Cobb

How to Hide 1Kg of Diamonds

So let’s start with giving an evaluation. A parcel of stones at VVG1 to VVG2 at an average size of .35 carats with F-G color will net out to about $3250 per carat. 1kg of such stones will be about 14,285 stones worth about 46.5 million dollars US. So really the question is how would you hide about 15,000 little things worth 45 million bucks. Your ability to hide them depends largely upon one thing, which is your ability to sell them.

If you have no ability to sell any of the stones, then you can only use conventional means, IE something anybody could think up on a middle class salary. In which case you might as well just throw them in the ocean because you’re going to get yourself killed or jailed the moment one person finds out. So there’s a Clean Approach and a Dirty Approach.

Clean Approach
So the first thing a smart guy will do is to approach someone with moolah and someone you can trust with your life. So for me, I happen to know a couple such people as I am fortunate in that regard. One of them is a Wall Street broker. He would know someone who deals with that level of investment with whom I would partner. I convert a fraction of my diamonds to cash, essentially 2 million worth, and give the other people the impression that this is the extent of my cache. I then set up an entity through which I can employ my own skills and improve them. This would include a cursory understanding of the diamond trade and a couple of trips to such traders and producers. The aim of these trips is to determine how far I can get away with selling diamonds legitimately without being a known quantity in the business. In other words, I’m setting up a diamond laundering business, but I can remain overground and live fairly large.

Dirty Approach
The other way to go is go underground, which means I live low rather like a card sharp. I produce the occasional rock in card games, to used car dealers, to pawn shops all at a level that people will immediately be able to handle and not talk about. In this case I have to do a lot of low rent stashing and have a 5 year plan to raise about 200k per year.

OK so either approach gets me to the point at which I can use sophisticated means to hide my stash. It costs money to hide money.

The Stashes

One - The Big Pentagram
I’m thinking undeveloped land in New Zealand would be the best thing for buried treasure. It’s not hard to get there. It’s not a dodgy place. I’d keep the biggest fraction there, roughly half, in five plots underground in a pattern. How about a pentagram 100 meters across? Uncleared woods. GPS tracked. Iron rebar markers with RFID tags. On a hill. (25 million)

Two - Obvious
I’m going to make a mistake. So it might as well be a stupid mistake. So I’m going to seed the stupid mistake ahead of time so the over-confident detective gets to talk shit. Which means I’m going to put the stash under my mother’s grave, or in a mausoleum niche having bribed a groundskeeper at a cemetery in my town. I will be observed making regular trips. (2 million)

Three - Attorney Client Privilege
This is the first technically challenging one to place. I troll around to find an attorney like Go Call Saul from Breaking Bad. Living in LA with its drug trade, I’m sure I can find a gang attorney relatively easily. I will put it into this attorney’s hands. I don’t know or don’t care where the attorney puts it, but he only gets his cut as trustee based on his ability to sell the diamonds himself. This is the one I plan to live from. (7 million)

Four - Charity
I use geocaching to place a handful of random stones into that game. Once a year I travel out of the state and place a rock into a geocache. I drop a rock off into the coffers of various churches in my travels. (<1 million)

Five - Rich Bitches
I develop a rapport with douchebags of all sorts who can fence this kind of stuff on their own. I develop a reputation and then flame out quickly. It will cost me getting my ass kicked but among that crowd I will clearly appear broke and flamed out. Kills suspicion. (1 million)

Six - Other Hidey Holes
Smaller versions of the pentagram. All self-service all visited during peak tourist season.

1. Black River National Forest: Michigan
2. Mount Washington: New Hampshire
3. Hot Springs: Arkansas
4. Sturgis: South Dakota
5. Gifford Woods State Park: Vermont

And I periodically check Quora, detective novels and CIA spycraft legends just to make sure I’m up on the best ideas. After all, I’ve got nothing else to do.

1982

'1982' is a barcade in DTLA.

I just assume that it's all about 1982, so I put on a white shirt, skinny black tie and my clubmans Falling Down style and headed to the bar EightyTwo in DTLA.

I got the high score on PacMan and three replays on Centaur. I had an Oban. I puffed a little vapor and I sorta dug the music which was and was not retro, but it was certainly loud. I met my brothers and Pops and for the time we weren't somewhat peeved that nobody in the joint cared a whit about putting the UConn game on, we had a ball at EightyTwo, the new 'barcade'.

What's strange at this moment is that although I feel like I could talk for hours about pinball and arcade videogames, I really don't feel like it. I mean basically the chick who owns the pinball machines kinda put me right in my place. I know I'm never going to step up and buy a pinball machine, even my favorite of all time, Bow & Arrow. And I know I'm never going to know more than 80% of what's worth knowing about what I kinda know. Like I eyeballed a machine that was built circa 1977 and I nailed that, but as she said, I was mostly right but wrong on the details. When I was 20 years old, I could have written a disertation of electromechanical pinball and arcade video games. I'm sure that I have spent something on the order of $2500 a year in quarters when I was in my Virtua Fighter championship form. But..

I'm out of joint and feeling somewhat weird about my relationships to the machines now that it has come around to this upscale hip joint that looks like it could have fallen off the back porch of the Standard Hotel. I popped at a million points on Centaur and turned to say, "At least machines have paid me more than I've paid them", which is true. Computers have been very very good to me. But I had several of those unbelievably low scoring balls and my typical movement of disgust was all there in muscle memory - never striking the glass, spinning around in place with my arms flailing in agony, but not wide enough to strike the next pinballer over, and never tilting in anger. It was the familiar frustration made unfamiliar by the whiskey. I never used to drink and game.

I'm all ready to drink and game if I can find the right friend to come with me. But I never have. I've always been, with very few exceptions, the lone gamer, the pickup gamer. It was never me and my crew, it was always me meeting the regulars at the arcade. Young men like myself known only by first name, if that, and their reputations as foosballers, or fighters. Whether it was Holiday Bowl on Crenshaw or Mr. Motos right across the street, or Sega Center at the Fox Hills Mall. Maybe it was Shatto Bowl or the legendary on Woody's on Figueroa. Midtown Bowl had a pretty good lineup but there was a great arcade across the street from LACC. Down on Broadway, I dropped a lot of quads, especially on Defender, yike.

My love affair with the arcades of the city is bittersweet of course. The social rules and rewards of arcade fighting games like Mortal Combat was a later phenomenon. I already was bathed in the solitude of pinball and of the digital cabinet games. It matters to get a high score on PacMan and there is that retro cinematic moment when you could stand back and have a few admirers, but as sad and lonely as it seemed in the movie Tron it was more desolate in life. We are the Tron generation and it is not entirely a happy thing to see the popularity of our old obsessions brought to life. It's a little bit shameful, at least for someone my age. There's no such baggage for the XBox generation, and I hope they enjoy and discover what joy we knew from those moments of finding treasure in Gauntlet, dodging sprites in Robotron or jumping that bridge correctly in Dragon's Lair. The social experience of an arcade has changed with the advent of Dave & Busters and now these new upscale hip joints. It's a lot less depressing than it used to be when arcades were on the outskirts of society.

Destiny Two: First Speculation, Halo ODST Revisited

So here's what I know about Destiny 2. The City is destroyed. The Tower is destroyed. Guardians are outcast to the wilderness and flying around the system to find enough weapons and stuff to save Earth. But the really interesting idea I heard was that there will be something like co-op missions where you find a member of the Vanguard and fight along side them. That gets a wow. Now I'm also speculating that there will be rescue missions. It doesn't take much poking around this reveal trailer to see that there is a guardian shepherding civilians along to safety. That's fabulous. And I'll also throw it out there that there may be some flying involved and attacking Cabal ships from your own ship. That would be super magnificent. But what Destiny needs more than anything is a competent way to tell stories. The only thing they've done very well in that entire area of creativity centers around the wit and attitude of Cayde-6 and the interchanges between him and the other Vanguard members in the Taken King. 

So if there is a surefire way to continue this style along with the idea of rescuing civilians in general and Vanguard members in particular (as well as the rest of the denizens of the Tower) then Bungie already has a model: Halo ODST.

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!

Wow that was eight years ago.  But now I invite you to think about the arc of the story of ODST. You start off with basically the weakest of weapons, almost like Splinter Cell: Double Agent, where you begin in jail with none of your fancy weapons. You're lost in a city and you have to combine up with the members of your team. You don't get to use rocket launchers until you find the teammate who used rockets. You look for clues as to where this missing teammate might be and search your way through foreign territory.

Now imagine that in Destiny. Just as you started the original campaign with one weapon, you'll have to gain rank before you can even get your super. And then it was a while before you could be strong enough to compete in the Crucible. So all that is possible again. Your guardian is completely rebooted, stripped of all goodies. The Tower is gone. You have no ship. It would be a while before you can get off the planet and up to the Reef. Man that sounds interesting. 

No Man Loves AI

The wildly anticipated videogame No Man's Sky is a failure. It's greatest feature is its greatest failure. It promises that its universe is procedurally generated. That means the developers didn't actually draw all of the heads on all of the creatures, on all of the planets, rather it gave the computer a set of rules and let the microchips do all the thinking. Not just the creatures, but the planets themselves, the plants on them, the structures, down the color of the grass and mushrooms. A few months after its release, nobody is playing. In fact, it's so bad that people are suing.

This is a bullet point I will get back to.

A Serious Gamer's Thanks to Bungie for The Taken King

I am one of those players who gets it. I have wanted what Destiny primarily is for years and years. A co-op multiplayer FPS with the highest quality graphics and mechanics where I and my friends get to be the hero. Almost every day for a year I have been telling my wife that I'm done with work, now I'm going to go shoot some bad guys. Destiny is deeply satisfying in that way. I used to play Halo & Assassin's Creed. I still play Splinter Cell and I'm looking forward to The Division. But in terms of weapons and capabilities, no avatar in existence compares to my guardians. And now with a third subclass, it gets even better. Everything else feels slow, constricted, flat and retro. I wanted you to know that I put in 1700 hours last year because nothing else compares. Destiny gets 90% of my gaming attention. I've reduced my Gamefly from three to one rental.

I also want you to know that I have quit this forum early on. I understand and respect your patience with your customers. You have to deal with it. I don't. As a software developer, I sympathize with you and I have enormous respect for your ability to execute on the core and deliver all kinds of features and fluff as well. But listening to the whinging about fluff is more than I can stand. Today I see thousands of posts about exploits. If Bungie were a business plan, this room would be full of the managers chirping with glee about how to cheat the customer out of unlimited money. I made an ass of myself here over a year ago explaining how ridiculous it would be for Destiny to have Forge or Split Screen. The hating never stopped. Thanks for backing me up on that (heh). But hey, I game with my friends, and I smack the rest down in the Crucible, even when they use the Last Word I get mine in. (A new weapon should be called Edgewise) So in that way I am happy to have millions of gamers to play with even if I couldn't stand them in person. You're keeping the critical mass high and Destiny has never gone dark (although it has gone beaver and marionberry). Keep it up.

The pivot of The Taken King is testament to how well you are running the company in terms of pure, balls out execution. Nobody can really know all of the decisions you all must take, but I know the tradeoffs must be mind-melting. But you stuck the landing here fellows. No matter what the press says (Forbes, really?) and how often they keep the whining alive, you have stuck to the core and delivered. I am exceedingly pleased with the new Crucible maps I'm getting, the new character dynamics within the Vanguard, the cutscenes and even the music, as monothematic as it is this go round. Special kudos for the questification.

I wanted to make a special note as an FPS guy who also has played a lot of RPG but not MMO. Your decision not to clutter up my screen with text and use voiceover that doesn't interrupt my avatar movement is a strength I really appreciate. I didn't know how much until I took a break and played Elder Scrolls Online this summer. I'm even wondering if I will be able to appreciate Fallout 4. I like being boss man in the Destiny world, and not stopping to talk to NPCs who want me to find their lost uncle. Although it would be super cool if within a raid, the game picked the weakest player and made the other five do an escort mission. Just saying. It's what made the randomization change to Atheon superb. My point is that the risk taken to recast the ghost, I'm sure you've heard before, was gutsy and as I read the availability story, necessary. Good for the scanning adds too in TTK. I really, really like the interactive voice work of the Vanguard during my story missions. And by the way, I don't think people who get into the North vs Dinklage debate appreciate how little that matters to the rest of the world you serve in languages other than English. So long as it's not text. I recall back during the beta, how annoyed I was getting stomped on that moon map and Lord Shaxx yelling at me. You won me over. I love more Shaxx in TTK. Thanks for that.

I have nothing much to say in the gun balance meta wars. But something occurred to me yesterday as I was contemplating your need to keep level 1 enemies in the Cosmodrome where there will be level 40 guardians (and beyond in the future). There must be some interesting curves in the game somewhere as you escalate the guardian powers or provide the illusion of ever increasing power for weapons and armor. At the release of TTK, 170 was the new 365, but surely these must be relative scales and not absolute ones. Anyway, you know what I'm talking about, having changed the sponginess of Valus Ta'aurc. That, to me, is a much more interesting problem for the entire game rather than which particular gun does what. As far as I can see, you've finessed it. But I'm wondering exactly how.

I am impressed with how you have tweaked your economies and currencies several times and various ways. I would really be fascinated to see some of the metrics on that stuff and understand the theory of that particular kind of economy in which players cannot exchange or set their own prices. It works, and please don't change it. But the theory must be fascinating.

All this is to say that there are some of us out here who appreciate the hard thinking that must of necessity go into the design and maintenance of this extraordinarily complex creation that you have made. I happen to think that for some fraction of the post-industrial world will depend upon what you have learned in making Destiny work. You might be as theoretically advanced as the architects of the Matrix, but I'm sure you don't let that overwhelm your egos, because you clearly do not toy with or abuse us. I intuit your purposes and principles and I am, as I said, deeply satisfied by the core and impressed with your delivery and execution. You have my investment of time and my admiration. Starside is a pretty good place becauas ultimately, my guardians are badass. 

The Difference Between Horseshit and Bullshit

I am particularly fond of the term bodewash, for what it's worth. Yet I think that there are appropriate axes of shit that should be navigated with some care. 

The other night, as my clan-mates and I were engaged in the Iron Banner, a certain combination of unfortunate and somewhat unanticipated circumstances prompted one of them to roar, "You've got to be fucking kidding me!" And then on another occasion, "You've got to be fucking shitting me!"  I pause a moment to think about those outbursts as they indicate someone rationally making moves when suddenly gravity is reversed. 

Horseshit is a term which I think applies to a specific instance of falsity. And in that regard it would be less of an insult to 'call horseshit' on a particular matter. If I am saying that some situation is full of shit, it is generally horseshit to which I am referring. Likewise, I think my gaming friend had a moment of outrage, and the surprise of "You've got to be shitting me" must be inferred to indicate horseshit. 

If the same thing happened over and over, I'm sure he would have thrown down the controller and walked out of the room exclaiming "This is bullshit!" Bullshit thus in contrast requires that one recognize and implicate a continuous and purposeful production of shit. An average cow is double the weight of an average mare and the average cattle herd is generally much larger than the average herd of horses, although I cannot say my experience with these observations is expert. Nevertheless, it's useful to consider these facts with the understanding that the bulls will produce more shit. 

It is also useful to note that horses are much taller than cattle, run faster and range further. Thus their noses are not as likely to detect their own shit, whereas bullshit is generally found fairly closely to the bull. 

The Taken King 'Revolt'

Bungie wields a dual-edged sword by sponsoring its community of crackhead gamers for the crack that is Destiny. Recently, one of the designers of the newest announce release 'The Taken King' has said that they have created player emotes that are so cool that people 'would throw money at the screen' to have them. The big controversy is that with what is essentially 'Destiny 2', the people at Bungie have got the nerve to make an all new Collector's Edition for 80 bucks which includes all the content from 'Destiny 1'. 

Since I game with many Destiny primadonnas I heard grief about this last week. It reminded me of a couple things.

First of all, prior to this, I think the biggest controversy by the dainty whiners in the Bungie forums, (who go out of their way to describe how they're actually still in love with Bungie (like co-dependent lovers)) was the idea that Bungie had included 'Dark Below' maps in the original game. IE, Bungie is trying to ripoff their players by forcing them to pay for content they had already downloaded. Evidently some players had managed to obsessively glitch their way into areas of the game that had yet to be populated or completed. So the speculation was that 'huge' areas of content were already in place and that Bungie was cheesing development so they could just 'flip a switch' and charge more money for work that had already been completed. 

I stopped going to Bungie's forums after this kind of crappy complaint became common. So it is actually possible that people still complain about that while I pay it no mind. As far as I knew,  the release of the Dark Below showed that only one room was used in that next release. Obviously I didn't even pay attention to the glitchers. If you have the patience to watch 10 minutes of that video, then maybe you fall into my category of dainty. Bungie explained of course that as important as art direction is, the skyboxes and levels/rooms are the simplest pieces to add. The difficult work is in spawning the enemies and making everything a game instead of just an empty room you walk through. 

The second thing I note on this matter is something I've understood for a while in my studies of Taleb. That is the matter of affording to make mistakes. When we hate on rich people, it's generally because they are powerful and stupid. How can one be powerful and stupid at the same time? Simple. When you are rich, you can afford to make mistakes. Related to this matter is whether or not money buys happiness. Well, if you make a lot of mistakes and you don't have money, you'll be more upset at your losses. Think of the expression "There's an hour that I'll never get back." 

So consequently, the people who are likely to complain most bitterly over the features of Destiny 2, or anything for that matter, are those whose bang for buck satisfaction level requirement is very high. Which is an interestingly different take on the term 'high maintenance' which we generally ascribe to more affluent people. 

I've spent well over 1000 hours in Destiny since September and I'm perfectly satisfied that the 80 bucks or whatever I paid for it is money well spent. In fact, I think about that almost all the time when I have free time. Downloading a two hour movie for 10 bucks is a complete waste of money to me, whereas I would easily spend $100 a year to play Destiny. 

--

I should add that as a gamer, my style is that of a completionist, and I also appreciate that which I appreciate. In other words, I am very happy taking my time to complete every aspect of a game. I'm never in a hurry to be first. Many of the Destiny gripers want more, more more, and then blast through the content to maximize their player levels, then complain that there is nothing new to do. Yes it's a grind to maximize as soon as possible and then boring to do everything else once you've reached the highest level. That's something of a jaded personality trait, if you ask me. Like the man who does everything possible to get the Wall Street job and half million dollar compensation package before the age of 30 and then calls the rest of the nation 'flyover country'.

One rather hopes that high stakes players remain at the high stakes tables, or that they can actually be commensurately happy playing penny ante games with the common man. 

Glitching and Learning

My theory of information dynamics says that knowledge cannot be maintained without the expense of energy. I'm finding an interesting inefficiency in my gaming lately. The presence of exploits both expands expertise and decreases propriety.

It is inevitable that as much as I game, that I will be using analogies to that in life. Get over it. Because Lombardi. But just in case you need an intro, here's a thick paragraph about the Destiny Raid:

Destiny Raid
Destiny is a free-roam open sandbox videogame in which the player takes on the avatar of a Guardian. A soldier who runs individual and small cooperative missions against legions of extraterrestrial baddies. The area of operations is the inner planets of the Solar System, Earth, Venus, Mars, Earth's moon, and Mercury. This sort of gameplay (PvE) falls into three categories, Patrol, Strike and Raid. Patrols are random in that there are not specific targets for your activity, although one can select various mercenary missions while on patrol. You can go solo or with up two two buddies as your loot and shoot. Strikes are more crafted adventures with a brief bit of story to get you going - rather like the messages at the beginning of Mission Impossible, you are assigned to take down this and such boss, facing several preliminary battles along the way. The Raids, however are the showpiece and crown jewel of Destiny. On a Raid, you need six players to accomplish tasks that are impossible to guess. Magical things happen that are not obvious, the rules of physics are bent and the team must figure out a way to overcome them. More than just sequences of enemy attacks, but changes in the physical enviroment take place on the way to beat the final boss. There are no instructions for these battles. Teams have to figure out what works. 

Now I'm going to talk about one particular Raid level and the exploit we have been using. It is the second level of the Crota Raid. Interestingly enough, I don't know what it's called. But here's how we play it, and playing it this way made me think about glitching and learning. In case you're not familiar with the term, 'glitching' means taking advantage of a weakness in a systems and short-cutting the process in a way contrary to the way the designers had in mind. For example, if you're hiking down a series of switchbacks, you might literally cut the corners by going down the middle of the hill instead of the gradual left an right on the beaten path. 

As our team enters the second level, we are stand at the top of a set of stairs over looking a pair of plazas. Between the plazas is a cliff. Each plaza is about 200 meters east and west and 75 meters north and south. The gap between the two is about 150 meters. On each plaza are three 10 meter radius circles forming a shallow triangle that points to the other plaza. The top of each triangle is the circle that lies at the foot of an invisible bridge between the two plazas. In the feet of each triangle are tall structures that hover above the center of their respective circle. These, are called 'totems'. So there are four totems, two on each side. The play begins once a player descends the staircase and enters the plaza.

Method One
Behind the near plaza is a large room cut into the face of the mountain. Our method is to hide five players in this room at its extreme rear while one player goes out and excites the enemies. How exactly he does so is a mystery, I've never seen what he does. I'm one of the hidden players. After about 30 seconds, two things happen. First an enemy called a Swordbearer comes out of the hidey room from a small door on the right, below the platforms upon which we are hidden. Then, all of the enemies that have generated out on the plaza dissappear leaving just the Swordbearer. We all then go out to the plaza and attack the Swordbearer who drops the sword. One player is designated to stand at the bridge circle, this materializes the invisible bridge between the two plazas. Two other players are designated to stand in the totem circles. Once gameplay begins, if no players occupy those circles the totems will begin to glow red, and after about 20 seconds destroy the entire team. The trick then is to create the bridge, destroy the Swordbearer, and keep the totems quiet. Then one player can take the sword across the bridge and face another enemy, the Gatekeeper. 

The most difficult part of this part of the game is that usually there are multiple enemies swarming the plaza harassing the players in the totem circles. The difficulty is defeated by the team using the rear platform of the hiding room which, for the purposes of generating enemies, makes the presence of the five hiding players invisible. Destiny levels up difficulty by taking into account the number and strength of the players. Few players, few enemies. More players, more enemies. By hiding, we eliminate the possibility of the game generating more enemies.

Method Two
In this version, all of us go out onto the plaza. One player must be the sort who can regenerate his life after death. We go and thin the enemies a bit. When the Swordbearer comes out we degrade him a small bit, but then all of the players jump off the cliff in close proximity to each other, including the regenerating player. The game begins a countdown clock to resetting the level and just as it hits 1 second, the last player regenerates his life and then restores the lives of the other players. The effect is that the multiple harassing enemies do not regenerate and only the Swordbearer is left. He can then be dispatched in short order and the sword taken across the bridge. 

Both of these methods are effective in eliminating the primary difficulty of defending the totem circles from swarming enemies while trying to kill the Swordbearer, who is more than any single player can defeat in a short period of time. Doing this will creating the bridge adds to the chaos, which is reduced through these glitchy methods.

However the result is that I personally, and certainly many other gamers who have passed through this level have done so without having experienced the game the way on presumes the designers intended. However this is different than a cheat because we were given an environment whose rules were discovered by experimentation, not explicitly laid out by its creators. The aim of the game is to survive and advance. Whatever works, works. Or as the meme says 'Everything bows to success, even grammar'. 

We avoided the difficulty of the challenge of harassment incurred defending the totems, by convincing the game that we didn't exist.

Harassment incurred defending the totems is a particularly apt way to describe a lot of life's challenges present in society every day. It has the virtue of allowing one not particularly skilled at defending totems to survive and advance. One might possibly, through all of the shortcuts, manages to beat Crota, the goal of the Raid. That's a win. The game only polices itself, but there's a meta game as well. How you beat Crota matters in some circles. Ultimately, the most skilled players will figure out how to defend the totems and win, or not waste their time doing so and still win. After all, only multiple wins in the Raid can gain you all the gear randomly distributed at the end of the final boss battle.  

I'm not so much interested in the ethical question here, because that's ultimately longitudinal in the meta game. Either the game creators will fix the exploit - say by resizing the hiding room, or find some way to raise the difficulty in another aspect of the mechanics of the Raid. The designers do indeed update the game to block usage of those exploits they deem to be 'cheese', while leaving others intact. That feedback loop is thus is self-correcting and the game becomes ultimately what the designers intend it to be. Their decision for popularity of a game level, or difficulty is the balance they must strike. But what about the knowledge?

I said at the outset that the presence of exploits increases expertise and decreases propriety. If I beat the plaza level, then I am an expert, whether or not I take the architected path. I will continue to play the way I do and teach others to play the way I do. They in turn will play according to the method they learned. There's an interesting dynamic at work in such cooperative endeavors obviously involving leadership and expertise but also consensus. Everybody on the team doesn't necessarily want to learn so much as win. So it's not so very likely that someone playing with the same circle of friends that team up to raid will learn multiple methods. Only going outside your small circle will you come to better understand the mysteries, and how many of them will be actually doing it 'the hard way' as the designers intended?

The proper way to beat the game involves defending the totems. (Sorry if I can't get over the aptness of the metaphor). And yet when certain methods are employed, that task - which was added for the purpose of making things more challenging (and fun?) - disappears as do the consequent difficulties. The skill of defending totems is lost, and over time their very meaning can be lost. As more experts figure out more alternatives to gaming the game, the rationality of the game design itself can come into question. This happens all the time in Destiny, as in life.

There is a meta game to which we take on various levels of care. The method by which you approach the game is a signal of your skill in the game, which others will interpret as you temporarily collaborate. But glitching itself is a skill which is not only valuable to the player who aims to survive and advance, but to the designer who has an opportunity to eliminate, modify or let the exploit remain. Sometimes you want to play with glitchers, sometimes you don't. 

The Aha Moment of Destiny

Last night I had an experience with Destiny that has changed the way I look at the game. I think I understand what's going on here. It is an experience that changes it from just another shooter into something far more.  

What I did was die. I died every minute. And unlike the other times when I had died in Destiny I did not automatically respawn after three seconds. Nor did I automatically respawn after thirty seconds. I died and stayed dead, with enemies pounding my dead corpse with energy weapons and swords, until my teammate could revive me. Half the time, when I was revived by my teammate, she died immediately after and so I had to double back and revive her. Your instinct is to run away. You cannot. 

We were participating in the Weekly Heroic Strike at level 26. Two of us were already 26s, I had just barely become a 25. We were two hunters and a warlock, a sunsinger, a bladedancer and myself a gunslinger. We battled the Phogoth in the Summoning Pits. We beat Phogoth before, all of us had battled all of these enemies before, and as the narrator said, we sent their souls screaming back to hell. But during this particular battle, things were different. Immediately we recognized that even the level 6 flunkies at the beginning of the strike were stubbornly difficult to kill. We ignored them and kept plowing through the Hellmouth, but just after we bounded down the stair where the meathooks hang from the ceiling, things got ugly. 

We started to die. This was way too early and these enemies had been familiar to us, why are they able to kill us? Our tactics were not working. The weapons we usually used to dominate seemed puny now. The combination of armor we were wearing, didn't seem to protect us as well. The super power we used to blast through foes now simply didn't. I used my golden gun on a level 26 wizard and the thing didn't go down in two shots. Usually it just takes one. Two, and it was still up! What fresh hell is this? Our go-to powers were gone. 

They say that only a fool keeps doing the same thing and expecting different results. We were being fools, for a long time. We kept saying. "This sucks'", "This is hard", but we kept trying. We got through the second room finally after about 20 minutes. Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, we didn't have to restart the whole room. You see what goes on in Destiny at this level is that while your team of three may have infinite respawns individually, if the three of you are killed, the room restarts. You have to begin that part of the adventure all over again. It doesn't matter how close you come to unlocking the next door or how long you have been trying. If you all die, Destiny exacts its toll without remorse. Start over. You're doing it wrong. After a while, 15 minutes or so into this second room and dying many different ways we started realizing a couple things. The first, is that these wizards will 'puppy dog' your dead body. If you are killed by a wizard, it's going to stay there and make it that much harder for you to be revived. The most important thing I realized was that my teammate has Radiance. When she's fully powered up, she can raise herself from the dead.

They say that the noose focuses the mind. In Destiny's Heroic Strikes, you get a lot of focusing. But most of the time, you want to focus on blaming the game for just upping the level of you enemies, and making it so damned difficult. It's not a simple matter of 'if you do this, then that will happen'. There's chance - there are slim chances. The strike will challenge you beyond your ability to remember. It's only after having failed continuously for an hour, at midnight, when you want to quit, quit, quit, but you don't. THEN you start trying something different. Well, what if I use this gun instead? What if I go gunslinger instead of bladedancer. Well that means I'll be able to triple jump onto those platforms. Maybe if we take out the yellow-bar enemies then the ordinary red bar enemies won't come out. What if we concentrate fire on those guys first? What if we try to all hit the Phogoth at once. What if we switch off, two of us against the rats, and one against the boss? What if we all hide? Will that stop enemies from respawning? What did we do to get the Phogoth off the chain so soon? How do we handle all three of those wizards up on that platform? What is the safest part of this area? Should we stay together or split up? What if we get rid of all the rat enemies and then concentrate on the boss? 

It took us about two hours. We had to retry the room at about a dozen times. We lost count. But we kept charging in. We kept saying, damn this is hard. We're never going to forget this. Each of us wanted to quit. But then one of us would run through the door and then start the whole thing over, and the rest of us would follow. We persisted. We changed strategies and tactics. We tried everything. Finally we figured it out. 

Destiny is a no-excuses game of hardball. Nothing you do in it makes sense until you and your team are tested at the level of a heroic strike. Yeah you can get cool gear, you can farm loot, but no matter what you do, you haven't played Destiny at its deeper level until you have faced your own anger and frustration at not being able to kill all the baddies that you used to kill. As they kill you and your team, you have to figure out their behaviors because when everything they do doesn't kill you, you don't pay attention. When suddenly it takes three of you to figure them out, then you must pay attention. Or you quit.

You may not like what I'm going to say next. There's a lot of quitters out there. There's a lot of quitter in all of us, as gamers and as people. I have to say that Destiny actually tests you character. If you want to win at this game, you have to make sense of deadly chaos and face it. What is Destiny's tagline? Be Brave. Yeah. You have to, because the game will kill you. The only way to win at this game is to forget what you think you know, and make something work. And there are millions of choices in Destiny and you are going to die for the consequences of your choices, over and over again, until you rethink and retry. The right combination is persistence, flexibility, humility and courage. And trust your teammate with your life. That a video game brings this out is no accident. The battle mechanics of Destiny are damn near perfect. There are no excuses for you to say you pushed a button and nothing happened. The game executes your will, and the game can be won, but it's hard. That's what makes it great.

So Destiny is a test of your will. I think you can only discover that one way, which is to succeed against the odds. Then and only then will you understand what this game is all about. Until you have pushed yourself to you limit and then beyond, you're just playing around and being cute in your little Guardian suit. There's plenty of that kind of fun in Destiny, and I'll be doing it merrily. But then I'll have to steel myself for some PvP in the Crucible and then warm up for a Strike like this one. One day soon, I'll be ready for the Raid. lt's a frightening prospect. There's something deep going on here, and I know I'm not the only one that feels it.

From Old Russia With Love

Hands On Beta Finally
I have been watching everything related to Destiny for over a year now, and I am almost overwhelmed with excitement about what is turning out to be one of the most important game events of the decade. I got my hands on the game and ladies and gentlemen, it is massive. 

I'm going to say it simply. Destiny is literature. It is so rich in style, function and in metaphor that it simply cannot be evaluated all at once. You have to experience its many dimensions hands on. After about 27 hours of play, I can tell you that it is immensely rewarding and still holds many promising vistas. Here are my impressions.

Next Gen Color & Light
The first thing that struck me as I began playing Destiny was how incredibly rich, textured and beautiful the colors were. This is a next generation game with certainty. There is nothing on your computer you have seen in any of the videos that prepare you for the impact of the color and shadow and lighting effects. Some of it is emotionally realistic and some of it is fantastic. The twilight blue of the entire Old Russia feels like day an night at the same time. The light snow on the sunny day feels a bit surrealistic, and there's nothing that gives you a sense of wind, even on the tops of the mountainous Skywatch. But the murky dark of the abandoned Cosmodrome is, hands down, the most haunting use of blackness in a videogame I've ever encountered. The darkness feels weighty, it is not the absence of light, it has depth. The way your flashlight only goes so far but you can catch the faint wisps of enemies many meters in front of you is brilliantly executed. Destiny's Old Russia is the essence of rust and Cold Warish technology crusted over with dust, and mangy overgrowth. And yet it captures the majesty of Something That Was, just like the line of derelict cars suggested so many months ago.   

Many months ago, the principals at Bungie said that they were serious about creating different color palettes expressing their feelings about each planet. It more than works. It creates a new kind of immersion. 

Enemies: Diversity is Good
The enemies are wonderous and they make me forget all about the Covenant. I watched some old videos of Halo2, and of course that's not a fair comparison, but I enjoyed remembering how cool it was to have the Brutes, a new enemy in the series. And I recall how different AIs in 343's Halo 4 might make for a different style of Halo play. Now I am just getting the hang of evading the twirling blue fire of the Fallen's Dregs and internalizing their crafty motions, along with plodding Captains and their flamethrowers, but then come the relentless Shanks, and then the spooky eyeball Servitors. Good one on that Bungie, you kept Servitors completely secret. But what a wondrously creepy idea, this giant black and purple floating mechanical eyeball that suddenly hyperjumps right behind you. Whoosh. And that's just one species of baddy. Then you have the Hive whose Thralls just bumrush you like fast, hungry, slashing zombies. 

Let me break off to say this about the Beta's enemies. Bungie was very smart to leave most of the spaces with low level fodder. The one thing that's mad different about Destiny is the huge range of destructive power that your players and NPCs can weild. I found that as overused as the term 'balanced' is, it is clear that there is some artful finessing going on, because there is a world of hurt that would await any Guardian dealing with enemies two or three levels up, as well as delicious badass satisfaction in wiping away a horde of them who are two levels weaker. 

Battles between the Hive and the Fallen are serious. I've seen them get into it on Skywatch and thinking that there is something more going on than what I thought. I was almost afraid to step in and NovaBomb them. Almost. 

Moon: Beauty, Horror & Mayhem
I felt a little bit guilty stealing through the Moon this afternoon. I wrote the following on Facebook:

The moon is awesome. It is gorgeously creepy with a combination of Geiger, Riddick Necromonger, Egyptian Tomb environments. The music, the faint trembling in your controller, the wisps of darkness. It's almost a shame to walk through it alive. I have been to the Circle of Bones in the Hellmouth. I have destroyed a Hallowed Ogre in the World's Grave. My hands are still trembling. l just put down the controller to have a breath, because the Moon is frightening.

The guilt came from the fact that I definitely wandered into some large areas that were severely underpopulated by baddies. The environment alone was spine-tingly intimidating and still inspiringly crafted. I could read in the art direction a purposeful blend of environmental effects, music, controller buzz, creatures and light that evoked a profound Gothic horror experience. And yet even though I could sense the threat, there were never quite enough bad guys in there to smash my bones into the pre-existing piles. I cheated my way into the deep underground chambers of the Hellmouth and got away with it. There were areas that made me feel forebodings I haven't had since the first time I watched the scarred humans Benearth the Planet of the Apes who worshipped The Bomb. 

When I took a break and watched Datto blasting his way at breakneck speed just looking for something to shoot on Twitch, the whole scene seemed to profane the environment. It felt like, here these artists at Destiny have spent years crafting this awesome environment and then a bunch of boy gamers come in and start tossing grenades and wisecracking about exactly where the invisible ceiling is as their Titans double jump across a cathedral. Yes I know that's the point of a shooter, but you can see that Destiny is much more - yet also done for and dedicated to shooters. 

Crucible: Appropriately Named
I particpated in the Iron Banner and made Rank One, but was intimidated the whole way through, getting my ass handed to me on a regular basis by gamers whose Guardians had high defense scores (I saw one with 157) and low Grimoire scores, (averaging around 350). So I'm the kind of PvP player who loves to brag about KD ratios when mine is high, and skulk around muttering when mine is low. I was so devastated in my first half dozen forays into the Crucible that I started taking the announcer's comments personally. Yeah I know I can do better than 0.23 KD but I didn't this time, OK?  I was getting huffy and defensive. But I decided to slog it out. Even though I was almost always first out with a good score, I would start getting owned and it took me a while to score above 2000 consistently. 

Then I began to notice that there was really no shortcut. Everybody has to spend the hours and only because this is a Beta am I completely freaked out. I have a job and responsibilities, and I can't get in the 40 hours necessary within one week of gaming to excel. It still took two dozen trips to the Crucible for me to start reprogramming my Halo, Titanfall and Battlefield reflexes to make this my primary shooter. And since I spent so much time buffing out all three of my characters, it took a while for me to figure out that I really want to play CQ with my Warlock -- which is weird because that's exactly what I didn't want to do as I was watching all of the PSN folks play in the days before the XBox gamers were allowed into the Beta. I wanted to try my hand at stealth and sniping with the hunter. But it turns out that the verticality of the double jump controllable glide of the Warlock is a much better tactic, besides I sucked at knowing lines of fire in the maps with my Hunter and got owned that way too. Nothing worse than a sniper fight you always lose. Well, lining up a shot and getting clobbered from behind. All of this is a jumpstart and I have had nowhere near enough time to refine my tactics and strategies as I have for Battlefield and Titanfall, much less Halo. Call me back on Halloween, I'm going to come aces.

There will always be better players than I - those for whom Destiny PvP is no mere game, who would rather quit a match than suffer a dent in their KD. Whatever to them, but I do actually kind of like the relentless hardcore attitude of the Crucible along with its attendant rewards. It is reminescent of the ranked multiplayer of Halo2 - TrueSkill I think it was. It may or may not exist, I couldn't tell if I was getting put with lower ranked players or not. But I did notice this. In all the Control games, there was a whole lot less to gain by actually controlling areas on the map as compared with Battlefield. In Destiny's Control (aka Titanfall Hardpoint, Domination etc) controlling map points serves more as a means to figure out where enemy players are headed so you can intercept and kill them rather than something that gains you actual points for time spent controlling them. That's something very unbalanced and wrecks the spirit of an actual game of Control / Domination / Hardpoint, but I can see why it would be that way for a Beta. 

Loot Glorious Loot
We now finally have the answer to the dreaded term 'microtransaction' and the answer is NO. The economy of Destiny makes sense. You get out there into the world and you gain XP and loot by downing the adversaries. So much loot is available that you can pile up cash just discarding unneeded and redundant or underpowered items. I still don't know what the hell to do with all my spinmetal, and I just figured out that I could buy special and heavy ammo to tote with me in PvE combat. So maybe when the Grimoires are un-redacted I'll get a better understanding of all that. But I'll tell you this, the collecting of stuff and things in Destiny works great. I love the Cryptarch concept and like the implementation of chance in getting a special loot drop rather than knowing that some drudges will play one note forever to buy and craft. So far, so good even though I cannot get a good pair of boots to match my cape.

I did get enough level 9 and level 10 stuff as a level 8 to not sweat the details of leveling up many of my weapons, but it took me a while to see that weapons themselves get XP and not just me. I just wanted one of everything and didn't spend enough time on one until the Crucible focused my mind onto ultimately a 61 Scout Rifle and 57 Shotty. 

Anyway that's all for today. 

On the Multiculturalization of Superheroes

I'm all for it. Except the 'it' I'm talking about ain't happening. Far be it from me to be a champion of diversity, but where it actually matters, ie genuine heroics, it seems to me that Marvel and others have got it all wrong. 

Now I'll be the first to tell you that I'm not a big comic fan, but I have seen enough to know that of all the creative media in the world, comics are unleashed in an extraordinary way. It almost seems to be a lost art, a kind of storytelling (if and when I find the literary gold) that goes beyond text towards a realm just visual enough to spark the imagination in ways that TV and movies just cannot. But I'm certain this has been much better said by others with some dog years in the critical game. I'm a newb. But I do know something about your standard American superheroes. I wasn't born yesterday. 

So when I hear that the next Captain America is going to be a black man, the new Green Lantern is gay and the next Thor is a woman.. Well I wasn't born yesterday. I've got emotional baggage with those old supers and I don't like seeing them flipped. Now I can't say with definition that there are not righteous in-situ ways of explaining the changes, even though I thought Thor was immortal. It makes sense that old caped crusaders die off and new ones don the mask. But isn't that nothing at all but cliche?

Granted, there's an important tradition of emergent minorities, and don't get me wrong, there's something very appealing about the right black man becoming the new Captain America. But it would be nice if he had a choice - that is to say, if your intent is to diversify heroism, why not diversify it? Why not build a new house instead of just having a new different person move into the old house? Wait, stop. I know the answer - it's about a black man becoming President of the United States of America, as contrasted with HNIC. Yes I get that. Still, why not have a new kind of hero with a new kind of power in a new situation?

Now I'm at the end of my rope. I can't say much more because I can't tell from experience how this may or may not have worked before. Obviously the old Justice League is in desparate need of a shakeup. And OMG, if Bruce Banner was a black scientist who got wrongly fired from NASA by a false claim from a white woman on sexual harrassment, that kind of rage would make the Incredible Hulk really frightening. But I'm still kind of freaking out over my discovery this week of Ravenhammer.com. An independent black comic is really giving me images that I never saw before, and probably you too. I think I'd like to see some of these alternative supers a chance to script outside the box. And so this is my invitation to see for myself as well. 

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Die Another Way

I've been thinking about the different ways to die in a Bungie shooter or any video game, and I think that the most satisfying kills are those that uniquely humiliate the target. So far they have been the assasinations in Gears and in Halo. But there has always been something special about Halo's deadly purple needler explosions that are utterly unique in gaming. So I'm wondering.. If I had the skills of a Bungie progammer, what kind of super unique kills might I animate that haven't been seen in any other videogame?

Now interestingly, I have a set of ideas based in physics about how you destroy something. Sooner or later in life, you'll find an unopenable can or something stuck that you cannot open - and you think, how can it be with all the forces of physics that I can't get this open? So, yeah. I have a list that makes me think of extremes of temperature, air pressure, water pressure, torque, vibration, sound, sharpness, etc.

So today I'm putting on my twisted thinking cap to imagine some ridiculous weapons.

Liquifaction Being reduced to a crap stain on the ground, or a puddle of goo has got to be in the list. But we all just think of acid, and it's always green and hissy. Now what might just work here is an acid blob gun with a great animation. But what about an acid blob shotgun that shoots out two dozen baggies the size of gumballs? Each acid gumball sticks to you and then they all simultaneously pop and dissolve you in all those places.

Implosion How about a vacuum magazine for a sniper rifle? Instead of a bullet, it's a dart with a total vacuum. It hits your head, your head implodes like a stomped on soda can.

Filament Shredder For close quarters, a shotgun like weapon that shoots out a bolo net. The net goes through you like a cheese cuber, and the you are a pile of ingredients for a chunky Denver Omlette.

Fireworker Here's a weapon that shoots like an RPG. But as the projectile gets close, it lassos your leg and then jerks you up ragdoll style as if you were a mortar. It reaches apogee and boom, you're a red flower.

Spastic Balloon Just like the Fireworker except it drags you all random all over the sky or ground like, you know, a spastic balloon.

Harpoon Yeah we've seen this before in Cel Damage, but there's nothing quite so satisfying as seeing an impaled body fly into the nearest wall. Sick, no? Yes.

Taster's Choice Oooh. Here's a weapon the instantly freeze-dries all the water in your body. Boom, you're Lot's Wife. A pillar of salt.

F5 Who wouldn't want to have a tornado in a can? I think it would make for a really cool grenade. Not quite so deadly, but it can throw you 30 feet. Then again, that depends on where you land doesn't it?

Mortification There's something classic about how the Ark of the Covenant made skeletons out of the Nazi's in that first Indiana Jones movie. Any animation that rots out a body down to the bones has got to be cool.

Eighty Two

I just assume that it's all about 1982, so I put on a white shirt, skinny black tie and my clubmans Falling Down style and headed to the bar EightyTwo in DTLA. 

I got the high score on PacMan and three replays on Centaur. I had an Oban. I puffed a little vapor and I sorta dug the music which was and was not retro, but it was certainly loud. I met my brothers and Pops and for the time we weren't somewhat peeved that nobody in the joint cared a whit about putting the UConn game on, we had a ball at EightyTwo, the new 'barcade'. 

What's strange at this moment is that although I feel like I could talk for hours about pinball and arcade videogames, I really don't feel like it. I mean basically the chick who owns the pinball machines kinda put me right in my place. I know I'm never going to step up and buy a pinball machine, even my favorite of all time, Bow & Arrow. And I know I'm never going to know more than 80% of what's worth knowing about what I kinda know. Like I eyeballed a machine that was built circa 1977 and I nailed that, but as she said, I was mostly right but wrong on the details. When I was 20 years old, I could have written a disertation of electromechanical pinball and arcade video games. I'm sure that I have spent something on the order of $2500 a year in quarters when I was in my Virtua Fighter championship form. But.. 

I'm out of joint and feeling somewhat weird about my relationships to the machines now that it has come around to this upscale hip joint that looks like it could have fallen off the back porch of the Standard Hotel. I popped at a million points on Centaur and turned to say, "At least machines have paid me more than I've paid them", which is true. Computers have been very very good to me. But I had several of those unbelievably low scoring balls and my typical movement of disgust was all there in muscle memory - never striking the glass, spinning around in place with my arms flailing in agony, but not wide enough to strike the next pinballer over, and never tilting in anger. It was the familiar frustration made unfamiliar by the whiskey. I never used to drink and game.

I'm all ready to drink and game if I can find the right friend to come with me. But I never have. I've always been, with very few exceptions, the lone gamer, the pickup gamer. It was never me and my crew, it was always me meeting the regulars at the arcade. Young men like myself known only by first name, if that, and their reputations as foosballers, or fighters. Whether it was Holiday Bowl on Crenshaw or Mr. Motos right across the street, or Sega Center at the Fox Hills Mall. Maybe it was Shatto Bowl or the legendary on Woody's on Figueroa. Midtown Bowl had a pretty good lineup but there was a great arcade across the street from LACC. Down on Broadway, I dropped a lot of quads, especially on Defender, yike. 

My love affair with the arcades of the city is bittersweet of course. The social rules and rewards of arcade fighting games like Mortal Combat was a later phenomenon. I already was bathed in the solitude of pinball and of the digital cabinet games. It matters to get a high score on PacMan and there is that retro cinematic moment when you could stand back and have a few admirers, but as sad and lonely as it seemed in the movie Tron it was more desolate in life. We are the Tron generation and it is not entirely a happy thing to see the popularity of our old obsessions brought to life. It's a little bit shameful, at least for someone my age. There's no such baggage for the XBox generation, and I hope they enjoy and discover what joy we knew from those moments of finding treasure in Gauntlet, dodging sprites in Robotron or jumping that bridge correctly in Dragon's Lair. The social experience of an arcade has changed with the advent of Dave & Busters and now these new upscale hip joints. It's a lot less depressing than it used to be when arcades were on the outskirts of society.

Gaming is now a huge industry beyond the dreams of us older kids. I am amazed. EightyTwo. I'll be back.

Destiny Speculation: Open World Missions

Well, actually this is about what I want to see Destiny do in its open world. I want it to approach the compelling narrative of Red Dead Redemption and Fallout 3. I think that asking for Elder Scrolls levels is not going to come until Destiny 2, at which point the depth of the legendary backstories will have soaked in, as well as with fan fiction and hopefully a good book by Greg Bear.  

I know Bungie don't like to hear 'RPG' but as beautiful as the environments are so far, if Destiny doesn't get a lot of open world missions going, then I will be disappointed. That is to say that if it's strictly Halo-like in terms of the pursuit of enemies leading you around the map, then it won't work as well as I think it should.

So here's what I'm thinking, in short spurts.

A. Task Areas
Some kind of areas should be 'task' areas. That is to say you should be able to travel to a place in the open world and hang out there doing a number of tasks and returning to that same place. I think of the big farm way up the hill in Red Dead Redemption. Catch a runaway horse. Stop a barn fire. Tame a mustang. In Destiny task areas could be similar with the occasional alien enemy making a pest out of themselves. 

In Old Russia, one could be tasked to find 5 car tires or mechanical doohickies from that stream of abandoned wrecks. Or maybe you need to find spare parts for your own ship in the Cosmodrome. Wow, now that I think of that, I can't see how that would not be a simple first mission depending upon how much of a chickenchaser they make your newb Guardian. 

I can imagine you finding some old derelict Awoken codger out in the airplane graveyard cooking a greasy piece of meat in the fuselage of an old A380. Which now that I think of it, what other kinds of creatures does earth have besides birds? What do the Fallen eat? Maybe they eat horses and we have a horse escort mission. Meh, I hated driving cattle in Red Dead, but horse roping from a Shrike might be cool.

B. Traditional Dungeons
Other areas should be like traditional 'dungeons', where you go into creepy surroundings in order to retrieve some strange artifact. In these, everything is what you would expect and I'm rather taken by the rules of engagment set by Skyrim and Fallout 3. The first time through the dungeon, if it is visible and accessible to you, presents a challenge as part of a narrative and it it leveled up to your skillset. Upon subsequent passed through there should be a modicum of sameness, but the challenge should be of a different shape after a set number of visits.

I'm thinking in particular of my favorite dungeon in Skyrim that was guarded by two daedric princes - you know those devil looking guys. There was always lots of gold and some high quality weapons there, and if you could beat the two daedra, then you were set. It would have been nice if on the third try the game threw in a completely different set of enemies and loot to throw me off balance. 

C. Wandering Prizes
I think it would be cool for you to be aware of some kind of loot or achievement that doesn't exist in one place for long. Or maybe it's like soap, if you don't grab it successfully, it squirts out of your hand to a new location, except in Destiny that location might be through a transport portal. I like the idea of perhaps one of those scary little girls who appear out of nowhere and tell you to follow them and it ends up being something really trippy. "How did you get that cape?" "From the girl in the pink tutu on Venus, near the laboratory". 

Ghosts

Call of Duty Ghosts is the most infantile game I've played in a long time. In the single player campaign, over and over I keep being reminded that I'm supposed to be a teenaged boy who loves his dad and his dog and will do anything to hear "I'm proud of you, son".  The most implausible set of episodes that include tanks that explode from one shot, guns that can be found anywhere in a jungle, and a dozen battleships in 50 feet of water off the coast of Santa Monica. Yike. 

Yeah. I hated the underwater combat, and I hated the space combat. What should have been an interesting challenge by changing the speed at which my character moved turned out to be just frustration.. There's not much else to say. I'm sending it back to Gamefly. 

Ogre

I met Bruce Sterling at UCLA somewhen about 1989. It was before I moved to New York and before the founding of the EFF. I had three distinct impressions. 

1. Dude was scary smart.

2. Dude was scary rebellious.

3. Dude looked way too young to know what he knew.

If I had finished up at USC as I planned, there was no question that I would have eventually fallen in with the dudes at the Swamp, the fairly well known geek hangout. I would have met a dungeonmaster. I would have been deeply into D&D. As it stood, I failed to make the connection. But since I had the audacity to write games in FORTRAN and found something fundamentally fascinating about bi-directional printing, then I would have been a lot more likely to trade the privilege of running USC's data centers for the sort of rebellious pose characterizing the name Bruce Sterling evokes. I liked him and I agreed with everything he said, but I think he had a lot of nerve to be poking his finger at those he did. Rich white boy. 

I didn't have time for that. I was working very hard for respectability in a society I didn't comprehend. I saw him as somebody throwing vases against the walls of his parents estate. Of course it didn't matter whether or not his parents had an estate, or how precise his aim. Destruction is destruction. I was a black man living every day life as a symbolic threat. He looked like Spritle Racer with acne. All he had to do was shut his mouth and he disappeared. I did not have that luxury in 1989.

Today I saw a picture of a box about the size of a carom table. Inside was a game called Ogre from a company named Steve Jackson Games. I read The Hacker Crackdown when I lived in Brooklyn two or three years after meeting Sterling. I thought of most cyber stuff about the way I thought of 'Lawnmower Man', severly lacking in aesthetic value with very little appeal outside of that which is given by a good crossword puzzle. I was one of those people who at once desired the distinction of belonging to Mensa or the Triple Nine and yet found the distinction worthless if not annoyingly alienating. I dug those like Feynman from a distance. I never had my own personal college professor. 

My friend Bryan Alexander digs ghosts and, well horror and scary stories. He's a college professor who lives in close proximity to nature and the understanding that what humans build, nature takes apart. He understands the moral dimension of destruction and failure and while he doesn't get all post-modern about it, he gets the deconstructional narrative of grand guinol. There's probably no better person on the planet to talk about the implications of the rise of Zombie Apocalypse stories in America. Bryan knows the literature, backwards and forwards.

I've begun to purposefully pay more attention to Bryan and he has been very kind in mentioning me by name over the past few weeks on Facebook. This is fortuitous because I have come around to the side of destruction, in the necessity of it. I've been knowing about Cthulhu for a long time, but I only recently decided to read what that fiction was all about. Somewhere between the fictional Mountains of Madness and the actual endurance of Shackleton is everything that human beings need to know at this moment in history. 

It was Bryan who took the picture of Ogre. As soon as I saw the logo of Steve Jackson Games, it took me back to the days in which the existential dilemma of being a young black urban sophisticate wrestling daily with call of cyber geekdom. I have been neither as both simultaneously, half-tracking through the woods of identity. Enough to be in it and called of it, distrusting both and unable to escape either. And in all that, no compelling need to *be* a rebel. Even now. Steve Jackson Games was persecuted by the US Secret Service. It said something profound about the imagination of the cyber and the warfare and secrets deeply implied in the strategic and tactical thinking of gamers, coders, warriors and spies. 

I am a console gamer. Skyrim is everything Dungeons and Dragons wanted to be, and in the imagination of those at the USC Swamp, I'm sure they inhabited the mind of the Dragonborn so many years ago. I can't say I feel jealous - I have had the ultimate dungeonmaster expressed as the world created by Bethesda for my XBox 360. And I stand in awesome anticipation of the next journey called Destiny, which is coming next September from the acknowledged master masters, the crafters of Master Chief, Bungie. There is the possibility that I will live in that world. There is the likelihood that in my dotage, I will remain in such worlds at nearly infinite stretches of imaginary time. I will experience all the destruction I might be able to handle and having it all realized, I will be ready to die.

I have raised a family. It's difficult for me to imagine Bruce Sterling married with children, but that may be so. Nevertheless, I don't entertain dreams of purpose dedicated to attacking the System, but of living in better worlds. Like Professor Farnsworth, I'm much more likely to become sick of the planet and go find a new one. I think of destruction as the thing that compels people to know reality, as the noose focuses the mind. But I am by nature a defender. I am the big brother without whose dependents I lack purpose. If nobody read Cobb, I wouldn't write it, much. I'd keep to myself, I imagine.

Adventure games are literature puzzles. Chess. Risk. D&D. I see these as things for people who don't actually know karate. Karate is stochastic and involves real risk. When you have to think about getting actually punched in the face, it's not so much fun to be a rebel. 

No conclusion. Just observations kicked off from a picture from a friend.

GTA5 & The Soulful Gangster Problem

I am laughing out loud at GTA5 and enjoying myself about six hours into it. So far so good.

Leigh Alexander at Gamesutra has poured a bit of cold criticism on the game, piquing my attention. I think, wanting for 'monsters', she has done little else but demonstrate that she doesn't like the lack of imagination that *is* the gangster genre. Where GTA5 allows you to do a ridiculous amount of stuff that have nothing to do with mayhem, mayhem is really what video game drama offers the player, outside of plot. If you don't like having the protagonist of a gangster film deliver mayhem for its own sake, you're in dangerous territory.

I have gone on for some length about how morally degrading it is to invited to care about a real 3D character who keeps committing evil actions. It is the signature of Hollywood's best creations since the startling invention of Tony Soprano whom I call a scumbag protagonist. The skewering question nobody bothers to ask is why doesn't [Walter White] just quit doing evil? Why doesn't he just walk away? But they don't, and this is the manipulation and plot device that keeps the gangster genre ticking - that and the fact that the protagonist preternaturally avoids death long enough for the audience to experience repetitive thrills, chills and spills.

GTA5's integration of its open world with its 'rails' is very nicely done, as a bit of technical kit. No load screens is a big deal. But I think the reason that GTA5 fails to engage you in its open world is precisely because Los Santos is boring. It's LA and LA in a very stereotypical way. The Westside is the 'Westside' and South Central is 'South Central'. LA was more well done, quite frankly in Midnight Club. But on the other hand, everybody gushed about just riding a horse through Red Dead Redemption - because the Old West it presented was interesting and mysterious in its own right. So was Skyrim. So was Fallout3's Wastes. I think that criticism of GTA5 on all literary levels is happening because the gaming world understands what Bungie has teased us into understand. The shooter genre needs heroism, and heroism requires the right environment. Nobody knows how to be a hero in gritty LA. Dramtically speaking, I don't think that problem has ever been solved, not even by Bill Cosby in the remake of Neil Simon's California Suite. 

GTA5 gives us what LA gives us, what is so far, an excellent big bada boom slapstick platformer with characters who are interesting enough, but not too interesting that you actually care that they might have souls. In American fiction, nobody in LA has a soul outside of Phillip Marlowe, and you're not too sure about him. These days, you have to go to New Mexico for soul, meaning Breaking Bad. Watching Walter White's family being destroyed is poison because they have souls. That is where the damage is done to the audience. I have not yet peeked at what level of monstrous acts Breaking Bad has delivered this season but I remain interested in pursuing the wacky hijinks and dirty jokes of GTA5 inured as I am.  Sooner or later all of this ends up being Saint's Row. It is inevitable.

I have played Saint's Row 4 by the way, and I'm about to send it back to Gamefly. It's far too clunky for me to enjoy in the context of GTA5, and the degree of outrageousness has set me up to enjoy the Rockstar's brand of 'subtle' humor a bit more. Still, found myself in Los Santos / San Andreas wanting my character to be able to climb walls and plant explosive charges as I have been doing the past few weeks with Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell Blacklist. But I've got to do what my GTA characters actually can do, which is drive around this cartoon LA and fall into plots. So the dramatic tension has just begun as I have started the arc of engaging in crime again as Michael. I'm already a good driver as Franklin and I haven't yet met my third personality. Thar be adventures a'waitin me hearties, but I'll not be spendin' 'em with human beings. Yo ho ho it's the cartoon violence for me.

Halo Moments

I've spent a lot of time in a number of virtual places but now I'm thinking about legendary (heh) moments in the Halo Universe. What are they?

I think the most memorable experiences in Halo had to do with the first time I saw a Scarab in New Mombasa. It was the largest, most unbeatable looking beast. The way the scene was setup so that the Marines around you were crapping their pants and it took several minutes to beat this monster was rather outsized for Halo. It was a boss battle that didn't seem like a boss battle. 

I thought it was very dramatic the first time I played 'Truth & Reconciliation' with the sniper rifle at night, crawling among the Covenant and trying to remain quiet all the while working my way actually up into the alien ship. 

In Halo3, coming out of the jungle to the enemy installation and watching Sgt Johnson fighting against a brute through the scope of my sniper rifle. Heart pumping.

One of the craziest co-op moments were in ODST when you played the guy with the rocket launcher and you hod to fight with vehicles to destroy Wraiths all over this mountainous terrain. Running around in the warthog and trying to beat the enemies on that map was a real hoot. 

Seeing UNSC ships in atmosphere is always super dramatic as are the large-scale invasions. So the cut-scene when the In Amber Clad drops the Master Cheif a Scorpion. Awesome. Also the first time I  ever got to pilot a Banshee had to be a stellar moment.

The rest is like trying to come up with the Top 10 maps, each of which had a special conflict or types of conflict that were designed into the gameplay. So let me remember maps - and I'm going to do this alongside this squeaker's video.

• Everybody desparately wanted to get the shotgun in the underground grotto of Snowbound. Crazy grenade battles in that room.
• For Tempest and Ridgeline, the best thing to be was an invisible sniper. 
• Sword battles on The Pit were awesome. Getting gunned down by the turrets was always a big frustration. This was a great place to have a needler and a pistol. 
• Countdown had epic CQ battles at the top of the big lift in back. I could almost always get first strike at the beginning if I got the needler first on the other side of the map.
• The Exile map from Halo4 is simply a masterpiece. Best map ever for Domination, and that includes similar gametypes across COD and Ghost Recon. 
• Last Resort: What can I say? Sniping from the sniper hole. Gunning from the turret. Ghost splatters and warthog domination. De in the top 5 most memorable maps.
• Settler is a great map, one of the first in Halo that makes you think about actual infantry tactics. The high ground is a bottleneck, so you have soldiers streaming in from all over the map just to get that one place. I think this map has seen more destroyed Warthogs than any other.
• On Guardian, everybody wants the hammer, or to snipe down the tunnel where the hammer is found. Plus, exploding walls! 
• Battle Creek would probably not fare well against more recent Halo maps, but the invisibility and the rocket launcher made for some crazy exchanges on this tiny map. It's Halo 101. Hang 'em High, I hated. 
• Vehicle battles abound on Sandtrap. Best vehicle map ever. If you don't have one, you won't last long.
• Lockout is a fan favorite. Blackout and other reproductions don't quite cut it, so it's greatness has been lost.

Interestingly enough, I do agree with the squeaker's top three choices, Valhalla/Ragnarok, High Ground and Blood Gulch. These are legendary maps in the Halo franchise. I cannot sing enough praises to High Ground for map design and weapon & vehicle placement. When I think of Halo's promise of 30 seconds of high energy fun and then you die and come back for another 30 seconds, High Ground is that map. It is the map that matches weapon finds with the territory - you basically *must* get to the lookout and grab the Spartan laser, or you *must* run for the dual weilding SMGs or get the bubble sheild and shoot the guy trying to get the SMGs. Or you *must* get inside the bunker and use the spikers, or get around to the backside and grab the energy drain, or get to the turret. It was a very deterministic map with guaranteed action. 

Valhalla and Blood Gulch on the other hand were wide open spaces that really leant themselves to being exploited by player skill and team coordination. If you couldn't call an audible and marshal your forces to one stronghold or another on these maps, you were doomed. I have to say in all fairness, One Bomb on Blood Gulch became a little tiresome in the way it was predictable, but for the Big Team Battles, these exemplify greatness in a way that no other maps have. I'm giving the nod to Valhalla/Ragnarok whose longevity into Halo4 makes it the best. 

XBox One: More Than Hardware

My friend Iz says XBox One sounds like a PS3 because now it has BluRay. Iz is not a gamer.

XBox is going to be a lot more used as the input to my big screen. I already do Netflix through it, now I see reasons to do more through it. I've never really thought of XBox competition to PlayStation - all the most important titles come out on all platforms so that has never been an issue. I do find the XBox controller superior to all others though.

The real loser today is AppleTV. I have one and MSFT has come up with what I think is a winning gesture and voice controlled interface between regular television and gaming. XBox One looks to be everything but the DVR, which it could do in the cloud. I call this a strategic win for Microsoft based on a vision that has been pretty much right on for years.

The huge news is that MSFT, 343 and Steven Speilberg are going to produce a live action Halo series through XBox One. This is a big obvious win that everybody has been wanting for years and now is going to finally happen. The significance of it is not lost. Microsoft has built the road between gaming and Hollywood AND the NFL. And part of that, I think, has a lot to do with (in retrospect) whether I could envision Steve Jobs hanging out with the guys at EA and Infinity Ward and UFC other entertainment types. The answer is no, Jobs wanted to be bigger and better than all of them and the center of attention. Now today it looks like more business as usual without godlike presences actually doing business in a normal way, and the acceptance of people in movies and TV saying that XBox is a real channel for content. It simply doesn't seem weird, risky or hyped any longer. That's way different than a BluRay compatible sticker on hardware that could be built anywhere. That's the job that neither Sony nor Nintendo nor Apple nor Samsung could do, and it has been, in my opinion, Microsoft's best run business for a long time.

The XBox One looks exactly the way I want it. Black and shiny, low profile and slick. Something that looks like it belongs in a well-furnished modern living room. Depending on what the kit is, I might even be willing to spend $500 bucks on it, which kind of pisses me off because I really don't have as much of an appetite for gaming as I used to. But as much as I love what FIOS has done, they really cannot compete with gesture and voice recognition control of my big screen. There has been a balance of power in my living room between AppleTV, XBox 360 and FIOS and that balance has just been pushed a little bit further towards the XBox. 

The details are where it matters. For example, a lot of cell phone multitouch control was demonstrated today. That means an IOS app if it means anything to me. How much is Apple doing with 'Smartglass'? I forget. If in fact the XBox One will have DVR powers locally or in the cloud, with whom will they partner. I heard Comcast mentioned but not Verizon. XBox.com mentions "HDMI pass-thru" which is just what I want, if it does the common sense thing. When I'm waiting in a gaming lobby, I want to pop back to TV or music and I want it to pop back the moment the lobby goes to game. 

Obligatorily, I have to say about this 'always on internet' mess. It's peasant bodewash and I'm really sick of hearing it. Everybody always wants internet always on, just like electricity and the fact of the matter is that nobody turns on their XBox and then turns off the internet. Anyway, my take is exactly like the take of the Orthy guy or whatever his name was. If you don't want the internet, something's wrong with you. Don't spend the hundreds. Shut up and mail a post-card. 

What will be more interesting is how much will all of those Azure services provide in terms of the same library of content we all want, and this is where Apple and Amazon still may have cards to play. So let's be frank about it shall we? Even though Netflix is the big gorilla, there's a ton of stuff they just don't have that somebody out there has. And all this new content pretty much hits at the same time - in fact it's getting annoying when I see the movie art on AppleTV and it's not available to rent yet, only buy. There is, for me, about zero upside in movie ownership. Which is weird (because I haven't studied why) considering that I think nothing of spending for a digital book whether audio or document. I very much like the Audible subscription model as well as the O'Reilly model. My purhcases are eternal and I physically possess them as well has having their library as backup. But movies.. not so much. Anyway, my point is that there is a lot of video archival footage and whatnot that I really would like to dig out and view but not own - and I kinda thought that's where Apple was going. Every episode of the Flintstone and the Gilligan's Island, for example. A huge TV archive. But that hasn't happened. So if the economics aren't there, and what's been proven is that everybody wants to rent new movies and recent TV series, then there is no reason why MSFT shouldn't get into that business with the exception that they are presently exclusived out of it because of deals made with Hulu, Vudu, Roku etc. So it seems to me that now is the time for XBox One to get into the movie action - or perhaps never.

Speaking of which, Vimeo and YouTube. I guess those are the back doors. XBox One really should have YouTube. There's no excuse. More legal hate, I'm sure. 

A few other things. My gamer friends list should be infinite. There's no way I should have to be limited to 100. XBox Live needs to fix that right away. 

The Next XBox

The most important thing about the next XBox is that it has decent USB support and a fat local disk. I expect MSFT to do the right thing with regards to memory and processing power - obviously all of the Unreal and world-builder types are the real customers for that stuff so the really can't screw that up. What they can screw up is peripheral support, as if we really need some new proprietary doofus interface for controllers and disk. If I have to buy some $50 mojo to move my current game content over to the new box, I'm going to wait as long as possible to upgrade. 

If it has a BluRay, yay, big deal. Just don't make me pay for it. BluRay players are 60 bucks at Sears. 
If it has cloud storage I won't use it, especially if I have to pay. 
If there's a new controller style, I'll be skeptical but not cynical. They did well in the change from the original XBox.
If it doesn't support 1080p I'll be shocked.

What would be cool: 
- A Destiny demo
- 5.1 stereo support
- HDMI cable included
- Frontside USB (because I always need to charge my iPhone)

What would be stupid
- 3D anything
- Bundled Pricing for current Live subscribers
- Any price point over 300 bucks for the basic box (with big disk)

What I would do (and I know would never happen)
- Offer a full integrated stereo amp with HDMI & RCA jacks.
- Offer XBox on a Board for PC gamers
- Open Source arduino kits & usb kits for the XBox Controller
- iTunes Store integration
- Google Play integration
- Amazon Shopping Integration
- PayPal Integration INSTEAD of Microsoft Points

What I couldn't possibly care less about
- Skype
- XBMC
- Social Media integration

Bungie Destiny: Speculation One

I am already extraordinarily excited about the next videogame from Bungie, Destiny. Halo was the first videogame that made me take videogames seriously all those many years ago. They took Halo to the next level multiple times, and when you consider the ways they have gone, including Halo Wars and ODST, there's a lot you know they can do. 

One of the most impressive things the Bungie guys can do is design a multiplayer battlefield that you want to play over and over. I really enjoyed learning about the story about how they used heatmaps based on real play to find where killzones were located. Since I have been playing Halo 4, now taken over faithfullly by the excellent team at 343 Industries, it's clear that there is more than enough Halo lore to keep that impressive gameplay quality alive. And so I will be doing some speculations about what I expect to see and what I like to see.

Big Team Battle Goes Massive
One of the most awesome and impressive gaming I've ever done, considering that I have never played in any MMO, was a 16 on 16 battle in one of those WW2 sims. I want to guess that it was an early Call of Duty but I don't recall. What I do remember was the shape of the battlefield and all that. I would play, literally for hours on end, with my same squads until there were places we could master, but even then we could be surprised. A classic battlefield will draw players in over and over, and whomever manages to own that territory can gain cred.

So imagine if you will, Halo players, a battlefield something on the order of Valhalla / Ragnarok which is a gateway to an even larger battlefield. In order to get to the larger battlefield, which is of strategic value to the game, you must play a Halo style big team battle with respawns putting you back. You press the enemy and lines of battle determine where you respawn.  

We know that Bungie is building seven planets. So I suppose we can guess that there are maybe 10 battlefields per planet. I don't even want to think about space battles, but I'm sure that after Reach, the Bungie guys are itching to do that as well. Just think about that. Seventy maps all with big team battles, each with its own set of unique obstacles and rewards. That's what I'm talking about. 

--

Forgo Forge
I started watching some old Bungie viDocs and I can't tell you how tiresome it was listening to the guys brag about Forge and Forgeworld. Please don't bog down the game with a bunch of Forge crap. It's like the rap stars that tell the audience to say 'Ho!'. I didn't pay money to say Ho, you're the entertainer, not me. Say Ho your damned self. Build the worlds, dude. Or just open source the whole damned engine, because we don't want amateur hour, we want professional design. If you don't want to design the world, give up all your tools to another studio. 

That said, if you build a map that sucks, nuke it. We're talking a 10 year game lifespan. Nukes happen. 

If you do a top ten of all the greatest Halo maps, you will get 20 consistent answers. So there was a time that I hoped to see a best of map pack. I'd love to play The Pit or Zanzibar or any number of the old school maps in Halo. It's kind of what I expected when the Anniversary Edition came out and Bungie showed they could repupose old content. Based on that theory alone, Destiny could be astounding.

Right now however, on any given day all the great maps on Halo 4 are getting play only during Big Team Battles. On a hot weekend, you see maybe 7500-11000 players. I know there's competition with Gears of War right now, but that's the best maps. New DLC is getting no play, and those are great maps too. So please don't bog down the new Sol System with bootleg factories for crowdsourcing maps. You'll rue the day. Halo isn't a god game, it's a shooter. Destiny had better not be a god game.

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I Never Liked Bioshock

(mid rant)

In Reference To: John Teti

Sideboob: Mercenaries 2

I found the original Bioshock exactly that boorish because of the thin veneer of ideology which was so one dimensional that it failed utterly to give any depth to the excellent art direction. I had hardly taken a step into the world when I get monologued to death by what amounted to an interrupted carnival barker. Hey I opened a door, ooh check that out, uh oh here comes that stupid voice over. It was so ham handed as compared to say.. well the other excellent FPS/RPGs that I just couldn't put up with it. Arriving on the train into City 17 in Half Life 2 was a miracle of immersion. Escaping execution from the burned out town in Skyrim, brilliant. Coming out of genetic rebuilding in Mass Effect, genius.

Infinite never raised my hope much further despite the very cool graphics - it stayed much too close to a politically mythical America to be useful. Nothing about the series has seemed sandboxy enough, and the invented universe simply didn't have enough resonances for me. Considering, for example, the historical verisimilitude of the latest Assassin's Creed, at least there's the net absence of the integral part of a meaningful role of the Assassin in the American Revolution. There's a kind of Groundhog Day irrelevance to all your passion, and Assassin's Creed is OK with that - or at least it is at it's best when not too much is made of the significance of your avatar's murderous rage. The same thing can be said of the deft denouement of Skyrim. Even after you've contributed to solving the world's problems, the world still exists, with new problems. Mass Effect, not so much.

To be fair, these are inordinately complex problems to solve. The narrative has to get you going, especially when your character is too weak to beat up an ordinary policeman or guard. Some successful games ignore the problem altogether. Here is the world, here are the badguys, here's the stereotypical mission and you badass your way through. That can be loads of fun, witness games like Mercenaries 2, or Borderlands.

Deus Ex is rather the exception that proves the rule. Or rather I should say, it's a very well done game that forces you to think differently about FPS/RPGs. As a moral exercise, I simply found it too challenging. There were too many ethically gray areas that I was forced to put my avatar through - and I did find that realistic. It made me feel as though there is no real way to be heroic if you were actually endowed with such powers. It made you feel the limits, and if you are a serious gamer and take what happens to your avatar seriously, Deus Ex will put you through some emotional changes. Lying, cheating, stealing and killing in Deus Ex, takes a toll (or it did on me).

The other game that made me feel something like that was GTA San Andreas. It got really revolting to be the bad guy. It was something -- well I've never had the stomach to watch Clockwork Orange all the way through -- I imagine to being akin to being brainwashed. The rewards for any positive moral behavior in the game are washed out of your system, and it being a sandbox game, you can't even pretend to be motivated by the arc of the story. There was none.

Obviously I see a world of sociological and psychological discussion in the universes that game designers create. And it is that angle that has always struck me as being a blindspot for a lot of the game criticism that gave such high marks to the artistic merits of the BioShock series.

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Bloody Pirates!

Bloody Pirates!

Well I just finished Assassin's Creed III and it was fairly enjoyable for a time. And then I killed the last dude but it didn't let me do anything more. Evidently, the whole running around in the present day cave thing had something to do with it. I have to say that the tag team between the ghost women was probably the worst thing I have ever seen in the series. I played the whole putting the power cube into place and watching the cut scene thing on mute and listened the the beginning of my new Alastair Reynolds book. I put in the last block watched one more cutscene and then the whole thing ended. If I never hear another Assassins vs Templars conspiracy theory it will be too soon. Drop that whole thing. 

Here's my suggestion. Let's say that the Animus technology after the murder of whomever it was we killed, fell into the hands of some Anonymous hackers who then open sourced the code and now 3D printed several Animii. Now anybody can go back in time to any period of history filled with bloody violence and intrigue and step into character. Here's the thing, there was no time in this story where that whole premise of synching memories gave me more life bar or anything that I noticed. It was more all about crafting (2/3rds of which I never got around to) and buying better weapons. So really this whole freaking episode was horribly imbalanced as an RPG with levels. What it reminded me of more than anything else was Red Dead Redemption, which was bloody great. AC3 was great because the story was great, the animation was great and the main mission was great.

The fight engine is better than ever - better than Batman, better than in any other RPG even though Bethesda gets awesome props for their taking turn based fighting to the next level. The sea battles were groundbreaking AND awesome. Nobody has anything like it and I want more. The Assassin missions were very good, and the capturing sections of the cities was even more well done than in the previous editions. Climbing up steeples and trees to synch is getting pretty tired, but having oceans, remote islands, cities and wilderness - absolutely spot on. All the other modern day hokum is filler with one exception. Jumping around skyscrapers really does give me the shakes. You feel the fear of heights in AC3's skyscraper piece. I will say this, however. The only thing that could improve Assassins Creed's fighting system would be to add some cover and/or stealth features. That aspect of gameplay just seemed too much out of the control of the character. Give the Assassin a third of Sam Fisher's stealth tricks and you will have filled the fight engine thingy to perfection. 

So drop the hooey and give us more historical shitstorms to drop into and alter with our badassery. And what could be better for that than piracy? Oh perfect. And it just so happens that I watched Treasure Island with Eddie Izzard, and it's probably the best pirate film ever - a great story done in two 90 minute segments. Everything else seems cheesy by comparison - kind of like what Saving Private Ryan did to WW2 movies. It borders on the imagination's rendering of the pirate adventures of Half Cocked Jack Shaftoe in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Series. (Which means Assassin's Creed 5 has to be Mongols and horse, sword & bow battle).  

Watching the preview video today gets me all ready for this. Some maroon at Forbes wants more Animus, but I say it's time to shitcan all the backgroundery and get straight to the intrique of the simulated world. All of that was necessary to setup the universe but the reach of the Templars and Assassins grows more tenuous and unbelievable in each further episoode. OK I think I've made my point. Blackbeard? Great. There's got to be ships of the Line of Battle involved and all that. So I know if any of you Ubi guys are reading this, you're going to want to read David Davies. 

And while I'm at it. let me suggest that you could probably spin off at least one more Master and Commander kind of game. Hey wait, there's a series isn't there? Hmm. I'm now newly  all into naval battles and there must be a huge amount of history to mine. Multiplayer naval battles? That's got to be pretty cool, and replication of wind patterns and all that in recreations of battles? Awesome. I will have to say that having your ship's crew cheer when all of the enemy is sunk is a new kind of exhilaration in video games. I have never played AC multiplayer but something on this nature.. I'd like that very much.

Anyway. Three cheers for Pirates!

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Brownies & Boggarts & Sprites

Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning is a combat RPG set in a vaguely familiar world of blathering humans, wanton devils, plotting gnomes, condescending fairies, and implacably territorial beasts, all mixed up into destabilized factions. The factions all use some arrogant spokesman to seduce you by honor into a plot to destroy their enemy whomever it will be, usually the devils and the beasts, while cursing and marveling at your ability to be the badass that you are. 

You wander from quest to quest, gathering nuts in May, keys, flowers, salts, loot, armor and weapons found in tree stums, rock piles and three variations of pirate chests 'o gold, some of which are booby cursed. 

The vaguely familiar world is massive, and lies in the midlands of modern three dimensional computer animation.  The world is filled with tudorish villages and medievalish castles and brackish swamps and caves. There are verdant fields with gigantic trees and ancient ruins, arid plains with dusty work camps and flooded mines, and boggy swamps with sour mists and oboes playing minor chords. 

And the creatures! Oh my heavens the creatures. There are three kinds of two headed giants, and two other kinds of giants aside from that. There are 30 foot beasts that slither three lengths in a fraction of a second belch up slimy procreations that hatch weilding tridents that shoot lightning. There are monsters whose faces split open vertically and spit green venomous clouds of stinking, stinging insects. There are shrieking black wraithes who dodge everything you throw at them and then come back from the near dead. There are glowing animate trees that fire corkscrewing roots at your feet and arrows of light at your face. And sometimes they gang up on you, with wolves, or bears, or brownies or massive doglike creatures with electric bites that drain your mana.

However.

In Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning, you are the most badass, world wrecker in the realm. I can distinctly recall Blair Herter say that the fighting system for The Dark Knight was the most satisfying... HA and double HA. No Jedi or Sith, no Prince of Persia or God of War, no Dragonborn, combo ninja acrobat, Vault refugee nor Black Operative has weilded such destructive whoopass through any territory as.. as... whatever it is you named your elf. OK perhaps I exaggerate, but I can tell you without qualification, in the world of RPGs there has never been such an engaging fight system. Only Borderlands comes close. 

You see all of those beasts and quests are just an excuse for you to use bows, chakrams, longswords, greatswords, daggers, faeblades, ice traps, grenades, throwing knives, hammers, poisons and the traditional three elements of magic, fire, ice and lightning to hack, slash, bash, quake and incinerate your way through legions of hapless foes, and zombies too. 

It's the fightingest RPG of all time, but wait, theres more. 

You know how it is in every RPG, you choose a race and a bloodline and a primary skill and god and you level up and level up and level up. In this one, you can undo all of your skill points and re-level up from scratch. Even the weapons that you embue with gems and properties can be undone and reconfigured. In short, you get to be every kind of badass the game allows. You can be God Wizard on the Sorcery scale, God Assassin on the Finess scale or God Warrior on the Might scale, or any combination in between. 

Therefore this is a fighting game. If you were expecting crackling good storytelling, wonderous voice acting, and anything resembling a sense of humor appropriate to the vaguely familiar worlds of Seelie Fae in the Sidhe, forget it. The job done is admirable to a fault, the fault being that in the end you don't really care about all the wonderous lore of the joint. You just want to get that 249 unit ice hammer and smash the shit out of those fat red one-eyed giants who belly bumped you. 

But there's also the Niskaru, in case you get cocky. These creatures are like a combination of speed, death and death and speed. If there are two of them, be on your toes. If there are two and their boss, you had better hope some idiot giants or other NPCs have walked into the battle space, or else you're going to be swilling cures and freezing the action every five seconds to pick another combination of weapons, poisons, distractions and prayers.  Beware the crossroads of Southern Klurikon. You have been warned. 

No I haven't finished, but I expect more of the same in Alabastra, the final kingdom. 

Searching the Universe for Vile Rats

I read somewhere the other day that EVE Online is a thinking man's video game. Maybe it's just another level of sophistication in pursuit of making things go BOOM, or taking fragging to space. Either way, I'm intrigued. It shows every indication of being ridiculously complex. 

My Macbook seems to be for crap when it comes to 'PC gaming'. I thought I would give MMO gaming a chance, having pretty much done everything there is to do on my XBox. And so I took half the weekend to install and run EVE Online. You may recall that one of the staffers in Libya who suffered at the hands of radical islamists went by the handle of 'VileRat' in that universe. Well, if that's the kind of grownup I might meet in the MMO world, I'm all for it. As some of my readers know, my gaming has taken a nosedive since the death two of my best friends online. I understand and sympathize totally with those who have felt the loss. But my machine was no help. Once I downloaded the six GB it was a real clunker in the Barbie section, so I pretty much gave up. 

But the other night, having a bit of insomnia and free time allowed me to consider downgrading my video quality. It turns out that pretty much every problem had to do with the Barbie screen and the game runs fine. So I've created a couple of characters and joined a corporation and am off to do what's called PVP with my gang. 

--

On further review, I have found it nearly impossible to get over the psychological barrier of playing games on the same machine I use to do my daily work, and my writing. It's just too much time in one place. Unless and until I can get this deal working on my big screen with an XBox controller, I'm just not going to do it. Mouses are for work, all intrigue of vile rats notwithstanding. 

Forward Unto Dawn: The Halo Movie

The difference between a video game and a feature film is immersion. Video games with cinematics and excellent mattes and backgrounds approach the scale and grandeur of film - well, not really. What film does excellently is almost a cliche but it puts your characters in a super dramatic backdrop that expands the emotions conveyed by the actor. I think of Audrey Hepburn in the empty luxurious apartment in Charade.  I think of zooming into the car chase from the aerial shots of John Frankenheimer in Ronin. To get immersion, where it's your own emotions experiencing the narrative AND scenic drama is a holy grail which has not yet been found. Yet the days are approaching when the narrative drama of video game immersion and scenic drama of film are used in tandem in order to portray a universal story. By universal, of course I mean epic scale drama with key cores of protagonists taking their audience through multiple stories over the course of years. Halo is, of course, one such universe. This is the future of fiction. It is the medium for our children.

ViHart is one of the people to whom I subscribe. I like the way she thinks. I know the way she thinks because she understands the new media. Like hiphop, her youtubery incorporates its metadata into its content.  She reflects the wisdom, newly discovered by me, of Edmund Snow Carpenter who says:

If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don't address themselves to audiences; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear & are affected. 

Brilliant. 

So 343 is making, at long last, the Halo movie. Their aim is to complement the Halo universe with the kind of live action drama that cannot be accomplished in video games. They continue the very grabbing human drama in the live action shorts that preceded Halo Reach. I especially liked this one:.

What will come into being is the next installment of the video game franchise, continuing drama in the Halo universe accompanied by that thing the movie studios could not manage to accomplish, making a Halo movie. As much as I admired the sneak previews of the movie that was proposed several years ago, I now see that the new digital series: Forward Unto Dawn, will be more suited to those of us who have heard & been affected by what the artists of Halo have already said. It will put faces, in particular, into focus.

Every one of these external forays into media other than the game itself has been, in my view, a success. I still have vivid memories of the serialized audiobook of I Love Bees, which came out in between the original Halo and Halo 2.

The preview trailer of Forward Undo Dawn, just released over the weekend, has already had over 2 million views. The Halo Movie is already a success. 

Paralympic Buzzkill

The only thing I want to see are Paralympic bloopers. I want to see a Paralympic fail reel. The agony of defeat for people with no feet. 

These days I am making friends with my libertarian sentiments. The reasons are manifold but I won't get into them right now. Understand, however, that the motivations for this idea come from that liberartian network of neurons in my political brain. 

I've been watching the Tour de France this week, and it is a stunning testament to the, dare I say it, triumph of the will. I've always considered it the world's most competitive sport, in which hundreds of men race through a fortnight of greuling trials and many hundreds of miles only to be separated by mere seconds at the finish.

Having been a mediocre cyclist, I have been there. In my 20s I possessed almost precisely the kind of ideal body for cycling. 5 foot 10. 167 pounds. Genetically big calves, great lungs and idiotically steely determination. Socially I thought the idea of cycling 100 miles with a bunch of cyclists to be ridiculous. So I stayed mediocre. But I got close enough to the sport to understand both its appeal and its challenges. The challenge is to push your body to the very limit of its endurance, to get on the bike and stay on it, to pace yourself and then punish yourself, pace and then punish again - to the point at which you can begin to hate yourself for eating a small banana instead of a large one. And.. well, that's the appeal too. Being a cyclist changes how you look at people's bodies.

If you actually believe in the greatness of the human spirit and you have an idea of what people are capable of, you cannot fail to be impressed by what the world's greatest atheletes do. Well, except for swimming. Swimming is catatonically boring. The only good thing about swimming is that it enables surfing, because surfing is awesome. But sports are changing as the human body is changing and progressively getting healthier and our ability with machines are changing. That's why we have the X Games. We are missing what great swordsmen were like. We are missing the athleticism of the ancient warrior, but we are gaining the athleticism of the motocrosser, the BMX stunter, the wakeboard aerialist. In our lifetimes, the improvement of women's gymnastics has been stunning. I expect to see a double back summersault on the balance beam in my life, which in the 70s was the most difficult trick in floor exercises.

We are often told however, that there is some extra measure of courage demonstrated by athletes with missing body parts. I don't buy it. A man who has half a right leg who runs a marathon on a fitted spring cannot possibly be facing greater fear or danger in his event that that which caused his crippling. 

What impresses me when I watch videos like those of Andrew Dickey is the implicit knowledge that there are great failures to match every triumph. You fail more often trying front double pikes from the 1 meter springboard in practice than you score on the dives at a meet. You look at that hill and you shift down into the girly gears more often than you stand up and keep up the bike's momentum. I'm sure Dickey has more scars than a few, just like Travis Pastrana has broken so many bones that he approaches Evel Kneivel. I confess that I'm more impressed by people who wreck perfectly healthy bodies in search of sports perfection than those who start with wrecked bodies in search of sports mediocrity.  It's the old saw about excellence vs achievement.

Getting my grandmother to stop smoking was an achievment. Keeping ex-felons obeying the law is an achievement. Two year olds tying their own shoes is a remarkable achievement. I think the guy who plays Mortal Kombat with his face, because he has no thumbs, is a real champion, not that anybody much cares about Mortal Kombat. I mean what happens if you fail beyond embarrassment? What I want to see is the fat kid stand up after crashing through the fourth hurdle in the 110 meter event. That's remarkable. What I want to see is the anorexic shotputter dislocate her shoulder. What I want to see is the one-legged skateboarder bail on the rail. Wheelchair basketball? No. Goalball? No. Boccia? No. I want to see blood and guts.

I know that we are in evolutionary times when it comes to sport. I also know that a lot of the sports we have evolved to popularity are often not athletic in the least, some border on the merest of cognitive pursuits. So we have time and bandwidth for a lot more events. I think the man who gets up on a bucking bull is courageous and the one-armed man who does the same thing is slightly more. Because we know the bull mostly wins. 

So. Show me the slo-mo fails. That's what I want to see. Real Drama.

Gaming Update

It has been a while since I've done much gaming, but now that I'm a bit more secure and deeper into my new discipline, I'm creeping back. 

I am certainly a snob when it comes to the games I care about, and they are reduced to a fewer few. Even given all of the new stuff announced at E3 for this year, all I need for the next year, I already know.

Old Dogs
First and foremost, let me make one crack about three people including myself. Thin ice. The other two are Adam Sessler and Peter Windsor. Windsor, who was as far as I knew in my introduction to F1, the premeir gadfly when it came to wrangling soundbites from pit row just before the race. His attempt to start an F1 racing team flubbed and now he seems to be behind the mic again, but way off the broader mainstream - which aint particularly broad here in the states. Will Buxton, that young whippersnapper has taken over at Speed. And similarly, Blair Herter has pushed old Adam Sessler aside in an unfortunate succession. Did I sense that one coming? Hmm. Well, the other crap on G4 TV is crap and Herter has seemed to ditch his ambiguously gay asides as he stepped up. He still seems genuinely more happy (especially when it comes to Batman) about games and gamers, then did Sessler and the new stage and new vibe is established. Morgan Webb is, by the way, irreplacable. She is the perfect straight man, which is probably going to become more evident. The change may actually be welcome in retrospect because it's obvious that the n-year running joke about wierdness behind the curtain of X-Play is running thin, ALTHOUGH, the parody of getting the Skyrim sword was the best ever. And so where will Sessler land? Windsor, I don't care. Sessler should organize the best gaming podcasters and replace the young snarkers. Gaming crit is damned difficult, and Sessler is literate and deeply experienced. Nobody else comes close - even the MMO Report should be dropped and let Herter and Webb get shiny on the air, with the occasional faces that were at E3. 

So there it is, Sessler should ratchet up to Machinima / Satellite Radio quality, his own 90 minute weekly podcast with a new partner or three. That would be the only force to be recognized. If he shows up on another TV channel, I won't watch. Speaking of which, it is only through a podcast that Sessler can let his snark through in which he gives a more righteous savaging of what has recently been hinted as 'brutally honest' reviews on XPlay. As soon as he said 'brutally honest' we knew the game was going to be shite, but he still has to smile for the camera. No more. Go PG-13 Adam. Hell, go R. Now's the chance.

Watch_Dogs
The unqualified hit of E3 was Watch_Dogs. Once it happens, we will wonder how we lived without that style of gaming for so long. I wondered all along. I mean I didn't want to do LA Noir, and I got nice and bored with Alan Wake's flashlight after a dozen hours. I like an urban sandbox where I have badass powers, but not necessarily strictly destruction. While it's very difficult for me to choose between Mercenaries 2 and Saints Row the Third where that was concerned, the more realistic games were more problematic. GTA Four, for example. It did the narrative perfectly and gave me a character I liked to be, but... Stealing cars and shooting people and running from cops, it's so tired. Somebody give me a sword or some other weapon. Which reminds me, the *next* Assassin's Creed will be the best one - when Ezio is in today's time, and then next when he's in the future. But Watch_Dogs is going to be the first one to do this super nice with cyber powers of the sort we kind of expected from Splinter Cell Double Agent, but more nicely got from Conviction ..yet.. downloading all that cyberbadness to a man in the field is badass. Can't wait.

Future Soldier
The best thing about GRFS is that there is a cover system and you can go indoors. Basically that was the difference between Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon. Ghost Recon could only do outdoor battles, covering large distances in big maps, which made more sense finally when vehicles were added. Rainbow Six added the cover system and made a giant leap forward in setting up marking targets and blasting doors. My preference went to R6 for the close quarters and multiplayer - loved blowing up those slot machines and the control was marvelous. Meanwhile Gears was owning the outdoors (no matter what MW folks said). Speaking of which, I have to say that Battlefield 3 has really become the game that I want to play instead of Modern Warfare.

Call of Duty was best, best, best, when there were huge 16 on 16 battles with WW2 weapons and people used mics. Something went wrong and now the battles seem cartoony without being a fun as Halo. The objective battles on Future Soldier are the right combination with the sprinting and cover system as good as Gears (better in some respects) and the necessity for teamwork and using mics. Anyway I think I'll stick with Battlefield 3 DLC and Future Soldier. Yes I'll have to play the new MW Black Ops 2, but...

Forza Horizon
Forza realizes that racing games are social? Well duh. I can't tell you how well it may actually work, but I kinda like the idea that there might be car clubs rolling in that game.  That will make it a winner - the idea will be inevitable and I think it's going to work. You can't beat Forza control, and although I still prefer Codemasters Grid for damage and realism, Forza is just as perfect. Yes I'd try one more Project Gotham, but what we need for all of these is Next Gen stuff - especially for the Clancy brand.

Next Gen
So let me say what I want to see for Next Gen, now that XBox 720 rumors are all out.

1. I don't give a crap about 3D, and neither should anybody. I won't pay extra for it at home. It's crap - just like those 5.1 systems they were selling 8 years ago.

2. The XBox controller is one of the greatest UI inventions ever. They should Arduino the hell out of it. If it wasn't Microsoft, that would already be a $50 million business. 

3. Multi-voice recognition is more important than multi-gesture recognition. That should be the focus of Kinect tech. Siri will know this and it will be a big differentiator. 

4. Everything depends on three things. XBox, Playstation, AppleTV. I cannot imagine that Nintendo does any settop integration - and too bad, but. they want to play with kids. Fine. 

5. Microsoft cannot brand streaming content. Forget about it and just be a platform. Metro suffices. Netflix was a huge win. Now get Time Warner and MGM and those guys before it's too late. Speaking of which..

Whomever partners with Amazon in the living room wins. This is so bloody obvious. If Amazon makes a set-top the market is going to stay interesting and volatile for another five years. So even though Apple could own music and movies, they are nowhere near getting sophisticated PC and console gamers. So yes, there is yet another chance for a Netflix/Amazon/Tivo entry into the market where Roku and Vudu are still minor players. This is the future, not MSNBC.

Hell, even Marvel and Ubisoft have a shot. Who is going to learn first from cinematics and the Next Gen console on how to make more mergey content gamey-movies? OK that's all.

 

 

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.