this week. Not bad.

The Lethal One Is Dead

I know his real name. I know his voice. I know what he would say. I know where he has been. And now that he is on his way to heaven, I don't want to go to his funeral. I know I'm being selfish, and I don't want to face the fact of his death. It wasn't that he seemed invincible, but you figured the old bastard would be around a lot longer. This is not a eulogy. This is just something I've got to say.

It hasn't been quite a year, I don't think, since the last of my online gamer buddies died. And now here we go again. It's breaking my heart, just breaking my heart.

His tag was 'Lethalme'. Three syllables, with the accent on 'me'. He was leader of the Cult of Sun Tzu, a scabbarous wag with a salty tongue and the conspiratorial honesty of old men. No. He wasn't our leader, he was our heart and soul and center of gravity. We loved him. We loved him like a crazy uncle, like a man too wise for words who never bothered to lecture us. I would call him by his name but I never met him in person. It doesn't feel right. We lived in dozens of virtual spaces communicating in real time, but I never shook his hand or bought him a drink.

I met him about six years ago in Moscow. We were driving our Ferraris in circles around Red Square and he was cursing out some kid. And the kid said how old are you? and you must be high. He said I'm old enough to be your grandfather and I'm smoking a bowl right now. Four months out of the year he smoked bowls of weed. We would notice the change in his attitude when he was off the stuff. I thought he just enjoyed it, and I liked his discipline. He'd go out to the garage and light up because it wasn't allowed in the house. I didn't know it was because of the cancer until years later.

One day, out of the blue, we talked about USC. He went there some time around the sixties when there weren't many black folks around. We talked about old black LA, for about 90 minutes. I can't remember a minute of it, but I could tell he was a man about town. He was a musician, and got a full ride on scholarship. I forget what he played, but I know he got himself a new guitar in the last days. It was the only picture I had of him. He was happy to be learning, and it was a good expensive guitar. He said it was easier than he expected.

There's a popular commercial about the Most Interesting Man in the World. The Lethal One was the most interesting man I ever knew. He was a real life hot rodder back in 50s Los Angeles and he ran with the street racers. He played golf with Mamie Clayton's family. He was a railroad engineer. He was an air traffic controller. He was the kind of man who lived by his wits when it was necessary. He didn't dwell on the past. He made his avatar a woman who looked like her name would be Mabel or Flo. He liked drivers and shooters. He liked us.

He lived on the eastern edge of the City of Angels on the western edge of the desert. Every night he would sit out in the garage and turn on the wheel. It wasn't easy to piss him off and he wasn't arbitrary, but suddenly somebody would be on his shit list and we'd never hear the end of it. That happened to TapDancer. That happened to Ferfer. That happened to Volvo. But Ferfer got back into the fold somehow. The Lethal One wasn't vengeful. 

Lethal liked me. He always spoke highly of me. He used to call me 'Six'. Said I was a good looking dude with a good looking family. He said I was pretty smart. I spent many weeks thinking about how I'd make my way out to the desert and cook up some steaks with him. Last year we all promised to get together at the Long Beach Grand Prix, but he had family in for the weekend and pulled out at the last minute. So that summer when I got tickets to Return to Forever, I tried to get him out. But he couldn't make it. I figured that I'd catch up to him sooner or later.

He was beyond discipline in the way that men who get away with it are. So I never heard him complain. Oh sure he had his moments when we talked politics and he was even into a conspiracy theory or two.  But he didn't try to get people to do what he wanted them to do - he would just tell you plainly.

You could go through two lifetimes and never meet one such as the Lethal One. He was one of those characters you'd expect Rudyard Kipling to write about. A man's man, a lover of people, a disciple of a few glorious callings and a rascal as constant and faithful. He had a beautiful charisma. He never lied. He never faked the funk. He never changed his accent. He might have done several things for no good reason but he was passionate like that. He explained himself, but didn't make excuses.

I never met him in person. I never will.

And there I am again, this gamer, this virtual presence with my virtual friends all so near and dear to my heart disappearing. I have a thousand mashed up memories from a thousand hours with The Lethal One and our friends. And I'm a loser. He's off the grid.

Ooooh baby! He would say. We'd be swinging around the last corner on the Washington DC circuit in AC Cobras and he'd be in 6th or 7th place. Kudos in jeopardy! Or we'd be at the first hairpin turn at the end of the downhill straight at Mugello and everybody would want to stay clear of his havoc. Or we'd be at the old neon sign graveyard outside of Vegas and he would play Dickstepper with the shotty. He used to stand outside the near door at the Presidio and toss grenades. That was always his entrance - predictable every time. He used to drive the Mouse Mini Cooper for the Red Team on the Ring. He used to love that stupid beach map on Island Thunder. And he always used to get caught in the hallways in The Vault or coming up the ladder from the basement tunnels at . We battled together at the train stations of Black Arrow, the casino rooftops in Vegas 2, the tank field at Modern Warfare, fighting Nazi zombies in a beat up old building with a sofa in the middle of a staircase and a hundred other places. Fake soldiers dying fake deaths together, friends until the end.

The lobby is empty. The adventure seems hollow. I won't be able to draft him, pass him and let him spin out challengers on my six. I won't be able to hear him tell me for the 55th time how much better Forza is with the wheel.

I'm all disjointed. The friends on my friends list were friends because Lethal was a friend. The death of Fastlane Ken was the one of the one two, and now Lethal is dead. That's the other shoe dropping. That's the end of the era. That's the last straw. There's almost no reason to go back online to XBox Live. I'm never going to meet anyone like him again. Anywhere. Ever.

I don't know what stage I'm at now. Anger I think. Lethalme was one of those men whom if you had them as a friend, and I did, you would never need a psychiatrist. I feel the planet one man lighter. Less alive. And I feel that somehow I have to be part of him now that he's gone. I have to let some of him live in me beyond the effects I experienced. But I have to move on. I can't sit here and regret that I don't have a voice recording all transcribed for my library. I have to be that guy. I'm angry at God. That's what kind of man we lost. The kind of man whose absence makes you mad that you have to live post-. 

I have to wring out all of my sentiments. Death comes to us all. Cancer. Well you only temporarily beat any disease. Sooner or later something kills you. We're all in remission. We all relapse. Life itself is a bedside vigil.So you do right while you're alive. You make your mark. You love your people and you make them remember the pride and the joy and the energy and fortitude of your life. The Lethal One did all that and I am glad to have known him in the narrow way I did, through this electronic network that augments our ability to cover distance and time. His life came through it and he touched me on this side. It was a human encounter and it came through in his voice and through his transmitted actions. It was a friendship that lasted for years. It has produced fond memories that will be with me until my end.

Goodnight Lethal.

Microsoft: Too Big And Failing

Maybe it was Cringely who suggested it, but I'm sure the idea has been thrown around a lot. Break Microsoft up. I with the wisdom of that idea would finally get some traction inside Redmond. Or at least it's my interpretation that the big shakeup there is not going to result in the spinning off of companies.

The news is explained thusly:

Robbie Bach and J. Allard, both of whom were both instrumental in creating consumer products through Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, both are leaving the company as part of a broader reorganization, reports TechFlash. As a result, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, will initially gain greater control over the division, which includes the Xbox, Zune and Windows Mobile products.

Ballmer? I'm trying to imagine how exactly Ballmer helps Microsoft do anything new or exciting. New and exciting is what must occur... What am I saying? That's never going to happen. Microsoft is a bit too far up in the woods for the culture of 'exciting' to permeate. Microsoft is a university and a universe. But it's sluggish and bound up in the slow that never quite leads the market. Of course, I'm biased. There are some outstanding things that Microsoft does, just not quite as great as they ought. They leave a lot of tech on the table - I mean an entirely too large chunk.

What I learned about Microsoft in my months in Redmond is that it's a Bank and a Marketing Machine, and because of those two things, all ideas are shaped in very particular ways, meaning stuff is matrixed out to the infrastructure and a lot of good stuff doesn't survive the process. Stuff that with the same amount of attention in a smaller organization might work just great. What saves Microsoft is the leverage the good-enough stuff gets when the market share gets past the adoption tipping point. Take Sharepoint for example. It is my studied opinion that Sharepoint is craptastic squared. There are so many other better ways to provide the functionality of Sharepoint that it's almost impossible for me to imagine somebody as smart as Ray Ozzie would be involved. It may have ingested all of Groove's technology, but it completely lost all of Groove's appeal. But now Sharepoint is too big to fail, and mediocrities all over the world will support it from now until doomsday. Proprietary lock-in. Leadership through religious fanaticism. That's what the Microsoft machine produces. Choice is the enemy, and therefore Microsoft has very few choice products. Yeah I use BaseCamp, and I'm looking at Google Sites.

Microsoft is the king of Gaming. So what disturbs me about this development is that the golden egg that is the XBox360 franchise is in jeopardy. Yes the Zune is a disaster. Everybody in that portable music player market got owned by Apple, just demolished. Window Mobile too. I never took that seriously - I mean did it ever even really compete with Nokia? Now that HP has Palm, there's no place for Windows Mobile to go. HP was the killer hardware for Windows Mobile back in the day. Those days are over. And that new roundy thing that looks like it feels like the Palm Pixi from Microsoft is probably going nowhere. So 2/3rds of this division is a nightmare. Painful.

If I were Ballmer what would I do?

I would abandon Microsoft technology and get some designers to design consumer products from scratch. It has to be as radical as GM spinning off Saturn. It might be too late, but it's got to be that independent. Let Microsoft use its money to allow multiple brands to emerge. XBox is a brand. Nobody cares that it's Microsoft. It works fine on its own. 

Here's what I'm suggesting - here me out. Look at your small consumer electronics companies. Microsoft has brain overkill for that product market. They only have to be marginally smarter and use their cheaper money (big deal) to make an impact in those markets, and downmarket from Apple's entry into the home electronics space, they can win. They can use the Microsoft mojo to hire top creative talent and try some really cool things. I'm going to list a handful of players I think Microsoft could outwit.

VTech. Audiovox. Jensen. Cobra. . But here's a real killer - a company and business that could have been inside Microsoft: Vizio. Yes them. Microsoft did nothing in TV, and now it's never going to catch up to Google TV whatever that might be. Before you knock the idea, consider Sync. Microsoft partnered with Ford and now their tech is making a big difference in car audio. If I was Ballmer, I'd be buying up shares of Panasonic, Sharp or Sanyo.

If Microsoft is going to survive as a huge company, then it needs to understand how to brand like a small company. It can learn from consumer goods companies like P&G, SCJohnson and Clorox.

Halo Reach Beta: First Look

I haven't written about games and gamers for a while. There really hasn't been much to talk about. I went down the rabbit hole of Mass Effect 2, and I'm not even sure if I wrote a review of that. It has taken up most of my gaming time before Splinter Cell Conviction. Now I finished SCC and am back to run through Mass Effect 2 a second time. Nothing's yawny, nor is anything compelling and I've been having flashbacks to Fallout 3, especially since I worked in DC. But I have to say that Modern Warfare 2 has taken all of my online buds away from me and so gaming is not so much fun any longer. Besides, I have other fish to fry.

Nevertheless, I discovered what I long forgot, that the Halo Reach beta was attached to ODST, and so I downloaded the gig last night and played it with my son until 2 in the morning. It's fairly impressive.

The first thing you will notice about Halo Reach is that it's kinda Halo and kinda not. You have to adjust your reflexes all over again. I'm not sure if that's back to ODST reflexes or Halo 2 or something else, but the layout feels strangely unfamiliar at first. Melee is no longer on the B button, and that's hella strange in Halo. Instead its RB. On the LB you have powers. Yes. These are old school spartans that have more up their sleeve than the Master Chief ever did. Shields, extra speed, and invisibility. Hmm. That makes for some interesting action, but wait. Did I mention that you can fly?

Flying (yuk yuk) adds a new dimension to gameplay that I haven't felt since Crackdown. And it's really smartly done. You are flying with momentum, not like Guilty Spark in build mode. And it works nicely to cushion falls from high places and to sneak up on unsuspecting enemies.

But really, the best thing about Reach is the speed. It is just as fast as Modern Warfare, and when your sprint ability is engaged on the LB you feel as though you're right back in those Clancy trenches. It's immediately familiar. Plus you have an indicator to know when your speed is over - so you can conserve your power. Another subtly brilliant touch from the masters at Bungie. (Or is this Bungie any longer?) Overall, the game is very fast and varied - you don't spend much time running around looking for weapons, you just pick a loadout and start running and gunning.

Additionally, you gain experience points (like MW2) and with those points you can upgrade your armor. Very cool. 

There is a new crop of weapons, some of which are brand new, some of which are kinda familiar going back to the original Halo. The needler is old looking but performs like the proper new needler. The standard assault rifle is right on. The same old pistol works predictably. There is a new needle pistol and needle rifle for Covy weapons. The needle rifle is extra cool.

Game modes are new and exciting. Invasion is my favorite. Spartans vs Covenant in a six on six with vehicles with escalating loadouts. You start as something simple and as rounds go by you get more loadout options and more weapons on the map. Arena mode I haven't played, but I think it takes ranking to a new level. Looks very interesting.

The maps are superb as usual. Growing on me as time goes by is a multilevel deally called Sword Bay or some such. Very different flavor of interior spaces, and windows I can tell are kinda optional in the beta. I didn't like it at first. Powerhouse is immediately cool, reminiscent of High Ground and Standoff. Boneyard is great. Open middle with high refineryesque buildings on both sides. Great for sniping OK for vehicles. Great for flying.

This is going to be a very great game, because the Beta is as good as Halo 2 was. I also particularly dig the new Social settings, so I can choose what kind of players to play with. Nicely.

The New Sam Fisher

I have finished the latest Splinter Cell on medium. It is, I think, finally mature and has superceded all of its previous incarnations. The Clancy Universe does need what's coming next and I'm sure that along with Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, this kind of splinter operation will be nicely useful in the future.

Since the introduction of the idea that the various aspects of game play across the Clancy genres will blend and mix in the future, I have been thinking about their various strengths and weaknesses. Clearly, the coolest thing about Ghost Recon are the advanced warfighter roles. Using drones, armor and calling in air support are part of the most interesting aspects of game play. Capturing large patches of territory with ground forces are just what that's all about. I also enjoyed for a short period, Clancy's voice command in EndWar but the fact that my own online buds didn't made it far less enjoyable than it might have been. I found that the lack of good collab online really destroyed the possibilities, and it was too complex for simple head to head in real-time. Too complex to be fun, that is.

Ubisoft may yet have an MMO in the Clancy Universe. If it happens, I'll likely enjoy a role with Rainbow Six special forces if my online buds come along, but if not, I'll be happy to go it alone as Sam Fisher.

It turns out that as I finish up the Realistic mode (about halfway through) I am also now going back for a second bite at the Mass Effect apple. This time I've made my character a total renegade - I have less patience for the cinematics and storytelling. Fisher puts you into that mode of intense concentration and tests your patience for physical strategy - almost like The Portal (I haven't played Prince of Persia much, and I don't particularly like it). The only other single character that ranks up that high for physical awareness in the environment is the one from Assassin's Creed. Fable and Halo don't really come close. Crackdown might, but that's a different kind of game, more like Mercenaries 2, both excellent with M2 being my preferred game of the two.

After a few hours, Sam's actions come very smoothly. The Execute feature is really cool and even cooler in multiplayer. The changing of the entire scene to black and white to indicate stealth is a stroke of genius and it executes so smoothly. I am surprised, however, that this edition has decided not to give Sam access to any sniper rifles. Not that he can't snipe, and silently at that, but I think it was a good decision overall. Sam works best inside.

As for the Conviction plot and story. It's all first rate. The environments are excellent and the voice talent is superb. I like all of the choices they've taken, including the projected instructions, reverse fly-throughs and lack of level maps. It has taken long for this package to arrive, but it is a complete package.

Borderlands

Borderlands starts off exactly like a video from Gorillaz and it gets better from there. Like most gamers, I was surprised at the novelty of this little unknown FPS looter game, and now I'm many hours deep into it. 

Borderlands is a pretty straightforward adventure. You're a mercenary on a strange planet looking for alien technology and clues to a great treasure. All sorts of baddies inhabit the joint and all sorts of missions bring you closer to the goal, which is The Vault. You power up by experience points, competencies, dollars and increasingly powerful weapons all of which spurt out of the dying bodies of your foes, be they man or beast. You pick them up, buy and sell and try to stay alive. The entire shebang takes place on planet Pandora which is, like everything else in the game, a cel-shaded menagerie of desolation - kind of like the wild west desert from Warner Brother's Road Runner cartoon mixed in with a Robocop / Heavy Metal / Mad Max aesthetic. Actually, I'd say it borrows most from Mad Max - there's even a character called Mad Mel. So you're out there with your BDU of weapons, revolvers, repeaters, SMGs, rifles, saws, snipers, grenades and shotties leveling up through the wastes. 

What makes this super cool is the elemental mods. There are several 'elementals' that make your weapons more powerful. They are fire, acid, electric shock, and explosion. As you might imagine, when you're shooting the bad guys, it's much more fun when your bullets can make a splashy 1pH  shower that melts them into a green pool of goo. Did I mention that the death animations are awesome? The electric shock kills fry the skin off their bones.

Also, rabid fun are the grenade mods. You got your basic grenades and then you can make them sticky or bouncy or MIRVy or health stealing in addition to the elemental mods. Coolest. Grenades. Ever. Except they're generally not as deadly as grenades in any other game. They've been detuned. Considering what they do, it would make the whole game a no-brainer if they were as destructive as they should be.

The baddies themselves and just about everything else but the music are very imaginatively rendered. There's a great twisted sense of black humor underlying the entire game (if you haven't already surmised). And the best exemplars of that are the flaming badass psycho. Yes that's what they call them. Imagine a lunatic skinhead whose body is on fire running at you with a hatchet screaming at the top of his lungs like 'I'm taking my pound of flesh'. Hilariously creepy - more hilarious if you have an acid shotgun or an exploding sniper. Oh and don't forget the midgets with their shotguns. They have the helium voices and the recoil knocks them on their butts, then they get up and come at you again. 44 magnum to the head works every time.

There are so many missions, but the skill levels are tight. So if you find yourself outranked (you can see the rank level of your enemies) in a battle by more than one or two levels, you can pretty much forget it. Even though you can stop the action to do a bit of turn based fighting, switching weapons to find the weaknesses of your foes, they will outnumber and overwhelm you. Best to do some side missions and level up so that you're two or three levels up. Then the game is a lot more fun. 

Yes there are boss battles, no they're not that much fun, yes they will have you respawning like a newb, yes they are worth it. Yes there are interesting surprises and the joint is massive, if disjointed. I mean the place is very large and you need fast travel and vehicles (which it has) to get around.

You get to develop all sorts of skills. There are four characters from which to choose your avatar. I took the hunter, who specialized in sniping. My special power is a raptor familiar called 'Bloodwing' I send to take out an enemy at long distance. It can be armed with an elemental too, and for each level point my skills combined with those of my special power can be enhanced. Accuracy, loading times, loot rate of return - that kind of stuff. I haven't checked out the multiplayer and I think a MP coop would be very cool, but I'm late to the party getting this. 

There is no detail overlooked in Borderlands. It looks way simpler than it is and it plays very simply too, but they've engineered the hell out of it to deliver consistent fun and challenge. Not too dramatic, not too cliche and always something new to see. I think the cel shaded environments are brilliant and just the right mix of devastation and rube goldberg tech. This is a first rate game. Yeah. I love it. 

Is it awesome? No. The story is not the point and so there's no emotional support for the mission. You just loot and shoot - cockeyed mercenary stuff but not as fun as Mercenaries Two. Still, I'd give it five stars. 

Echoes of the Rachni Wars

Echoes of the Rachni Wars

I have begun and completed my next RPG, returning to the galaxy as Max Shepherd. Last time around I checked in Geth Hunting an interest in the tedium of searching planets for clues and fuel. This time around I have a better ship and can just send down a probe. Nice.

The return to the Mass Effect galaxy begins dramatically with the destruction of just about every link to the past, including your avatar, at first. It continues with with a larger cast of characters, a much improved combat system, a sweetly fine-tuned set of angelic and devilish responses and the same extraordinary real-time rendered cutscenes and excellent vocal talent that made the original such a compelling game.

The twist is now that Shepherd is a true galactic hero he has to fight against his reputation because he is allied with a non-governmental movement headed by The Illusive Man. This illusive man is, fortunately not so enigmatic as the illusive man of Half-Life. We understand his aims, if not his methods, but still very little of his origins.

I probably worked my way through the entire epic in about 30 hours over three weekends, and after the climax I was not particularly hungry for more. Still, this is clearly a game that begs to be played twice and I actually do want to go through it again with a bit more Renegade. I was balanced about 55 to 45 as the Paragon, which is actually a lot more difficult in this galaxy than it was to be a paragon in Knights of the Old Republic. KOTOR now seem incredibly slow and tedious by comparison. I think BioWare has struck the right balance between puzzle solving, moral choices, real-time and turn-based combat in this RPG. It moves at movie speed, and that's what's delicious about it. Lord of the Rings scale where you control the action. That's entertainment.

Interestingly, the most fascinating part of this particular epic was the part that I lost, which have particular poignancy as characters meet their fate at the end of the adventure. The game is setup so that in order to gain the loyalty of your specialists, you have to get off the main quest and do some favor for them. Some are conceptually simple, like shooting enemies in a boss-battle rite of passage. Others not so, like defending someone at trial, or pretending to be seduced. It was in these later two that I found myself outwitted by the logic of the game. Or more appropriately, I did not want my character to do those things which would have gained the loyalty of those specialists I was to help. In one case I consciously could not take the step, in the other case, I could not figure a way out of the impasse presented to create a win-win. It was only later upon reflection that the win-win scenario occurred to me, and so I had to lead the rest of the missions with the regret that I had failed one of my crew, which again had significant consequences as I led her through later battles. 

The more pedestrian aspects of gameplay have been improved as well. No longer was I required to land on innumerable tedious planets in search of precious metallic loot necessary to upgrade weapons and capabilities. A planetary scanner was a wonderful addition. As well, the detail paid to the encyclopedia of the galaxy was complete and proved to be fascinating to my daughter Scholar who followed along championing my efforts in this video drama. 

A fascinating move in this second installment was the inclusion of Mordin on the cast of characters assignable to the Normandy's crew. Previously, Shepherd worked his missions in the context of an historical understanding of the biological warfare against the species known as the Krogan. This time, Shepherd has to work with one of the engineers of that destruction on a personal basis. It gives a new immediacy and depth to the history as presented in the ME universe. The creation of the genophage is now not just an abstract point with which you can agree or disagree, you now have the complication of trying to make progress in your mission with one of the minds behind it.

It will likely take another two years for BioWare to sequel Mass Effect. Clearly there is much more action in store for Shepherd. I look forward to it.

--

There is only one thing that can top this, and if you're listening BioWare, hear this. Go after Iain M. Banks. Put the Culture into an RPG.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2

"Shepherd doesn't care about danger close."

If you play Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2 on Normal, you will finish it in eight hours. If you play in on one of the more advanced levels, you'll probably have too much time to think about it. I did not want to think about it that long. It's an ugly story.

But there is plenty of good, and some bad in this installment. Is it worth it? Yes. Does it live up to the hype? Yes, but. 

First off, the 'yes but'. This happens to be personal. I've been an XBox gamer for about six years. I've seen all the drivers and shooters and I will have to say that Forza 3 and CODMW2 are the best of the best. I think there are about four more games that I will have to play in my life and then the whole thing will be over. These games are delivering all the realism, and a good bit of narrative. After this, there is nothing but more historically accurate games to play, and if I were rich, that's one of the businesses I would invest in. Hannibal at Cannae, Montgomery at El Alamain. Bradley at The Bulge. Nelson at Trafalgar. You get the picture.. So I'm at the point at which the context of the story is more interesting than the online action, and COD is built for online action, except that it generally has a superb campaign. This campaign? Not so superb, but still excellent.

Essentially, you have to believe that if an American gunned down 200 civilians at an airport in Russia, that Russia would launch a shock and awe against Washington DC. And if you can believe that, then all of this makes sense. The impact of this story was somewhat lost on me primarily because I wanted to play this game so badly. I confess that I just rushed through it, but it's all starting to blur, BUT. This game makes for some truly standout action.

What's unique about MW2 is that there is every kind of mission here. You can tell that the developers wanted to give the player every way to shoot in this game. In the story there are firefights that you essentially cannot survive unless you hunker down and draw fire behind a riot shield while your teammate flanks. This is the best new and original tactic in any shooter, of a much greater quality than that of Rainbow Six. There are stealth snow missions with silenced rifles. There is a  free for all mission where bullets are flying everywhere. There are great sniper missions, one from a helicopter. There are missions with a Predator, and with a robotic halftrack gun. There are buildings to storm on a large scale and small breaching missions with hostage rescue, there is half-dead hand to hand combat, and there is the soon to be legendary terrorist mission. 

I'm trying to think of another battle in a shooter where things got so ugly that I lost my appetite to play. Nothing comes to mind. The situation is this. You are called upon to infiltrate an enemy cell. The commander of that cell, Makarov is one step ahead of you. Makarov attacks an airport terminal in Russia and his crew, including you, casually walk in with machine guns and start mowing down civilians. The control of the system is restricted. You cannot break from the group, you cannot run, all you can do is shoot. I'll be honest, I couldn't shoot the civvies. I killed a couple that were dragging their bodies away at the very end, but for the most part I shot at the ceiling and at the guards that were shooting back. I kept wondering if my reticence would break cover, but as I said, Makarov was onto me the entire time. I, the American, am killed and my body left at the scene of the massacre so that the USA takes the blame, thus begins WW3. Except that it's not WW3 it's just America vs all of its current enemies and foes. 

The battle comes to Washington DC and you fight in suburban Virginia and on the Mall. It's chilling for both its realism and similarity to Fallout 3 when it comes to trenches near the Washington Memorial. Thematically, our creatives are hunkering down for some remix of American failure - the film 2012 debuts this week as well. 

There are vehicle battles in this version which are very fast paced which makes up for their somewhat clumsy control. I get it, there should be frenzied action, but on the Normal level, some of the running kills are a bit too easy and the physics seem a bit contrived. And so let me speak to that. I think that by including all of these different styles of combat into one game, Infinity Ward has reached their limits. They are very high limits, but it's starting to show on a couple of the edges. When it comes to wide open battles, Ghost Recon still sets the technical standard. I still prefer the Ghost Recon tightness and control even though the missions are a lot less realistic in terms of chaos and fog of battle. And for the close in battles and tactical missions, I still like Rainbow Six although some of that is being challenged by the breach missions of MW2 which are very well done. Call of Duty rules in sniping, period. But ODST has really raised the bar for the combination of mission types and control. I felt myself slipping back into my Halo reflexes many times. That's somewhat annoying. 

Here's where Call of Duty rules. The Brazilian favela fighting is brilliant. The combination of weapons, civilians, tight areas, sniping opportunities, dogs, confusion and chaos is unprecedented. I've been waiting to actually hear some voice talent other than Russian and Spanish in all of these shooters and COD delivers with Portuguese and Arabic, finally. The tactical missions, which I have just begun are also very very good. It's an innovation that takes what began in Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell did for training to the next level. Giving a nod to the training missions of the great PsyOps Mindgate Conspiracy, COD rules. 

Oddly enough, for the online, I don't expect much. I'm curious to see if the advantages gained by access to tanks, aircraft, dogs and artillery don't make for greatly unbalanced gameplay as they have in previous games. I much prefer the Halo approach where more powerful weapons and battlefield positions are objects of direct competition rather than perks for kills. But if there are zombie levels, I'll be happy for that.

All in all this is a great game, and I suppose that I will enjoy it as much as anyone my age and sophistication will admit, which is, admittedly declining. Then again, some people watch football.

Apple + Amazon + Adobe > Google

Somebody out there thinks that an Apple gaming platform would be really nice. That somebody is obviously not a gamer. 

The quick and dirty answer to the question of whether or not Apple could float a decent gaming platform out there is yes. yes in lowercase letters. If a reasonably priced Apple game plaftorm came out, it could do as well as the Nintendo DS in 2 years, but that's about it. It would have to be the iPhone or iTouch when they cost less than a Wii, which is when? Then they have to be as good as the Wii. But what drives the console market are blockbuster games with millions of units sold and DLC that keeps online players happy for months. There are NO games that compelling for the handheld market. Even Twitter can't make that kind of money.

But what Wingert was thinking was that Apple TV could be a gaming platform and a convergence appliance. It can under one condition which is that Apple uses leapfroging technology for HD on demand and makes their deals with studios to get them into everywhere DirecTV, Comcast and Verizon FIOS already are. Perhaps many people don't recognize that I can get Netflix on demand right now through my XBox360. You've got to go a long way to beat out Netflix market share, and I already went through all the deliberations of thinking through Apple TV. The bottom line is that the people at Microsoft were already ahead of me and offered me cool stuff I never imagined I'd want. So I paid 150 bucks to get the big hard drive for my XBox and haven't looked back yet.

To compete with the $400+ platform that is the full blown XBox360 + XBox Live is a tall order for anybody. Apple is probably the one company that could do it, but they would have to make a big strategic investment and really desire to take over the world. I just don't see Jobs doing it - not when there's the publishing industry opportunity out there. Apple's entry into the eReader market (ha, I just named it  - the iReader) is 75% certain according to a Wall Street analyst I heard a few weeks ago. The entry of Barnes & Noble's Nook raises the stakes. So I was particularly intrigued when I got a notice on my last Apple Store download that the terms of service were changing. The first incredibly large paragraph of fine print was all about Amazon's 1-Click. That's enough cozy to make me think that Apple is doing the very right thing if it is partnering with Amazon and the iReader will be the high-end machine. For Apple and Amazon to join forces... well cloudwise it could be the beginning of a new era, and suddenly Google doesn't sound so cool any longer. I believe that Amazon is as technically smart as Google when it comes to infinite scalability, and Amazon has been around longer and I'd bet is better managed. 

Speaking of well managed. I have to say that I have a fresh coat of respect for Adobe. In my ridiculously vast personal library of software, I dug up an old copy of Acrobat for which I spent 300 bucks several years ago. It's still packed with features I haven't even bothered to learn, and it actually does things that I let my imagination imagine - like embedding interactive goodies into pre-existing PDFs. It's truly brilliant. So now I'm going to give Adobe Flex a good look, because I'm really starting to get fed up with my browsers.

Speaking of which, I turned on my process explorer and started tracking which of my applications are giving me the most page faults and gobbling up memory. It turns out to be SQL Server, which apparently launches itself with no prompting from me and no good reason. But right behind that is Chrome, which sprouts all kinds of pseudo-independent processes yet locks up all of them when one starts farting up the system. I don't know WTF is up with Firefox, but the latest version 3.0.13 has been a huge disappointment, which is why I'm using Chrome. Oh wait. I left that on there to have the Google Notebook Add-In.. Hmm. Maybe I should upgrade. 

But back to Apple gaming. There's one great game for the iPhone (and it wasn't Myst). It's called geoDefense. Awesome. I knew it the first time I saw it across the aisle on my plane home from San Jose. We'll talk if and when the tablet comes out. 

ODST: First Look

The latest first person shooter to hit the XBox is Halo 3: ODST. I introduce it as an FPS because it compares well with others and invites such comparison as well as to the world of Halo. That's something unexpected.

Clearly, as Halo Wars has shown, some of the best talent in gaming is attracted to the Halo universe. More than any other series, save perhaps Dr. Who, Ender, Star Trek and Star Wars, the Halo universe continues to remain compelling over various tellings. It has been a book, an FPS, an RTS, a campaign game, a co-op game and now a squad game. Of course it has always been greatest, since Halo 2, as an online multiplayer. ODST is better because it is different.

The Campaign
The first thing you notice about ODST is that it's quiet. It's night. You're lost. You're sneaking around trying to find your way around New Mombasa and there are patrols of Covies around every corner. But you've got silenced weapons, enhanced vision and your Halo skills. Fair fight.

The music is thematically very different. It's occasionally noir, jazzy, solemn. It feels like the music of the dark and lonely night. For moments, ODST approaches Splinter Cell. In fact, that's the first way to think about it as an FPS, because you are not the Master Chief, the monk's chant is not in the background, you are on Earth and there are no Elites to be found alive. What the heck is going on here?

You are on the front lines.

The hardest thing, and the greatest thing you have to get used to in ODST is that you start to realize how deadly the Covenant are. Sure, when Brutes were introduced in 3, it took a minute to figure them out, but after a while you mowed them down. You were the Chief. Now you're not and it takes two, maybe three melees to take out a grunt. And if you think you can just melee a brute because his helmet is off, think again. Your combat style has to change. Heroics will get you killed. You are not a Spartan. This is not Sparta!

Instead, you find yourself gravitating to the shadows, making flanking moves, plinking off headshots with your incredibly accurate headbursting magnum. Double kill, triple, killtackular, spree, running riot. No wait. That doesn't happen in the campaign. That only happens in Firefight. In the campaign, you run, you hide, you search for health packs (which are plentiful on Normal), you make the most use of vehicles and other marines when you can find them. 

The most important thing is the feel of being differently abled than a Spartan, and I'd say that you take damage almost exactly like a Gear from Gears of War. You are more robust than Rainbow Six, so you live longer. In fact, in Firefight, you live a lot longer than you do in Halo multiplayer. It's more like the best battles of Halo Co-op without the aggrevating plot devices and cut scenes. Like Gears, it's straight to the action. So let's do that comparison.

Firefight
Firefight is like Horde. Firefight is better than Horde but exactly in the same way that Halo is better than Gears which is according to your tastes. Firefight has vehicles. Firefight works at night. Firefight has more kinds of weapons. Speaking of weapons, did I mention that ODSTs can carry 12 grenades? Yep. Makes up for the lack of dual wielding.

Firefight is organized into 3 sets, each with 3 rounds each with 5 waves. That's 45 waves of baddies to shoot, snipe, melee and blast your way through. Me and and two other guys got up to 3.3.4 on Normal but couldn't get past 1.1.4 on Heroic. The fifth wave is always the toughest. Remember what I said about the difficulty with Brutes? Imagine three chieftains swinging hammers with invulnerability on. Literally brutal. And boy to they talk smack.

If you do good, you can earn extra lives and weapon drops, but the Covenant get power ups too. Let me tell you something. There's a skull called 'Catch' and it means that the Covies throw lots of grenades. The guys at Bungie amped up the AI and those grunts are deadly with grenades. And you can no longer dodge the Phantom drop ship cannons, you basically hide until they're gone. And even worse are those pesky Jackal snipers. Carbines hurt. On the map we played, Crater, putting snipers beyond our immediate reach (and not part of the enemy count) made a huge difference.

You need to do a lot of weapons trading in Firefight. More than you do in Halo multiplayer. A new tactic we've used is to get a pistol (which we've got some stock of) and go into the field and find a hammer or needler, then bring it back to base, trade back down and drop it for later use. Near the end of the wave, you get less and less time to scavenge ammo.

I haven't figured out all of the skull power ups that the Covenant get other than the basic three. But I know that when they're all turned on (because there are bonus rounds between sets) you find yourself banging away at grunts who just won't die, that is unless you headshot them with your trusty magnum, which is super deadly head on, but won't leave a mark if you shoot them in the back and can't penetrate a shield worth diddly.

No swords. Don't miss 'em. No BRs, no big deal. The minigun rules. The magnum is awesome. The fuel rod gun is very useful. The needler is a staple of combat, the shotty is not. That's because you generally don't want to be so close that you have to rely on melee and by the time the shotgun is available, the Covies have damage skulls, anyway that's how I've been playing. 

Grunts are tougher, Jackals are peskier and you can't blow through their shields as easily. Brutes come in larger packs and the chiefs use invulnerability. Buggers have been cranked up a notch and are way more difficult and deadly. No Flood. AI is better all around. New Mombasa is gorgeous.

So.
The best thing about ODST is that you play Firefight with your friends, not with anonymous jerks like in Halo multiplayer, and suddenly Halo is civilized again. You focus on fighting the bad guys, and their AI is so good that outsmarting them is non-trivial. Smarter than Rainbow Six, smarter than Gears, as deadly as COD Modern Warfare. 

On the Downside.
The VISR is useless during the day. I'm sure they wanted it that way. It would have complicated things to have multiple modes on the X button. 

On the Whole
Solo play in the campaign is dramatically different as ODST. This is a great way to extend the series. Firefight means that tactical fighting has returned to Halo. You must flank. You must coordinate. You must have ammo and weapons tactics. There are no patterns to memorize, you have to think on the fly. It's right where I like it, more Rainbow Six-ish but nowhere near as predictable, more Gears-ish but very Halo. Definitely an improvement over Halo multiplayer, where people gripe in  the lobby and say 'Veto! Veto!'. No more of that.  No vetos for ODST.

Visions of the Silent Cartographer

This is a real place in Siberia. I had only seen it before in Halo.

Others Knew Too

Sony went wrong a long time ago. All it has is God of War, and more PSPs.

Cat Circle

  Yeah I did it. Can you?

Try here.

Star Wars: Game Beats Movie

It was only a matter of time. Note the Jihadi subtext.

Mafia Wars

I have become a billionaire and I am bored with my billions. I need to find another way to buy the things that money can't buy. There has got to be another game than Mafia Wars. Mafia Wars is a fun little game on Facebook. I've been playing it for several weeks now and it has just hit the wall.

There are several objectives to Mafia Wars. Gain experience, gain money, gain associates. There are several ways to all of those things and one of those ways is a marketing backdoor called The Godfather who will grant you brownie points if you just buy from one of their many sponsors. Zynga, the developers have certainly made a tidy pile of money with this clever game and its variants.

To describe all of the complexities of the game would be something of a waste of time. I am drawn to describe its limits which are exactly the same as its virtues. For one thing, like most MMO games, there are always a universe full of players many orders of magnitude more powerful. But as you increase in stature, around level 70, the mega-players become a bit more availed to your quivering backside. The game becomes a lot more difficult in that there are fewer peers to compete with and fewer marks to pick on. You yourself become a mark, and suddenly the whole thing doesn't seem fair any longer.

Secondly, as predictable, there are no macro level events of the sort that would make things very interesting. For example, one of the things you can do is earn money and buy properties which yeild some cash flow. So there's a little microeconomic model which makes for the kind of price inflation and lower ROI so that you don't buy infinite numbers of properties. There are also ways to buy insurance so that when rivals attack your properties it makes it a bit harder for them. But there are no disasters that befall your property's earning power. You simply amass more cash and buy ever more expensive properties. I have something like 23 mega-casinos valued at 107 million each. But there's nothing bigger to buy.

Thirdly, you amass energy in order to pull off various heists and crimes. Completing a tier of such jobs gains you greater honoraria. From thug to associate, soldier and enforcer to hitman, capo and consigliere. You work your way up to underboss, boss and master boss. But the inflating costs of jobs means it takes me 24 hours to earn enough energy to finish one level. I'm almost a level two capo, but I don't want to work any more. I could buy more energy from the Godfather, but what's the point?

There is a 'friending' marketplace to attract other players to join your team. As you might imagine, it's like volleyball. Nobody wants duds on their team. Of course you can always go to the Godfather and buy friends.

You can buy health, energy and even money, but everything inflates. Every bank deposit costs 10%.

Playing Mafia Wars has made it perfectly clear to me how inflation kills all the fun of being a billionaire, and how, when you have billions, the longer you have them, the more you want to change the rules of the game and attempt to buy the things that money can't buy according to the rules of the game. It also makes it perfectly clear to me how foolish it is to lie about the nature of success. You never know which Capo will become Underboss or if they might become your friend.

Halo Wars - First Look

So you probably want to ask me what is so great about Halo Wars as a realtime strategy game. You especially want to do so if you're not a console gamer - you know, one of those guys who has the conceit that PCs are the best gaming platform for all those reasons you see in Alienware marketing. The answer will not satisfy you because you are a bigot and because you probably know a game that did something like this before. But I still have to say it...

Halo Wars is the best RTS ever, and not just because it has a fabulous backstory.

The simple reason Halo Wars rocks is because unlike any other RTS I've ever played, it is a campaign. Which is to say instead of getting one big world in which the technologies are fixed, you get multiple battles in multiple worlds and the technology is varied as are the foes. Now it's true that End War put you in multiple battlefields with different objectives, but the enemies were generally predictable, and you would still race to enable pretty much the same variety of technologies and weapons.

Here's an example. In episode four, HW throws a curveball. Instead of massing troops and hording technologies and other large strategies, you are tasked to escort civilians from a city as the transports, which are in three different locations come under increasing attacks. I've played the scenario three times, and I've never been able to save all three evacuation transports, and you don't even get a chance to build a base until you lose one of the three. This is a completely different scenario than anything I've ever seen.

I don't take a lot of direct guff from being a gamer, but I imagine that there are people who find the very idea of video games trifling. I have only one thing to say to them. Buy the Prima Guide. It's only 208 pages and full of pretty pictures, but once you start reading into the rules, tactics and strategies, you'll realize that this is the most sophisticated kind of game imaginable. It's a war game. 

Once upon a time, not long ago, humans could beat computers & human programmers playing chess. In terms of computer and programming evolution, that was a very very long time ago. The games we play are a lot more unleashed than chess, so much so that we need artificial intelligences to direct against other artificial intelligences. One of the most interesting sorts of challenges HW provides in general is the ability for you as a single human to play with your AIs against a pure computer AI, or against another human and their AIs. With Halo Wars, you can go 1v1 2v2 or 3v3 in any number of different maps as you collaborate with other humans and their troops. The complexities are mind-boggling, but the drama is compelling.

Halo Wars is difficult.

It is not much like playing Halo at all. You simply cannot blast your way to victory. Having finished the game on normal difficulty after three days, I can attest to the fact that some online players, notably the younger ones resign before they're truly beaten. It simply requires a completely different set of skills. I'm now working on doing skirmishes to get deeper into tactics based on my brief experiences and the RPS of RTS. 

Now. I base a lot of this smack talk on my experience with Rise of Nations and Rise of Legend, which were both a great deal of fun. But I have to say, even online with real opponents it felt very linear. There's also the fact that I simply hate gaming on PCs which I see as good for just about everything *but* gaming. Keyboard and mouse just does not engage any fast twitch parts of my brain, unfortunately. There is probably somebody who should smack me up from the StarCraft view of the world, and there are things to concede. However, like with Second Life, I think it's really stupid to have any game where you are likely to meet opponents several orders of magnitude more powerful than you - in which the investment of time and money runs into months. I could conceivably do so in an MMO Fallout or Oblivion universe, and quite frankly I gave Spore a shot at that. I thought Spore was a miserable failure, but that's a long story itself. 

So yeah a case can be made that I love Halo Wars because I loved Halo and I have no idea what the state of the art is for PC based MMO RTS where you pay 15 bucks a month and clan up with solar system sized economies. Yeah you're right. I want something between that and chess, that I can play for a couple hours a night and be fully satisfied. And I am.

Race Pro: First Look

This weekend I spent a little time with Race Pro, the new driver from Atari. While most of the guys in the Cult of Sun Tzu (my clan) have begun to rave about it, especially our Lethal friend, I'm a bit more reserved in my judgment. Still, it's a very good game.

Now the Lethal One keeps telling us that this is the perfect driver if you have the Microsoft Wheel. I do, and I don't ever use it because i have no good rig for the thing. So it's somewhere in the garage. Nevertheless, I'm good enough on the controller, or at least I think that I am, to place after i get the gist of the game. The problem is, I haven't unlocked enough of the autos to tell you. But now that I just got my hands on the racing Viper, I'm starting to be convinced that this is more excellent than it seems.

Race Pro is, quite frankly a combination of PGR, TOCA and Forza. So far it's a pretty decent mix for the kinds of things I like. The TOCA part is that you have a real season and you have to earn money to get into races. It's kinda realistic, but nowhere near as fun and interactive as Grid. And it should be said that this is a $40 game, not a $60 one, so it's a decent budget game. Like Forza you can hack you ride and tune the handling. But it's all about handling which is better and more realistics for tight class-based racing. Sure it's cool to put a 800hp blown hemi into a Mini Cooper, but... Like PGR the driving can be nicely forgiving and the online competition is handled nicely. 

Race Pro is unique in several ways, some good. My first gripe is that there is no E-brake. WTF. I get realism but jeez. On the plus side, the tuning of the suspension and all that makes a significant difference, and I actually get it. I changed my differential settings and I noticed the difference right away. I changed my spring softness and got 5 seconds off my lap time. So I can make all of the different cars handle the way I like them to handle. I think I'm going to learn a lot more about tire camber setups and all that and use them in Race Pro more than I ever bothered in Forza. 

I don't like the fact that so far I can't change the look of my hoop. All of them are pretty ugly and realistic. I also think that they should have had multiple grains of heads up. It's either extremely busy and distracting or not there at all. I like the grains of the assistance and driver aids better than in Forza. The track line is not interactive and therefore not helpful as Forza's is, but the shift indicator for what gear you should be in is very nice. The in-car view has fairly readable dash, so on certain open wheel cars, it makes up for the lack of heads up. 

The tracks of Race Pro are very good. There are a few that are familiar, Road America, Valencia, Laguna Seca and Macau and several new ones that are nice challenges. There's not much detail paid to graphic niceties - spectators are few and wooden; trees and landscaping might as well be from the PGR 1 days. I wouldn't be surprised to see jaggies. But the tracks themselves are first rate, technical and well realized. So far my favorite is Brands Hatch, and Pau is giving me conniptions. 

The AIs in this game are brutal. If you hookup to Pro mode, as opposed to Semi-Pro or Rookie, be prepared to get your car flipped. There are some vicious algorithms underneath some of these guys. Also, if you cut the track, you get DQ'd. That's right. I haven't played many online sessions in open rooms, but there is no turning off collisions and other goodies for button mashers. 

This is a serious driver's game and it shows. Still, the balance is that it's as technical as any drving game needs to be but forgiving enough on Rookie settings to be a lot of fun. The tracks are interesting enough to provide a good variety of racing conditions. Right now, however, qualifying and unlocking vehicles is likely to try the patience of most workaday gamers. This is a drivers game, not with bells and whistles but with cranks, knobs and switches. 

2008 Games of the Year

As you know, I play three types of games. Shooters, Drivers and RPGs. My favorites are shooting RPGs which is why I tend to enjoy Tom Clancy's stuff. This year wasn't much different, except that the number of high quality games this year was very impressive.

10. Too Human
Almost didn't make the cut. I was surprised that I liked this game at all because it's so corny and rather button mashy. However it was very engaging and had a good mix of squad play that got me emotionally involved.

9. Frontlines: Fuel of War
This was a very good game and I spent a good deal of time in it. It had a lot of great promise for massive online squad based conflict that simply never lived up to its potential. It wasn't the game designers' fault, it just that gamers didn't run with it. If gamers who like R6V2 would have taken more to it.. well. They didn't, but even the single player was worth it.

8. Tom Clancy's End War
Same problem here. I'm going to give this game another chance however. It just got launched in during an awesome season. Lots of competition. This game is completely unique, nicely complex and yet very playable. It also lacks some enthusiastic support online, and is probably the underrated game of the year.

7. Call of Duty: World At War
Back to WW2 again? OK they did a good job. It's everything you expect COD to be but no more. Although I did have a lot of fun online with the zombies, the whole graduating to a 40s era tommy gun was a turn off - very ponderous and hard work for online shooting fun. However, as usual, the single player is extraordinarily chaotic, and COD gets the award for best flamethrower.

6. GRID
GRID is really a great driver. I have to say that I like it more than Forza. The great thing about GRID, aside from the huge variety of driving styles, is that it works the physicality of online driving better than any other game. PGR basically encourages ridiculous stunts with Cat and Mouse but is very annoying when you want pure driving. Forza is too damned touchy to be fun, and you have to be a genius mechanic to tune those cars. GRID is right in the middle, and does demolition derby right.

5. Midnight Club LA
I am so glad that I got this game. I had no idea it was going to be as much fun as it is. For a gearhead like me there is no other driving game that exploits the pure beauty of the automobile as this one. Online gaming is crappy but the single player more than makes up for it. A lot less realistic than GRID or PGR, but it does have precise control. A bit better than Burnout Paradise, MCLA benefitted from snappy dialog and memorable characters. Plus driving in recognizable LA was a huge plus. The open street mode of racing in MCLA is exactly what PGR was missing. This is an excellent driver.

4. Gears of War 2
I didn't expect Gears of War 2 to be so much better than the original. It was in every respect except one in which it was exactly the same. Basically when you hit the wall on single player, there is no way you can get past it without coop. For me it was the big courtyard before going down into the hole of Jacinto. I swear I played that level 100 times. Still, shooting from moving platforms did transform the feel of the game. Losing the detail of directing your partner and leaving it up to the AI was so good that I didn't even miss it. Everything seemed to click together better. New weapons, moving cover, new baddies, online lobbies, online game modes. They improved every single thing. This is an instant classic, and like its predecessor, burns you out in six weeks.

3. GTA 4
Everything great has been said about this game and it has lived up to its reputation in every way, except one. For some reason, I just never felt compelled to complete it in single player mode. I don't know exactly why that is, because unlike San Andreas, I didn't get weary of being a bad guy in this episode. For a sandbox adventure, this has some of the most tight and compelling storytelling of any game ever. And yet as soon as I put it down for a couple weeks, it lost all momentum.

2. Mercenaries 2
I don't know where this game came from, but I have never had so much fun being a destructive badass in any game. It found the perfect balance between realistic narrative, personal indestructability, variety of adventures and quests and stright up destructive fun. M2 has the largest destructable environment I've ever played in, and the widest variety of guns and vehicles as well as one of the largest maps. Super fun game. Just super.

1. Fallout 3.
This game owns me. I never thought I would play another game with as much intensity and devotion as I played Oblivion, but the folks at Bethesda have me pegged. I had no idea the game was coming, nor did I know they had been working on it for four years, but it shows. This is a massive, massive game. It is as intriguing and complex a world as ever has been written for any platform and it continues to fascinate and amaze me. I can only hope that as with Oblivion, I can continue to play and acquire skills after the completing the main quest.

Honorable Mentions
Fable 2 - I really didn't expect that I would play it once and then drop it. The problem was that my son got into it and instead of playing myself, I just watched him play. Realizing how huge the game was, I stayed away from it.

Left 4 Dead - I hate zombie games. As great as L4D is Even Valve can't make me like exterminating vermin. I played for an hour or two and gave up. Beautiful, fast game. But I haven't been twitchy lately. Maybe I'll come back to it.

Spore - The most fun in Spore was all up to the tribal level. After that it sucked. Plus the security on that game was totally retarded. I cannot believe the nerve of EA to make it a single player license. Just one more reason I hate PC games. This had great potential, but turned out to be a dud.

Tiger Woods 09 - I only bought this to play online with my buds. I think I can say now once and for all that I don't like golf. Or rather that I can't stand the way in which golf is an extraordinary waste of time. TW09 makes that perfectly obvious. That's how realistic it is.

Fallout Three

Fallout 3 is the game of the year. I know this already. Although I only got it four days ago, I have put in 31 hours of work.

Fallout Three is superb and has set the new standard for turn based RPG combat. In a brilliant move they have created a system called VATS (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) that allows you to stop time, target your enemy (with a single weapon) and engage. The system then puts moves forward in time, animating all of the effects of your turn in slo-mo then moves back to real-time. The results are really well done. I have had situations in which a bear-like creature is caught in mid pounce two feet in the air above my character. I got off two shotgun blasts using VATS and splattered the beastie. 

Being from Bethesda, F3 is very Oblivion-like with several improvements. First of all, it gives the appearance of being about a 60 hour game whereas Oblivion is at least three times that. But I could be quite wrong about that - I'm about 30 hours into it and only two of my 20-odd skills are >50%.  There is a bit less human interaction and fewer ways you can seem to grow your character but plenty of diversity possible. 

The artwork is much more striking in F3. The entire effect feels more immediate whereas in Oblivion you seem to have a bit more distance between yourself and the avatar, it being sword and sorcery. With Fallout 3 you have a constant sense of being Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. 

There are little touches that I like - for example you don't get woken up in the middle of your sleep by some creature wandering by. You are also incompetent for a much shorter period of time than in Oblivion. The action is more immediate, you don't spelunk for 15 minutes into a cave and then get ambushed by 10 creatures all the way in the back so that you need to run back another 15 minutes for life & weapons. Encumberance is handled better; you can repair items wherever you are which consumes spares in the field, lightening you. 

Whereas Oblivion was a kind of awe-inspiringly, overwhelmingly massive work, Fallout Three is merely jaw-dropping and stays closer to the plot and adventure. You don't spend inordinate amounts of time, as you did in Oblivion, shopping the diaspora for goods and visiting your prize vendors every day. 

The environment is huge, but not quite as large as Oblivion's. It's more compact and there are fewer side missions. The missions in F3 are very well crafted and have subtleties of negotiations between characters and factions that are very appreciable. As in real life, nobody is quite so evil as they may appear. The 'Blood Ties' mission surprised me in this way. 

There is a Karma system which is very nice, and some great computer hacking puzzles that make you put down the controller, get a pencil and paper and do some different kind of thinking. The quality of these games within the game shows through. 

Control of the character in the environment is good, I've gotten stuck in a few places. You get unlimited saves so you don't have to work up to checkpoints. There is fast travel between major discovery points on the map which comes in handy, but you can't jump out of combat like a genie and teleport yourself to safety. 

Like Oblivion, there is a limited 'alchemy' skill. You can combine found objects within the game and craft them into weapons and technologies. Bodies in the road are persistent, so if you kill it it doesn't vanish over time. There are thousands of nooks and crannies filled with worthless junk that you pick up and drop as well as roaming caravans of merchants who will sell you stuff. 

Your health is three dimensional. You have basic life points, you have a radiation count and you have 'effects'. Everything you eat is radioactive so you trade off health for radioactivity. At 200 rads you start to get ill and need special meds or the services of a doctor. There are all sorts of drugs to take which add 'effects' including increased or decreased perception, strength, intelligence, etc. You can get addicted and suffer withdrawl which also alters your performance. 

What is startling about the F3 world is how Mad Maxian it is and isn't. In the ruins of Washington DC, it's heartbreaking. There are two competing radio stations, both echoing melancholy songs as far as their signals go. Of course everything has a 1947-58 look and feel. Analogs of the voices of the Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald croon out songs of love and loss, of hope and sadness. A DJ named 'Three Dog' whose voice and attitude is a cross between Wolfman Jack, George Carlin and Samuel L. Jackson spins these tunes and offers helpful hints to his 'children' in the wasteland. The other, the evidently pre-recorded voice of 'John Henry Eden', the president of the US, makes nostalgia come alive and promises a brighter future - a restoration of a simpler past among patriotic songs.  After about 20 minutes or either station, you see how empty and sad the whole place is - all the books are burned. There is no legend and little history, there is only survival in the now and your character plays a part in every dream anyone in the Wasteland manages to keep.

NXE - All That

It took me about six hits of the (X) button on my controller asking for a display of more avatars to realize that my XBox 360 was generating a random set every time. But I kept pressing it because it was so cool to watch the crowd of them run up to center stage and make gestures like 'hey over here, pick me!'.

I'm talking about the New XBox Experience, the new menuing and operating system for the XBox 360. It's actually very, very cool.

Feature-wise, the big fat hairy deal is streaming HD video on demand. XBox Live has obviated my need for AppleTV. I should say my desire for it because I don't need any of this - it's just another way to see the same 200 movies currently in rotation which I could get from FIOS.

But the real coup is that Microsoft has, in a fairly successful fashion now created a UI that I'm much more willing and likely to use in getting my content. I can tell you this right now, the new XBox 360 with the NXE has bridged the gap. Anybody who games on XBox Live will tell you that the gaming experience is excellent, but with regard to watching DVDs - meh. I'm really at the point at which I feel comfortable using it as a DVR. I know MSFT is dying to hear me say so, but I'm now actually looking at the reasonableness of getting a second box instead of going Blu-Ray. But there is no question whatsoever that I appreciate the speed and ease of use of NXE on the 360 much better than that for FIOS on Motorola DVR.

I went ahead and signed up for the Netflix free trial - which is my third go round with Netflix which we cut off when Blockbuster added their mail service. The "Instant" feature is the only one I'd really care about but the assumption was that I'd have a bigger library at Netflix than I do on FIOS. Not the case at all. Only about 7 of the top 100 rentals on Netflix are available for streaming to NXE. So big whoop on that. What I want is the big library.

Advances in this direction make me think moreso than ever that I really don't want to own half of the DVDs that are in my library. I'm really anticipating the ability to manage my clouds because I have own a hell of a lot of data, but nobody is coming close to that  - except perhaps Carbonite. In the meantime, I'm still going to depend on DVD Planet for the depth of their library. Apple still rubs me the wrong way with their small perfections that don't scale. Yeah that's right MobileMe still doesn't work, and I'm buying all of my MP3s from Amazon nowadays. Apple still rules in podcasts.

If Amazon gets into NXE, it's all over for Netflix. I do wonder how it is that MSFT didn't consider that deal or try to make it happen. Speaking of which, does WalMart still sell MP3s for 83 cents? I'll be damned. 74 cents! And LaBelle has a new album out.

Anyway, I do want to now get the nextgen XBox with the big drive and HDMI connectors. That's the other big feature is that you can run games fully off the drive. Yes this software can sell hardware and move content. Nice job Microsoft.

Gears of War 2

Gears of War 2 is such an excellent game that I find myself surprised at how much fun it is. It is by far one of the grisliest and bloodiest shooters out there but it works so much better than its predecessor.

I have spent a lot of time working towards a rank of 30 in Halo 3 for the past month, and I have significantly improved my game. I was a 19 when I started to take the game more seriously back in September. Now I'm a 28. So I cannot really tell whether that exercise in improving my reaction time and thinking on the fly has helped my control in Gears2 but by every measure, Gears 2 feels much more controlled and precise than the first installment. On the other hand, maybe it's my new HD bigscreen.

Be all that as it may, there are several enhancements to the franchise that like with Halo2 and Halo3 embrace, extend and enhance the Gears experience. More weapons, more vehicles, more stunning and varied venues, more subtle music, more creepy uses of darkness, more character revelations, more well thought out battle spaces, more dialog and more moves. Did I mention more enemies? And how.

The biggest change in gameplay in Gears2 is that there are a larger number of battle situations in which you are shooting from a moving platform. The original was walk and shoot, run and shoot, shoot from cover and flank the enemy. Good enough. But shooting from huge moving vehicles over rough terrain, or barges or dirigibles or trams - that's different. As well, Gears2 has avoided over reliance on boss battles. Instead, it's all about trying not to be overrun by hordes of foes of all shapes, sizes, speeds and strengths. A great battle in Gears2 will have you in an area where the cover moves, and you have some one-shot-kill enemies running up quickly to you and exploding nearby like suicide bombers, some enemies moving very slowly with large weapons that require two direct headshots to kill. All the while the standard grunts are changing positions and laying down suppressing fire and then a mounted enemy is zig-zagging his way to you and you have to decide to kill him or his mount first then deal with the other. Sometimes you have one assistant, sometimes you have three.  All very varied.

The multiplayer and menu system which was very bare bones in the first go round has gained a lot of sophistication in the new version. It makes for a more convivial lobby experience.

Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is an absolutely stunningly beautiful videogame. It's also, sadly, right smack dab in the middle of the uncanny valley. It's too fake to be real and too real to be fake. It has an absence of style that makes it just wrong, wrong, wrong. Worst of all, it made me dizzy and gave me headaches, something I haven't suffered in a videogame since Doom, 1992. Sorry.

I don't think there has been a longer more drawn out intro into a videogame since Frontlines. Or was that Call of Duty 4, World at War? Anyway, it got real tiring real fast. So did the rather random nature of it. I really didn't like the slow pace, and quite frankly the game was too real to be fake.

Far Cry 2 is extraordinarily realistic in that it gives a very authentic feel of a sort of abused nature of operatives in low level conflict. I was very much feeling like somebody abandoned in a hostile environment with nothing more than my wits, a cell phone and an AK47, and a machete for God's sake. I walk around and take over hovels and shoot people who have no idea who I am. They're just in the way of a morally ambiguous mission. Ick. That's not fun, it's not entertaining. Not only FC2 visually deep into the uncanny valley, but morally and in game play as well. It's a disturbing narrative that I simply didn't have the patience to see along despite the fact that I totally buy it.

Mercenaries 2 Completed

I have played the Chinese against the UN. I have, at my whim, subverted Venezuelan revolutionaries, kidnapped and executed executives, run tanks through VZ government palaces and exploded oil platforms. I have launched missiles at reinforced bunkers, chased gunboats through minefields, and dropped shipping containers on the heads of civilians from black helicopters. I have hijacked troop transports, destroyed historic castles and run guns for Jamaican pirates. I have blownup billboards with rocket launchers and run missile gunships aground. I have thrown more grenades and flipped more jeeps than I can count. I have stolen millions of dollars, sabotaged fuel depots, tasked satellites over refineries and dropped the mother of all bombs on a hillside favela. I have dealt with money grubbing gringo mercenaries, ball busting female insurgents, Rastafarian bird smugglers, pierced Irish playboys, ambitious Chinese colonels and drunken Russian pilots. I have swung from helicopter skids and thrown men to their deaths 3000 feet above the jungle floor. I have snuck through government checkpoints in rustbucket heaps armed with only a sidearm. I have called in carpet bombing airstrikes on UN peacekeepers. I have rained artillery fire on office buildings in the middle of business districts and watched them crumble in huge clouds of concrete dust while chomping a cigar. I have pistol whipped dignitaries and handcuffed them only to execute them because I have double crossed the clients who already paid my bounty. I have run armored personnel carriers through tarpaper shacks and demolished military barracks with C4. I have crawled out from under the wreckage of helicopters falling from the sky, victims of combat air patrols. I have dropped fuel air devices, cluster bombs and even a nuclear bunker buster that I extorted from an American general just to get revenge.

What can I say? I had a badass time.

End War Demo: First Look

The worst thing about online multiplayer battle sims is that unless you are a clan geek, there is not a very good way to get complete strangers to listen to your commands and thereby gain an upper hand on the battlefield. The problem has been solved, and now I fell as if I can get all of the fun of an online multiplayer shooter without the headache of dealing with teenaged gamers.

The voice command works. I trained it in two minutes. I knows what I'm saying. End War allows you to play an

This could be one of those games, like that huge multiplayer

Mercenaries 2

The moment I sat down for the first time and played Mercenaries 2, I could swear that I had been on that beach before. The very first level, still in tutorial mode reminded me of a very early pirates game. Even as I was moving forward up the beach into the interior of this island, I'm thinking is this some kind of joke? Have they recycled an old videogame?

The thing that makes Mercenaries 2 feel like that is that it can be pretty clunky. I tend to like very fine control of my drivers and shooters, and of course since I'm an old Virtua Fighter guy, that holds true for my fighting as well. Since I can do all three of these, ok well it's just a melee button, I want it to be better than it is. Furthermore this is a big grainy looking environment. Nothing is anywhere near as crisp and clean as PGR or any Tom Clancy Title. So I'm starting to yawn, but I keep playing. It helps that I've racked up 200 points in achievements without having put in many hours at all.

Soon I realize that I've been playing it a lot longer than Army of Two, something that didn't last long on my box at all, and Army of Two was a lot more precise that M2. Soon, I'm realizing that I kinda like this game because I'm starting to see how big the environment is. It's very, very big. I mean it's about as big as Burnout Paradise and just as seamless. OK I'm starting to get it. It doesn't hurt that I rather dig the black guy avatar.

Then I realize that I can jack cars and motorcycles like in GTA. It's not as smooth but OK. Now I'm starting to actually really dig the game for all its simplicity and grainyness, there's a hell of a lot to do. Then after about three days of playing it, finally I realize something that I hadn't really noticed. Almost every damned thing is destructable. Here I am playing with a kind of tactical and clinical precision, even with this monster jumping car called Cacharro de Muerte, and I've failed to realize... Well I failed to realize until I got my hands on a tank.

So I've got this this tank and I'm in this little fishing village on the island across the channel from the Jamaican pirates.. and I realize what I've just said as I'm swinging the turret around having blown up half a dozen corrugated steel shacks. Then just for the hell of it I aim the big gun at a building. Boom! Wow. I gotta get one of these things in one of the cities!

I haven't yet, but I have gotten myself some bunker busters and a lot of C4. There's nothing quite as cool as sticking a pack of C4 on a small building that contains guys annoying you with RPGs are hanging out in. Well, actually putting together a several semi-wrecked jeeps in the middle of an intersection and dropping a grenade on them and watching the cascading explosions. Then again calling in an artillery barrage against a five story building and watching the whole thing collapse is pretty cool too.

There was another game which was somewhat similar to this one, where you're a commander and you could call in a bunch of supplies to be dropped on your locale. It was a lot more squaddy than this one; in M2 you're pretty incredibly indestructable. A one man wrecking crew. I've walked away from exploded fuel depots and swam a quarter mile in 30 seconds, but there are still some pretty hairy challenges.

M2 has a very high brainless fun factor but also calls for a bit of thinking. I think I'm going to hang onto this one and play it all the way through. Coop is pretty stupid, rather like coop on Too Human. Hey I've been playing Too Human did I tell you? Another time..

Halo: Still Going Strong

I don't exactly remember the date when Halo3 came out. I'm not that much of a freak for the game. But I'd have to guess that it was about a year ago. Just this weekend they added a new style of gameplay and a new ranking system for the online interactive competition. I have to say, this game is still going strong.

Halo fans have been waiting for movies, eaten up books, consumed podcasts directly about and indirectly about this franchise.

Spore

Yesterday I downloaded the Spore Creature Creator and I'm hooked.

Will Wright, notorious creator the mind-sucking Maxis franchise of simulation games, has returned with a galactic scale sim called Spore. It is a god game which does the simple thing of expanding the role of god. Instead of giving you a garden to plant and capture animals, like Viva Pinata, it gives you a planet or two and allows you to evolve creatures. The full game is due in September, but in the meantime you can join the Spore community and download the creature creator.

The implications of Spore, if Wright is onto what I think he may be onto, are enormous. What Wright should know is that this is the brainspace we've not been using creatively. It's one thing to play dress-up with Sims who are all human, it's another altogether to open the box and allow you to create every sort of species of vertebrates. From there it's just a relatively small step conceptually to go to invertebrates, virii and bacteria. The scale of interactions between all of these species is extraordinary and the opportunity to design those interactions is an untapped vein of human curiosity and art. That's why Spore is colossal.

Top Games of 2007

Yeah I know it's late, but I'm not even going to fake as if this was from the archives. I'm doing it now.

8. Guitar Hero 3
Now that I have played Guitar Hero 2, I can tell you how much better a game is GH3. It's an order of magnitude more fun and inviting to play, and I can actually master some of the songs on the Medium setting. The ability to download songs is brilliant, now if they could only build up a library worth downloading, they'd make a fortune. I'm sure that licensing money is stopping them but damn, they need to get with the program. Although I haven't tried Rock Band, I can see that this is the Karaoke of the future. It's huge, really huge.

7. Crackdown
This game was more fun than anyone might have predicted. Very Superman-ish but completely outdoors. I say 'Supermanish' not in the context of videogames, in that regard it's more Spidermanish, but nice powers and leaping ability and handling of sectors of a city. Good stuff. Very playable and lots of side trips. The best driving, shooting and fighting game of the year.

6. Call of Duty 4
I'm not going to tell you what you already know. But still I wasn't particularly compelled to finish the single player game, nor have I found the online character of games to my liking. But the excellence of the immersion and control cannot be denied. This is a first rate game by any measure. Now that I have the HiDef, I should give it a second look. I may probably find in it everything I missed.

5. Shadowrun
A completely different kind of big team battle game which is first rate and surprisingly rich. The more you play, the more ways you find to play. I only wish I could have gotten my crew to get into it. Here's my long review.

4. Halo3
It was everything we expected and more. It's still very playable and the add-on content is better than expected. Novel ways to play and the full construction kit were just the bomb. This is a great way to end the series, but giving the players everything. Excellent work guys, especially with the new weapons and defensive systems.

3. Half-Life 2: Orange Box
The Portal is the most innovative game I've seen on the XBox since Prey. It demonstrates thinking outside the box. Although I never finished the single player game and thought Team Fortress was a big loser, the combination gave me all kinds of wow factor. It's something I'd look at again.

2. Mass Effect
I'm something of a sucker for Bioware RPGs, and this one was so good that I played it twice. It was very well moderated. Not too much talking, not too much action. Bioware is showing that they have the capacity to be a new kind of studio. I would very much like to see them handling known sci-fi universes, like that of Iain Banks' Culture or that of Firefly or Ender. The possibilities demonstrated by their capabilities are uniquely pointed towards the future of gaming.

1. Assassin's Creed
Assassin's Creed is a damn near perfect game. It is deeply immersive, has the absolute best ambience and AIs in any game anywhere. It's decidedly low tech in a mix with high tech and I have been playing it on and off for months without tiring. It is gorgeous, the voice talent is perfect and the control is exquisite and challenging. I think it is the finest first person fighting system I've ever played, and you know there's something about swords. Prince of Persia never caught my imagination like this one. I think I wear the avatar hero of this one about as tightly as any character. As tightly as Sam Fisher and more than the Master Chief.

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Also rans:

Two video games which absolutely sucked were Jericho and Two Worlds. I will also mention that Bioshock left me completely non-plussed. Just conceptually horrible. I think it survives as one of those games that you love or you hate. Hated it.

Grid

There's one problem with PGR and that is a lot of racers punk out when the driving gets a bit too furious. Specifically, in the online races when you bump somebody into a wall, especially in the first turn, they start whining and complaining. Some of these wimps even turn off collisions. Ridiculous.

GRID looks to be the end of that although I'm going to miss the first week and probably a lot of online. I downloaded the demo and I very much enjoy just about everything about the interface. It's not crazy difficult to drive like TOCA and you don't spend your life customizing the autos like Forza. The cars can take a fair amount of damage without coming completely apart and this will, I think, encourage some balls-out racing that's competitive and fun.

Dark Sector

I've been playing Dark Sector for a couple days now and I must give it a fairly high rating.  The official blurb sets the stage:

What lurks inside Dark Sector? A frightening Cold War secret and 3D-shooter action. Covert-ops agent Hayden Tenno is sent on a mission to Eastern Europe. During an attack by an unknown enemy, Hayden is infected with the Technocyte Virus, which turns its victims into mindless killing machines. Hayden begins to develop superhuman powers as his abilities gradually evolve. As the virus takes over, it works magic on his body, and wreaks havoc on his mind. Harness Hayden's new powers, which grow as the game progresses. You'll need them to survive Dark Sector's gritty, shadowy world that sits on the edge of ruin.

It looks pretty good. What you are forced to say is that the environment is reminiscent of Gears of War, as is the cover system. But beyond that it is very much its own game. Now generally I cannot stand zombie games, and there is one scene in the third or fourth chapter when it's nothing but zombies ad infinitum until you can find a trick to stop them from coming. But I have to say that I do enjoy sending zombies into the great beyond in Dark Sector.

The play is very good and the control is fairly well thought out. It's not very complicated but gives your fingers a different twist. The super cool thing is the glavie, your three bladed boomerang which you hurl using the right bumper instead of the right trigger. As is relatively standard, you zoom your aim with the left trigger and then either shoot lefty with your pistol, or hurl the glavie righty with the right bumper. Holding the right bumper and timing your letgo based on the color of your reticle gives you extra power. And, as you might expect a super boomerang to do, you can fetch remote objects, like the very guns the enemies were shooting you with.  Regular weapons, shottys, assault rifles, etc are only good for a certain time, then they auto-destruct generally before you can reload them. So you are mostly dependent on the glavie.

Environments are mostly tight to medium, and in dark places enemies can creep up on you. There are a few puzzles that you must solve to move from level to level, though nothing as complicated as those in Prey. But other than that it is a straightforward over the shoulder first person shooter, very much like Gears with sprinting and diving for cover.

I've gotten through a couple boss battles which are tedious but generally solvable with rockets. I've endured a lot of rain noises on a perfectly sunny day, and I've endured the ridiculously tight lock you have to have on weapon pickups. These mar an otherwise nice semi-tactical shooter.

Interestingly, the more games like this I play, the more I appreciate Black. This whole game would be an order of magnitude better if the environment were destructible.

GTA IV: First Look

GTA4 is the most immersive game I've played since Oblivion, and I've only put in 3 hours.

Being Niko is a whole lot more easy, mature and realistic so far, than being CJ back in San Andreas. GTA4 has an organic quality to it, unlike the paranoid frenetic pace of San Andreas. In Niko, you get to see the bottom of the pile of Liberty City, but it is not preternaturally dangerous. You ease into the dark life. My Niko is not there. I've just started. I got about 150 bucks in my pocket, I walk the streets a bit. I bought a pair of boots from the Russian market. I met this girl named Michelle and we went bowling. I sat down in my filthy apartment and watched Katt Williams on TV. I got into a fight to save my cousin from some Albanian loan sharks, but I got my ass kicked by a guy with a knife four times before I actually got through it. It feels like the pace of a real life, day turns to night and sometimes it rains.

Carjacking is stupidly easy in this world - easier that hotwiring a vehicle, but that's part of the fun. The driving engine in GTA4 is an order of magnitude more refined and subtle than any urban shoot 'em up game before, and the hand to hand combat engine defies button mashing of the sort that powers Bully. It makes a world of difference.  I figured I could just knock over these fat thugs with some cool moves. No such luck. My Niko was basically spent after 50 punches. If you have to fight three men, you had better have a weapon.

As before, the music is crackling. The audio talent and variety in GTA4 is the benchmark against which all ghetto ambiance in the gaming world must now be judged. That too shows some mastery on the part of the Rockstar crew. I can't tell you how quickly stupid and repetitive comments just destroyed True Crime despite the ripping sound track. Once again, Rockstar has put together some excellent radio parodies and now added television parody as well.

The art direction is spot on. I am transported to Brooklyn and Queens in Liberty City. The light, noise and shadows under the tracks, the wooden clunk of my shoes on the boardwalk, the weeds and garbage cans under the light in the alley at night. GTA4's Liberty City is a completely intelligent and sophisticated riff off the American urban underclass. It is both exploitive and serious. This is to gangster gaming what the Sopranos was to gangster stories on TV. It has been more than evolved, but revolutionized and humanized with a deft touch. I really truly expect academics to take a close look at this representation of urban life. So far, it is utterly convincing.

But none of that prepared me for being drunk. Yes drunk. My Niko took his cousin out to a bar and then I get drunk. The experience is extraordinary. Niko stumbles trying to walk straight, the entire view is fuzzed and wobbly. I can't even get in a car to drive because I nearly get run over in the middle of the street. Before I can get to the curb I can hear cops coming, and then my head starts spinning harder. I had to laugh out loud it was so uncanny.

I approached GTA4 with more than a bit of trepidation. I have a difficult time being the criminal, but I'm emotionally sympathetic to Niko. It's more than just the date with Michelle and the relationship with cousin Roman, it's the whole world.

R6V2: First Look

I have been playing Rainbow Six Vegas for a week in anticipation of ganging up with my old buddies for the new release. Who knows, we might even become a devastating clan. So last night was the first time I played the game and it looks new and interesting.

The four biggest differences are all important.

1. Tight Maps
Everybody will tell you immediately that these maps force you to think. Open areas where you might have just dashed across in Ghost Recon or Call of Duty - don't even think about it. The enemy is deadly and they don't miss. You simply must use your tactics. I've been on just a few co-op terrorist hunts and everybody right now is calling out positions and thinking about their load outs. That's because when the AIs are lurking twelve feet from you behind cover, they're ready to pop you quickly.

The maps are claustrophobic and you get the feeling that there is an enemy around every corner, it's not as tight as Splinter Cell, but this is definitely and indoorsy game. Sure there is lots of outdoor action but busting down doors and hiding in cover is really part of this game because there are few wide open spaces.

2. Sprinting.
I can't tell you how annoying it has become to play R6V after playing Gears of War or Call of Duty or Frontlines. It just seems way too slow by comparison. But part of that pace was its appeal because you had to think your way around, not just run and gun. Well now you can run and guess what. You still have to think. In fact you have to think more, because the accellerated pace of this game, which was already way more deadly.

The great new aspect of gameplay makes this game really cool and it took about a dozen online 7 on 7 matches for me to see the magic. Running short distances and slamming into cover in R6V2 now approaches the excitement of doing the same in Gears of War. It's more difficult to accomplish in Rainbow, but the tactic is immediately familiar and the way that the new tight close combat maps work, this is how you can inch your way to the enemy stronghold. That's excitement. I was practically spawn killing using this technique.

3. Armor
Armor makes a much bigger difference in this game. I can remember the frustration of the old R6 when spawn killing was a problem and you could dance around and pump people full of lead and people would dance on their left joystick and not die. Now, there can still be a little bit of dancing, way more than R6V, but only when they are wearing armor. In combination with sprinting, it makes for a more dynamic part of gameplay because you can change up armor on each respawn. The less armor you wear, the longer you can sprint. Adjusting your armor for different maps adds a real dimension I really appreciate right away.

4. ACES
In Project Gotham Racing 4, the Kudos system finally reached perfection. I think that can now be said about the ranking system in R6V2. I love it. The fact that you accumulate your points in co-op whether you win or lose is very cool and the three categories of achievements are stellar. I''ve never been one to accumulate internal rankings for more than just the big guns, but these are actually fun in a non-fanboy way.

A few other things I've noticed. The interiors of some of these maps are very sweet looking. Almost to the quality of Splinter Cell. Putting the ROE on the Back button is a little bit annoying - it's one of the things I use a lot, especially when I want them to flash & clear and then engage weapons free.

Enemy AI seems improved slightly and now there are two weapons they have and you don't that are to be feared and respected. The SPAS 12 is back, and deadly as ever, but now they have the AUG Para. That bad boy is nasty.

Frontlines: Fuel of War

It's really funny to play the game that Nulan sees in our future, an international conflict over the last oil on earth. The peak oil crisis is the premise for the new large scale multiplayer battle sim on XBox 360. It's an excellent game. It just came out last week, but the weekend before I had been playing the free demo. It took about 30 minutes to get it, which was a bit long for me in a first person shooter. But as soon as I did, the veils were lifted from my eyes which allowed me to see that this is a landmark game for the 360.

First of all, it's got more weapons and more vehicles than Halo3. You start with one of six basic loadouts (Sniper, Rockets, Assault, Heavy Gun, Silenced Sub, Shotty) and you carry a pistol and grenades or mines or C4. Then there are four addional weapon sets you can get as you score kills or objectives in the game. They are {Ground Support, EMP Tech, Air Strikes, Drone Tech). Each of the weapon sets has three levels and you can switch your loadout and/or weapon sets during the game. You have to die or respawn yourself, but the option is always there. So that's 24 sets of stuff to begin with. But wait, there are two versions of each of those, you can use NATO style or Sino-Russian tech. After all you're either with us or with them.

I have to say that the greatest part of this game are the vehicles, and most especially the attack helo. But even the six man helo is extra cool. You can pickup five teammates and parachute them behind enemy lines to mount a surprise attack, but watch out for anit-aircraft flack and rockets that lock on. Still you have flare countermeasures and you can always bail if you're taking too much damage. The first time I realized that I could jump out of a helicopter and then pull the ripcord, I freaked out. Ultra cool. There are tanks with three kinds of guns, Stryker-like APCs, 8 wheeled AA + SAM vehicles and super quick Humvees with the 50 cal. All can be used to move your team around.

But there are also drones. You can hide behind a rock and send a UAV up and over into enemy territory. Some fire rockets, some you just get close to the bad guy and explode. There are six different types and they really add a new dimension in battle.

Airstrikes in COD4 are just weak compared to the way they are handled in Frontlines. Frontlines is, by the way, nothing but team warfare online. No capture the flag, no oddball or any of that. This is really the most realistic war gaming for multiplayer, period. Battlefield 2 comes close when it comes to big team battles, but Frontlines is far superior. You can call in three types of airstrikes. A precision JDAM, a cluster bomb attack, or an awesome 105mm gunship barrage.

The EMP weapons are also formidable. You can setup a pulse beacon that renders all vehicles and drones ineffective for a good radius, or you can launch an EMP rocket that will drop a helo or stop a tank in its tracks.

Online play with 32+ players on a battlefield is really awesome. It brings back memories of COD3, which was previously the best big team battles. COD4 is very good, but it doesn't have the frenzied action - something about the new maps just doesn't quite do it for me. I can't explain why. Still, you can get up to 50 people playing. The rounds are timed for one hour, and you just rip through it.

Maps on Frontlines are huge, and you always need to be on the lookout for UAVs. You can shoot choppers out of the sky, but you cannot survive helo attacks. You had better see him first and hope he doesn't evade your missile.

There are certain things about Frontlines that I find more realistic. Close explosions don't always kill you. I think the idea that you're going to throw a grenade back to the enemy preposterous. There's none of that in Frontlines. Airstrikes are time delayed and targeting is non-trivial. So you can effect some friendly fire, or just miss the enemy altogether. Sniper fire does not work well unless you pop the head. It feels like a more realistic version of sniper fire. Tanks feel very safe. All that small arms fire that's deadly becomes a mere annoyance when you've got armor.

The single player game in FFOW is unremarkable save two or three unique elements. I find the tank battles to be fairly tedious and just a real pain. The AI for driving is very weak, unlike in Halo where you can just jump in the backseat and let your driver take you to the right place. However, there are multiple nukes and one or two defending battles that are well worth it. Controls are very good although close combat is klugey. The long distance combat is unbeatable.

Right now an underused option is the squad based system. You can command a squad and set objectives and communicate, but everybody is a noob now and few people are using that option, even helo pilots don't communicate with the people in their aircraft. I suspect that's different in the ranked games and will become more prevalent as time goes on, but for now most people are just mostly mewling that they've been jacked.

I suspect that this is the big competition to Endwar. For massive online battles, it is the new benchmark. The only reason Halo is better is because more people play it and are used to it, but these maps, weapons, vehicles and tech give new dimensions to battle that every new game is going to have to try to match.

Kane & Lynch

In the category of badass, Kane & Lynch is way up there in attitude but mediocre in gameplay.

I think that the producers of badass videogames, you know the kind, know that there's only so much they can get away with. In the end, it's difficult to compete with gangster movies, John Woo and Jerry Bruckheimer. But there is still some room for creativity in this arena as the makers of Kane & Lynch have discovered.

The premise is simple, the theme is classic, the execution complex, the results both better and worse than expected. You are Kane, a man who has been busted out of prison by a dude named Lynch. You soon discover that Kane you are a mercenary who has betrayed (perhaps not intentionally) a set of kingpins collectively known as The Seven. Lynch is assigned by the Seven to get you out of prison precisely to recover that thing that you stole, otherwise your family gets it. It turns out that Lynch is a semi-psychopath who goes postal when he's off his meds. You play a squad-based shooter that starts out with just Lynch in search of the precious stolen artifact. When Lynch, in a bank robbery kills dozens of hostages, you realize that you will both be hunted to death.

It turns out that Lynch may not always listen to your commands, and you discover exactly how creepy he is as time goes by. You pick up various henchmen and find that they have personality conflicts as well. The them of Kane & Lynch is loyalty and betrayal, and at any time, the smoothness of the narrative gets interrupted by somebody hesitating and not obeying your commands.

That's bad enough because Kane & Lynch is a very ambitious game with partially destructible environments (a la Black, a la Matrix movie lobby scene with the exploding tile columns), a cover system and squad commands. None of which work as nicely as any of the Tom Clancy titles (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon). The controls are somewhat awkward  - it's sloppier than

Geth Hunting

Mass Effect has been pretty much everything it was cracked up to be. Now that I'm just about to finish what I think is the last boss battle, I'm very much considering playing it again.

This latest RPG has all of the good stuff from the Knights of the Old Republic game, and little of the more tedious stuff that turned it into an epic. It's a lot more straightforward and doesn't get me as a player completely bogged down in the arcane wonderment of a spacefaring battle story. In many ways, the tedium of Mass Effect plays directly into its appeal. You honestly get a good sense of, ho brother yet another planet we gotta deal with, as the protagonist.

Another thing that Mass Effect has got going for it is a broad assortment of characters to take with you as your battle squad. They do a good amount of work as AIs and don't need a lot of extra tinkering. Every once in a while, you point them at a particularly nasty baddie, but for the most part they handle their business. Additionally, most battles are a good deal more spontaneous than those of the Star Wars series. A rudimentary cover system, plus a basic squad control system add to the spontaneity. Good job on that.

The environments and characters are high quality as is the voice over acting. The fact of the matter is that if BioWare can crank out this level of quality on a regular basis, this kind of adventure will satisfy my sci-fi fix. Now I'm only about 15 or so hours into the adventure, and I find it highly unlikely that I'll ever do an Oblivion-length RPG again (But I said that about Morrowind) so this is about the right length. I'll probably double that time by playing it again at the fast pace, but because of the richness of the story I'm actually happy having played that relatively short period of time. Interestingly enough, I'm watching my boy play Half Life 2 for the first time and there is no way I could endure that full game.

The best thing about Mass Effect is its well-conceived plot and well-integrated universe. It's really one of the best in RPG land, not that I play that many. It feels very much like a television series which is why I think of it as a sci-fi fix. I could come back to the Mass Effect universe, and considering how little I interacted with a number of the species of it, I'm guessing that the Bioware folks have that in mind. If so, great. I'll be back.

The Portal

The past month has been something of a bonanza for us on the 360. I must have grabbed about 800 gamerpoints just playing Halo 3, PGR4 and Assassin's Creed. But the most intriguing and fun game I've enjoyed in a long time is The Portal from the Orange Box. I knew this was coming. It was worth the wait.

The Portal is a challenging spacial puzzle game for the XBox 360 brought to you by the Valve folks who brought you Half-Life.  It is part of The Orange Box, which contains all three sequels to Half-Life, the award winning FPS/adventure game. If you don't understand, it's your fault. The Portal places you in the shoes of a test human in a physics lab called Aperture Science. You are challenged, basically, to use a Portal gun to get through a series of mazes.

There are 19 mazes (so far as I can tell, I'm still working on #19) that go from the simple to the complex. Although they all have similar themes and are constructed with some fairly basic elements, they are the most fun and unique challenges I've seen in a video game since Myst.

When I first saw the Orange Box, I was somewhat disappointed that The Portal was its own game, and not part of some FPS. I originally considered the Portal in the context of Prey, another game in which gravity is a key player. Instead, everything in The Portal resembles tutorials of the sort you would think Morpheus would design in The Construct. The whole theme of the game is just that, a tutorial with a disembodied computer voice (every bit as distinctive as Guilty Spark) that becomes more and more sadistic and cruel over time. With each successive level, the puzzles get more complex and 'impossible'.

This is as clever a game as it gets. It's a great entertainment for everyone.

Two Worlds

Two Worlds is the suckiest game I've ever played. Change that. It's the suckiest game I never played. It took me all of 15 minutes to realize that this was a loser. I rather feel sorry for the guys who had to write this game because they're going to have to crib their resumes if they expect to work again. Something went radically wrong here.

The first thing that went radically wrong is that this game arrived in 2007, several years after Fable and Oblivion. It's a damned high standard. The second thing that went radically wrong is that this was released on the 360. The XBox is still out there, and there are still games like Blynx and Oddworld at the lower end oft he graphics wars which are still playable. I dunno maybe the whole thing was a bad idea. I mean orcs are so yesterday.

But from the very first cut scene, this was a snore. Sorry guys. It made for about 10 minutes of hilarious mockery MST3K style, but then even that got tired. Two Worlds is officially the second worst video game ever to hit my console, number one being uh... I think it was Minority Report. Nah, check that. Minority Report was actually fun for about 10 minutes. This one was never fun, and within two minutes of the action, the camera got lost behind a wall. Bag it.

Halo Three - First Impressions

So it turns out that I'm part of the Dash Trash, a second class citizen on the Microsoft Campus. In other words, a mere vendor. So since I have an Orange badge and not a Blue Badge, I am not eligble of discounts at the Microsoft Store. This store happens to be in Building 127. It took me a while to find that out. If you Google Microsoft Company Store, you will not find an answer. So that's one of those fascinating things. It is, perhaps, a purposeful Googlewhack. Sure my badge will get me in the store, but not a discount on the stuff I really want. There, Halo3 cost 25 bucks. Plus, they have pieces of the diorama from the Believe Commercials. I'll get stills next week.

Either way, I got the full priced version and was banging away in custom online games last night only to return to the campaign in the wee hours. It feels very much like Halo, but it's actually almost a different game. You are so engaged with different combos of buttons, the graphics are so much crisper, and the sound is so much more rich that it really does feel different. Halo has lost some of its spontaneity. For a Halo geek like me, that's OK because I am so deeply into the history of the game, but I'm telling you that the way you have to fight on Legendary makes Halo verge on the feel of a tactical squad based FPS. There have been times when I've wanted to have a cover system. I've never felt like that before of Halo, but that's only because I've been playing the Jungle and I haven't gotten out of that level yet. I imagine that when I get into some larger arenas and fight with vehicles, there will be a different take. But right now, I'm almost wanting it to be more like Rainbow Six.