Cobb

Visions of the Silent Cartographer

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

Others Knew Too

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

Cat Circle

  Yeah I did it. Can you?

Try here.

Star Wars: Game Beats Movie

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

Mafia Wars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Halo Wars - First Look

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

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

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

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

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

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

Halo Wars is difficult.

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

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

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

Race Pro: First Look

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008 Games of the Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fallout Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NXE - All That

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gears of War 2

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

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

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

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

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

Far Cry 2

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

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

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

Mercenaries 2 Completed

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

What can I say? I had a badass time.

End War Demo: First Look

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

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

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

Mercenaries 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Halo: Still Going Strong

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

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

Spore

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

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

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

Top Games of 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Also rans:

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

Grid

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

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

Dark Sector

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GTA IV: First Look

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R6V2: First Look

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

The four biggest differences are all important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frontlines: Fuel of War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kane & Lynch

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

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

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

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

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

Geth Hunting

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

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

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

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

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

The Portal

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

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

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

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

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

Two Worlds

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

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

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

Halo Three - First Impressions

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

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

Halo Fever

I'm starting to get itchy. H-Day is one week from today. I feel like I ought to be doing something to prepare myself. Maybe some finger stretching exercises. Something. Maybe I should pre-order. I don't know. It's crazy. I just went through this for Harry Potter.

I've heard that somebody got a 6 minute spy capture of the ending of the single-player game. I just know that I don't want to see that. If somebody would have told me what would happen to various character in that last book, it would have destroyed half the adventure. So I'm going to stay away from YouTube on that score.

Part of me wants to just relax, chill out and not worry about playing the first week. Another part of me wants to find out which of my online buddies has the biggest HiDef and go hang at his place. Another part of me wants to pretend I don't care at all and deny my inner game geek. See, I know that there are going to be a dozen new maps for the interactive game, and I know some folks are going to just do the single player just to get some quick achievements. I've already been through the beta, so I have a jump on some millions of players. Why should I rush?

Because, Halo is the biggest new franchise of science fiction. It is what Star Trek used to be.

Yeah you got me. I think people who watch soap operas are lamebrains. I'd never watch Entertainment Tonight or buy a gossip magazine, but I am a gamer. Lately it has become something of a guilty pleasure. I don't quite enjoy it as much as I used to, and the times that I do, I feel a bit more silly. It's detective novels that are doing this to me, I think. I do a lot more serious reading too. I heard that there was a Halo comic novel. I never found it. I've been trying to get the I love bees ringtone onto my Treo. No luck yet. The film has been canceled and the Nylund books have left me a little dry. I need more Halo fix, and nothing is satisfying me.

I need the real game. I need to un-Shadowrun my reflexes. I need to back off of Rainbow Six and get my Halo focus back. It's about that time.

Bioshock Demo

Bioshock feels somewhat familiar but it's definitely innovative, still I'm not hooked.

I had no idea what to expect from this game. I know there's been some buzz about it and somebody asked if I'd played the download. Knowing I hadn't, I quit playing Shadowrun and hopped to it. The 1.3 GB downloaded fine (actually faster than R6V Black Pack which is about half the size) and I started it up.

I sat in the water for a good 20 seconds before I realized I was actually in first person mode and should start swimming. Duh. The very beginning reminded me of my first Splinter Cell adventure. Rich graphics, fine control. Then I started down the rabbit hole into the Ayn Randian fantasy turned nightmare. Whoa. A thinking person's game says me. Then the slasher stuff starts and despite the fact that I dig the retro, I'm already thinking.. man this is claustrophobic and creepy. Sometimes I like that vibe, most of the time I don't. So I start through this wild underwater city and as the gameplay gets going, I feel like I've been sent back to Myst. I'm a treasure hunter in a bizarro world plagued by zombies.

The voiceovers are really excellent. I think I was playing it with my own soundtrack, but even so, the voice talent here is immersive. And as I get a couple of the skills and start to hack and slash my way through a half legion of psycho-baddies, I see some of the attraction. Then I get into a bot attack and I try to hack the bot but can't hack it. Oy. I can see that this is going to take some skill to. In other words, it is like a very creepy and claustrophobic Myst, and it ain't easy.

I keep on trucking until I die a couple times, and then finally get to the end of the demo (what? already?) and watch some of the action samples. Ya know? I just can't get with it. It looks too similar and even though I know at some point I'd probably have to swim outside, it's too boxed in. If I could sneak through some of the rooms, I'd probably be more inclined to dig this. But none of the action seems to appeal to me. It all seems to be zombies and I can't stand zombies, not because they creep me out or anything, but because they're not live humans in an online interactive play. I don't know.

Take for example Silent Hill. I very much dug the suspense of that. Also, I think Prey was an extraordinary game. But on both of those, I enjoyed them without a demo. So in one way I think the demo of Bioshock has turned me off of the game - so I've only experienced some small fraction of the action I'm not more interested to see it. That makes it a hard call. If, for example, I had only played Route Kanal for Half-Life 2, I would have not thought it was a great game at all. Bottom line: the jury is still out on Bioshock, but the demo is a total failure.

Shadowrun

The longer you play Shadowrun, the more you love it. It starts off novel, and then it gets better and richer.

I see that there are not a lot of high falutin' reviews for this game, and the reasons are clear. It's basically a stripped down online team based FPS without a single player mode. The graphics are just OK and there are just some dumb animations - for example when you climb ladders in the levels, your body parts don't move. You just go up the ladder. But when it comes to rich gameplay, it doesn't get much better than Shadowrun.

Before I played this game, I heard that it was very different and more complex than most FPS games. And it's true. There are so few conventional ways to play the game, that nobody has figured out how to glitch it. There's no such thing as spawn camping, primarily because you can respawn at anyplace on the map.

When it comes to big team battles, which is basically every game, this game does actually compare to Halo. Except that there is more flexibility. With the larger maps, you don't get so much of a frenzy of action, and the conflict isn't as predictable as it is with Halo. On the plus side, every game has two ways to win. You can either eliminate your enemies, or capture 'The Artifact' and take it to a base in the enemy camp.

For people who like to be big and bad and just blast away, or become headshot snipers, you simply cannot do it. You must be a team player to win, and you must coordinate attacks, defenses, weapons and races. In other words, it's more of a thinker's game than a button masher's game. There's not much use for cover in this game, and those who can master a manual use of cover have a definite advantage.

As with any shooter, your game play depends primarily upon the economy of life. In a game like Call of Duty when you can respawn an unlimited number of times and games are fairly long, certain kinds of actions make sense, like surging all players to a contested territory again and again. In a game like Splinter Cell, at the other end of the spectrum, when you can lose just be being discovered, a great deal more thought goes into every physical move. The trick is finding a balance. The trend has been towards collaborative resuscitation during battle and this is what makes for truly exciting play in Shadowrun.

Shadowrun also gives a practically infinite number of ways to play as a team. You have four races times six weapons (weilding up to two at a time), six magic spells and six technologies. You can arm three triggers to employ a combination of spells and tech while the right main is for your weapon. There are three game modes and that multiplies out to a bunch. All the levels are fairly spacious and some are downright maze-like.

There are two great ways to play that I find particularly fun. The first is juggernaut mode in which you take a troll character (the big strong brute) and a minigun and just mow down your adversaries. Two trolls parked under a Tree of Life, both with miniguns can deal death like crazy. The other and very popular mode is ninja mode. One of the weapons you can buy is a katana sword. As an Elf, with the speed boosts of Wired Reflexes and Transport magic, you can rapidly sneak up on enemies and deal a deathblow which is very similar to the back of the head melee in Halo, only more dramatic. Players that have been dealt such a blow begin to bleed out, which means unless somebody revives them or they find a Tree of Life, they'll be dead in 10 seconds.

Shadowrun also gives teabaggers a new, more productive hobby which is clearing bodies. If you are struck dead, there is a possibility that a teammate can resurrect you, especially if you are the victim of a cheap shot. So not only does an opponent need to be killed, you need to rip their corpse to shreds as well, otherwise they may come back to haunt you. It takes longer than an execution move in Gears of War, so there's risk involved in this coup de grace. However a resurrected body is a bit more frail than a fresh one. Chances are you won't survive a second death in any one round. Each game is a first to six round victories. 

One of the more subtle aspects of the game is the use of the DPad which allows you to convey battlefield information to your teammates. Although the maps are large and complex, every area has a name which appears in the lower left hand corner of your headsup. Using the DPad left, will tell your teammates that you need assistance. A Cortana-like voice will say "needs assistance at the Habitat, two enemies" and text that message on the screens of your teammates. You can also spot enemies with the up arrow or order allies to a spot on the map with your right arrow. Not many players use this function to the fullest but it can definitely make a big difference.

I'm going to try to get more of my shooter pals to play Shadowrun. We're just starting to play a lot of the new extensions to R6Vegas, especially VIP. But I think they'll come around. In the meantime, until Halo3, it's Shadowrun for me.

Halo Noobs Die Whining

Somebody named Croal is whining about how hard Halo 3 is to play. I'm on the lookout for his gamertag just so I can frag him my damned self.

Halo 3, I have to say, is an overkill of a game. It has so much of everything that it can be downright intimidating. But that's what we want. People who can't handle the complexity should hide themselves way back in a corner of the map and try to throw grenades at the big boys battling it out on High Ground. Well, I guess that's what blogging at Newsweek is, by definition.

But you know what, I think he's man enough to say that he just doesn't like these kinds of online shooters. The online interactive Halo world is brutal and unforgiving. Noobs get schooled hard in Halo, and there's really no two ways about it. Even the best players are accustomed to getting fragged at least 10 times per game. My average lifespan in the beta has been around 30 seconds, but I've seen it down to around 24. I don't even want to talk about my K/D ration. (I sacrifice for the team).  But I have to tell you, everybody gets their ass handed to them in Halo sooner or later. It's one of the great things about the game, you never get so good that it gets boring. Never.

Learning curves are one thing, competency and perfection are everything. What makes Halo so annoyingly great is that as you learn and master new techniques.. well, it's like playing a musical instrument, it's simply that involved. I've said this before and it's why I think the Wii is a joke. The kind of manual dexterity mastery of Halo forces you to acquire is daunting and the subtlety of finding new attacks is sublime.

Here's a couple of examples. I've been playing the beta for about 200 games now, and I've just picked up a couple new techniques, one of them dumb and the other fairly clever enough so that I almost hesitate to mention it it public.  The first is that in dual-weilding, which was new to Halo 2, you could still throw grenades. It would automatically unweild your left weapon and you could grenade opponents. Now you have to perform a dummy melee attack to unweild your left weapon and toss the grenade. That extra step is tough to remember when your instinct is just to throw.

The second attack is with a new series of weapons never had before. One of them is called an energy drainer. To deploy it, you hit your X button and it basically rolls out a few feet in front of you, but unless you're moving forward you're going to get yourself in it's target radius. So I came up with a way to jump forward, deploy the weapon, move back and then start strafing the area of deployment for quick kills. Now my enemies are seeing the energy drainer in places they don't expect to find it.

These are tricks that noobs are simply not going to figure out even when they are done to them. The gameplay in 3 is a great deal more nuanced and sophisticated with the new weapons and maps, and they enable combinations of tactics that go far beyond just picking weapons and button mashing. But like Virtua Fighter fans before the days of consoles, a lot of us Halo player have always resented the school of twitch button mashing. Halo gives us all the strategies and tactics and speed we crave. But it does make it damned hard to master the game.

Did I mention vehicles?

Gaming Cafes

Like many people half my age, I've got Halo 3 Beta fever. I've already played about 70 games online and have ranked up a bit, but not up to my usual standing. This week I'm out of town again and away from my console. Now that I've heard that they added a banshee to Valhalla, my fever temperature has risen again. So last night I looked for a gaming cafe in Houston.

Oh the pathos.

Somehow I just don't understand PC LAN party style gamers. I mean I think I understand what they are trying to do, but the very idea of paying 40 bucks or so for all the fun you can have on a rented PC in some dark room that's not your own dark room? How sad. And these guys are out there still playing Counterstrike. How absolutely pathetic.

There are about three gaming cafes in Houston if google is to be believed, but all of their websites appear out of date. None of them have XBox 360s and none of them appear to have more than 30 PCs. It basically means you'd be gaming with the same folks, which I suppose is not so bad if you're 13 and your mom wants to know where you are at all times IRL and virtually. But I can't even conceive of gaming without thousands of folks online. I mean, my Friends List on XBox live is 77 long and I've taken a lot of time to pare that down from 100. I could easily have 256 friends, I wonder if XBox Live might let me, some time in the future.

I understand Warcraft and all that. I understand Second Life and all that. What I don't understand is how gaming cafes manage to stay open or how their business model will remain useful. As a kid and young adult who has been to all of America's greatest and seediest arcades, I've seen the end of that era. Gaming cafes are just extended life support. Broadband to the home is real and the need to go to the local cafe can only continue if they become part of a network of semi-pro and professional competitions.

I haven't been much of a sports gamer, so I can't tell you how successful the XSN (Xbox Sports Network) has been. I do know that XBox Live gamers continue to complain about EA's server network. But there might still be some reasonable expectations from the conventional tournaments held online by all of the gamers. Bungie's enablement of video sharing for Halo and the Heroes' Channel for Project Gotham Racing are good ideas. But none of that matches the thrill of a real sports venue with megascreens, glitz and chatter.

So I think I can manage to survive a week without buying myself a travel XBox, but I didn't think that gaming cafes, the alternative, would be so far behind the console times. Their loss.

The Halo 3 Beta

Seventeen Ways

1. I have yet to see any lag. Sometimes it takes a little long to get a session started, but once it does, Halo3 is pretty much lag-proof. I noticed one tiny glitch on my second day of playing hours at a time, which is what made me think of it. Wow. A lag. It was gone in a second and it made me realize what a good job had been done.

2. Return of the MA5C
Aww. I get all sentimental over this gun. What a sweet thing to do. It's back and it's just right. In fact, it's so cool that you'll forget that there are no pistols in this game.

3. Power Drainer
I have yet to use this wisely. One of my tactics now is just to use grenades and devices to limit were my opponents can hide. This is an excellent tool for just that. It's especially excellent in cramped spaces, other people's gun dances and on King of the Hill. So, never say I didn't give you a clue.

4. Grenades.
Always starting with two grenades is a huge plus in my book. This may have been the old difference between slayer and slayer pro, but I'm not interested in checking that difference out. There is nothing so lovely as running up on a huge cache of grenades strung out it a row. Spike grenades are great and they do exactly what I've been needing grenades to do forever, stick in one place while an over-zealous pursuer is on my tail.

5. Snowbound.
Snowbound is a great map because there are so many different and challenging environments a great combination for close in battles and outside sniping. What is clearly evident is that the level design in Halo is far beyond that of any other kind of game. The placement of weapons and the size of the playing field and the kinds of battles that are generated because of the environments are evidence of the genius and testing behind this game. Some of the setups are just astounding. It took about two days for there to be a battle in the large cave, the one in the center, but that was very excellent. Right now people are shying away from the underground for more than 2 or 3 people, but I expect some awesome battles.

6. High Ground
HG is my new favorite map. I took an instant liking to it just like I did with Zanzibar. If there is a designer with a name, then you can definitely feel his touch here on the details as with Turf which became a favorite. There are new materials and surfaces and new places to get that provide good targets. The broken concrete is great on the right side of the wall and the bunker. It has the feel of a military base, and the amount of decay is good too. This is classic Halo.

7. Valhalla
A good map as far as large maps are concerned, but very boring for four on four. I was surprised to find how quickly a single sniper can cover most of the field, however. In BTB, this one should rock. On the waterfall side, the rocks over the river look like half a star. OK we get the joke. Lose it, it's corny.

8. The Needler
Finally tuned properly. It is now the deadly weapon it was always supposed to be and acts like I expected it should have in the first Halo. You don't need two (it can't be dual wielded) and you don't need to land 30 needles in someone for them to pop. About 6 or 7 will do. I've been waiting for this weapon to be right since the beginning. Thank you Bungie.

10. Dual Wielding.
It takes a long time to get used to the new system, at least for me. I'm probably going to stop playing Halo 2, just to deal with it. It does make sense to use the bumpers to grab weapons and to reload, but actually it feels less natural than on Gears. I think that is especially the case because so few games use the left bumper. Overall however, the system works well enough. No complaints.

11. First Person Details.
My hands! They're so cool. My SMGs ave such detail. My sniper scope wireframes the whole battlefield. This truly enhances game play.

12. DPad Intercom
I hate it. Yeah the sound is good, but it's just clumsy. I'll get used to it because I'd rather have this clunky thing than somebody's crappy mic humming in my ear, but I'm used to talking while I'm running and strafing and turning around. Can't do that any longer. Makes tactics kinda feel like NASA talk from the 60s, Over.

13. Name Extensions
Very good idea to have Clan names as a letter and 2 numbers. Simple, effective. Non-corny.

14. Melee
Is it me or is the melee amped up just a touch in this game. Perhaps it depends on the weapon but I very much like the way melee is timed and executed in Halo 3. I can tell it has been tweaked just a touch, and I like that touch.

15. Big Guns
My nephew likes domination weapons. So he'll go looking for the biggest whatever in the map. Now he's going to be a pig in slop because there's a mobile 50 cal, something called a

17. Sound
There are a hundred little details in H3 that are noticeable to long time players. The way the King circle lights up is a big obvious one, but the little ones in the sound are very cool. The Power Drainer has absolutely the coolest sound in the game.

Now a few suggestions for the Beta Team.

Gaming Update

Cars
It's a driving game so I had to try it. It's playable for about 6 hours, nah, make that 2. I bought it for the kids and even they got bored with it within a couple days. This game is so lame I'm almost embarrassed to have unlocked any achievements.

Crackdown
Crackdown is a very good game. It's too bad that I could never get a multiplayer session going. I think it would have been rather cool to have multiple players with the kind of superhuman skills I eventually acquired to whip on some gangster butt. But as it stood, even in single player mode, it was exceptional.

In just about every way, Crackdown is the new standard to be beat when it comes to such 'urban assault' games. I mean the Grand Theft Auto series, Saint's Row and the True Crime series. Crackdown is as well balanced a third-person shooter as Brute Force (finally), and superior in every way to the others, especially with driving. I don't know what is is with these developers. There's has never been a game where you can fight well and drive well. It's either one or the other. I'm sure there's a technical reason for that.

Technically the game was flawless. I got no glitches (not that I go hunting for them). The look is a combination of a kind of cell shading and realism that makes you think of American superheroes as opposed to the Japanese sort. The environment is massive and diverse, every type of cityscape imaginable is in the game.

What makes Crackdown special is that you gain skills in multiple dimension, rather like a RPG you learn by doing. Plus there is a huge environment. So it is very RPG-like, but it's unlike other RPGs in that you never go inside buildings into caves or rooms or mazes. Instead it's an outside game where you use buildings like Spiderman. You can scale tall buildings like a rock climber (you don't stick to walls, you find handholds), this is completely unique and very cool. Additionally, they have nailed the Anime Jump in this game better than any other. Going rooftop to rooftop is a huge thrill, and when you land with a thud, it shakes and cracks the ground. Smashing. All that and rocket launchers, vehicles and the ability to throw containers.

Still for all the fun Crackdown packs into its game, I found myself wishing for more online action. But since I'm going to go ahead and buy it in order to the Halo 3 Beta May 16th, I suppose I'll have time to get with that action. Crackdown is right on the edge of being a great game.

Viva Pinata: Who Doesn't Like Playing God?

My primary controller is broken and I don't have cash to buy another. I've been out of the shooting rooms for about two weeks, and I've been playing Viva Pinata. That's the excuse I'll be giving the guys on Gears of War and Rainbow Six, but the fact is that this game is a lot of fun.

OK so the basic premise is this. Viva Pinata is a god game, which is to say that it is The Sims with animals. There is actually something stunningly compelling about the basic premise even in this Fisher-Price interface. You're basically allotted a scrubby patch of junkyard that you must convert into a garden. You start with a few basic seeds and a broken up shovel and a worm or two. Your job, turn this wreck into an environmental paradise.

Since the game is obviously for the younger set, you'd think that perhaps they've dumbed down nature. OK yes there is a stork involved, but the player is responsible for getting pairs of animals to do the 'romance dance', which is a mini-game within the sim for each species. I've been playing for about 18 virtual days and have managed to collect, very un-Noah-like about 20 different species of animals. You learn very quickly which animals eat which others or if plants are their thing. For some reason, the frogs and newts really go at it, and bees and ants hate each other with deadly passion. The snakes are remarkably tame. There are 'sour' animals too that simply prey on every species, there are poison plants and inexplicable sicknesses too. You find yourself after a few upgrades overseeing quite a menageries of plants, trees, insects, rodents, mammals, flowers and god knows what else is in store. Viva Pinata is a masterwork of farming and husbandry with ecological details that pull few punches.

Now it's true that animals that die explode into pieces of candy, after all they are pinatas. So it's lighthearted enough for any kid who can handle an XBox controller. But it can get as complex as you can manage. Still, the engineers seem to have found a way to moderate the pace. So it doesn't seem to game you as hard as you might expect of a game of this complexity. On the other hand, if you're going full hog as I am, you can find out nice farming economies, purchase helpers of various competencies and get real traffic minded in designing your plot of land.

Like with the Sims, you can build  ponds or fill them back in. You place trees and plants, fences, birdhouses and the like. Creatures require certain environmental niceties. So if you want to get a mouse, you have to plant radishes.If you want rabbits, you have to plant... hmm what do you think? But that's just to get them to visit. If you want them to mate, you have to get them on a proper diet and provide the right house. For example, if you want a baby snake, you have to attract the snakes. Then you have to feed them each a frog and build a snakehouse. But to get the frog you have to have a certain amount of pond area, and the frogs have to have eaten some flies to stick around. Well to get flies, you have to have the right kind of flowers. You get the picture. There's a deer that skirts by every once in a while, I'm desparing because a sour bat just bit my sparrow.

What god game would be complete without some control over life and death? Since all pinata are candy on the inside, you can whack a fox upside the head with your shovel and feed the pieces to a frog.You can also play capitalist, find a cash crop and just hire a hunter to go track down a rabbit for you rather than spend the time crafting a seductive ecosphere. There's also a bum in the game. I have yet to figure out what purpose he serves, so I whacked him on the head with a shovel once too. It didn't matter, he keeps coming back begging for coins.

I'm somewhat embarrassed by how much I like the game. I mean it can be very insipid at times. All of the creatures have big baby doll eyes, and you can look at them doing things inside their homes, which inevitably elicit cries of "OOooh they are sooo cute!", from my ten year old daughter. Yeah when you think about it, these are like beanie babies come to life. So yes absolutely it will hold your kidnicks transfixed. It is rich gameplay with dozens of different species to play with and watch interact. There's even a feature that allows kid friends to share animals via XBox Live. If I were so inclined, I wouldn't mind one bit giving XBox Live to my daughters. VP is a perfect environment for kids, and it's way more expansive than the games that kids play on PCs like Millsberry and Club Penguin.

If Microsoft is smart about gaming, and I know they are, they will come up with a set of Viva Pinata class games. It will be the biggest hit since Pajama Sam and the Humongous Entertainment series. The kinds of controls that are in place for XBox Live for such games good, I know because I have such controls for Boy on his account, and when it comes down to it every parent who wants some control and direction over their kids online use would much rather have it done on a game console than on the family PC.

Now, sadly, I'm going to give the kids their controller back.

The Moral Salience of War Gaming

As Sister was leaving last night after our informal Karamu (with gumbo, yeaaah!), I was reunited with my online buds in old habit of venturing to foreign virtual lands and shooting each other in the head. She shook her head and mumbled something about corrupting our children to which the Spousal Unit mumbled agreement. You're a husband, you know how wives do, and you know exactly how to mumble back.

Ever since watching Patton a year or so ago, I've been thinking about that which gets attributed to war rightly or wrongly. I have concluded that war is man's greatest endeavor, it is the mother of all invention, the scrubber and creator of history. War appropriates all moral discourse and destroys all information that it doesn't yield, thus it is the be all and end all of humanity. There is nothing greater we can do to destroy or preserve ourselves than is done in war. We victors or vanquished have only the mind of God from which to rebuild that which we might be again after the battlefield has taken its toll.

So I am reminded of another great man whom I met on a small plane in Vail but neglected to put on my silly list of most famous people met. This broker named Bernstein; he was reading an old history. And I am reminded of the Arnn lectures I am hearing from the Hugh Hewitt archives on Jaffa who says life is too short to read 100 great books, and then proceeds to recommend three. History is the history of war, and why shouldn't it be?

So in my games, I have approached the pitch of battle, and I watch how men call each other names or brothers and how bitterly we fight or how bravely we sacrifice. And though these are only games, they are only games for men. There cannot be any coincidental reason for that. Men are drawn to war as they are to righteousness and renown. In our times of peace, it is our constant reminder of the things we might be called to do were it not for prior victories in our favor.

I'm studying war. Not this one in Iraq because to study that one is to engage too many people who have nothing better to do and no investment in the moral discipline of war itself. They are opportunists seeking currency. I am seeking a more transcendent wisdom, and that cannot be gotten by making political statements, at least not by me given the quality of the discourse I've been able to sustain. No disrespect to my present audience but who among you is Herodotus? I'd rather read him than you and I'd be better served.

You'll hear more of this.

See With Your Eyes Not With Your Hands

Gamespot has done what I thought had been done, but until ZyklonKillerBees sent me a message, I never saw it. That is the comparison between PS3 and XBox 360. Game by game, screen by screen. Now you can really tell. This isn't news to me because as I said before John Carmack of Id Software said it years ago - the XBox dev kit is superior to that of the PS3 so the XBox guys are going to write better code for graphics and all sorts of other things.

Anyway here's the scoop .

We expected the PlayStation 3 to ship with several games that first appeared on the Xbox 360, similar to how the Xbox 360 had a lot of Xbox ports at launch. And the PS3 did indeed arrive with a good number of games that originally shipped for the Xbox 360. This gave us the perfect opportunity to compare the graphics on both systems with several cross-platform games. You'd think that the PS3 versions would be exactly the same or slightly superior to the Xbox 360 versions, since many of these games appeared on the 360 months ago, but it seems like developers didn't use the extra time to polish up the graphics for the PS3. We found that the Xbox 360 actually had better graphics in the majority of the games we compared.

Go see for yourself.

Rainbow Six Vegas: A Seasoned Look

Rainbow Six Vegas is still once again proving to me that I can enjoy getting shot.

The cover system in this game is making it just about as realistic as possible, and while the pace is a great deal slower than Gears of War, at least you have the realism of shooting Tangos in the foot from 150 yards with a PSG and having that be an effective kill, whereas in Gears, you could unload three direct headshots on a Boomer and they don't even budge.

This is the most wide-open Rainbow ever. While there is still an ample amount of close in combat, you cover a great deal more space. Furthermore, the AI enemies are a great deal more unpredictable than ever before. On the standard level I am having a good amount of challenge actually getting through the streets of Vegas.

The environments are fabulously destructable and the Vegas street shootout, which is the second chapter after a more sparsely populated Mexico chapter, is a complete with cars and trucks that bounce when fragged. If your assault rifle is powerful enough, you can shoot off a door or panel and get to a terrorist that much quicker. But these aren't terrorists, these are armies. I mean there's no way you send a three man squad up against what has to be at least 50 men armed with commando-quality armaments.

The first chapter of R6V takes place not in Vegas but in some city in Mexico which is somewhat reminiscent of the opening of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. I think maybe Tom Clancy is trying to tell us something, which is that Mexico is a lot more dangerous a neighbor than we might think. The rich desert reds and browns look great on the screen and the authentic cursing of your enemies

I've made it to Sargeant First Class in R6V and have been playing with a bit more intensity these days. I'm coming to appreciate this game in ways that, quite frankly make me think twice about Halo.

Shooter's Evolution
The thing about R6 is that it seems to be in the right niche between Halo and Ghost Recon. I should say that Gears is a totally unique thing. But what I'm noticing right now is how my playing one comes at the expense of another. Now I'm not going to sit up here and tell you that I'm an ace player. When it comes to Halo2 I'm something like a 13 and that's as high as I went consistently. I got to 15 once, but I don't remember the details - it was so long ago. But the folks I play in Rainbow Six were 29s and 30s in Halo2 and I'm on par with them for the most part in R6. I have good days and bad days, they tend to be more consistent. R6 requires more strategy and team tactics, and the pace is slower and more realistic.

I realized that playing Gears and Halo rewards players who rush in, engage the enemy, back out and jump back in. In R6 and GR, rushing in just gets you killed. Halo and Gears work at a more frenzied pace which, when you have respawns and vehicles and chaos, it's a cool thing to be able to take 30 bullets and survive. That doesn't happen in Rainbow Six. You're a great deal more vulnerable and it makes a big difference.

Online Gameplay
Both Retrieval and Attack & Defend are really big games for me online. I'm very pleased that these styles of play are popular because CTF gets really tired after a while, and the whole spawn camping deal in Sharpshooters gets you thinking too narrowly. I think we'll all have to agree that for Big Team Battles, Call of Duty and Halo do it best. I'm very encouraged by the trend towards more online Coop. More more more.

That's all.

Top Games of 2006

Honorable Mentions:
Starwars Battlefont 2
Made for some interesting online gaming, but you gotta admit that Lucas vision for weapons systems needs some tweaking.

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
Mixing it up on this game online leaves a bit to be desired. You spawn too far away from the action, the action usually involves you getting sniped from God knows where. Only the single player, which is very good saves this one.

Battlefield II
I have to admit my bias. I can see why people love this game. I don't. Switching mission tactics in the middle of a level is a good idea until you run out of ammo in the only tactics that work. Then suddenly the game sucks big time.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07
Very nicely done. It's the best golf game ever. The problem is, of course, who wants to golf with strangers or alone? Get this game if and only if you have online buds you can depend on to spend hours with. Otherwise you bring all the challenges and frustrations of real golf to you own living room without the benefit of fresh air.

Call of Duty 3
It's not fair because the jury's still out on this. Massive online games are the bomb in this one. But aren't we all getting a little tired of WW2? Yeah sorta. When I finish it, I'll review it again.

My Top Eight

8. Saints Row
If I weren't a respectable father, I think I'd enjoy this game a lot more. I obviously have a stomach for warfare but I don't have it for crime. Even so, Saint's Row is very entertaining and doesn't take itself so seriously as GTA San Andreas, but still manages to deliver all the devolved fun of that game. Plus the driving system in Saints Row just makes sense.

7. Splinter Cell Double Agent
This game's release came unfortunately too close to Rainbow Six for me to get into the online play, but for the first time I was actually hooked. All I really care about is doing Sam Fisher's dirty work, However this episode seemed to go too quickly. Although the Clancy guys proved that playing Sam is cool even stripped of weapons and goodies, maybe they shouldn't have aged him so much. Whatever is next, a Solid Snake blood transfusion?

6. Project Gotham Racing 3
PGR 3 didn't disappoint this year. But they did make one major miscalculation. We're not interested in custom tracks we're interested in custom cars. There's a reason that only few people get to design racetracks but lots of folks make money in the auto aftermarket. The best tracks are good for a reason, that's why you improved your rendition of Nurbergring. I say for Four, give us some new cities to eyeball and get that Veyron. Or better yet, give us the tracks from MotoGP.

5. Black
The single player mode for Black is what every shooter should be in online. Massive destructible environments, devastating weapons with practically unlimited ammo. Gorgeous graphics and extra flavorful language. Squad action and explosions.  All this puppy needed was a cover system.  Keep those developers in mind, lessons learned from them will make the next gen incredible.

4. Prey
The best of the second tier is Prey. I don't think it has been adequately appreciated. This is the game that captures and keeps the title that Doom and Quake have been trying to rule all these years. For straight out sci-fi fun, this is the greatest game since PsyOps.

3. Rainbow Six Vegas
When I first heard the premise I didn't think it would work. None of the marketing sold me. When I got my hands on the demo I was floored. They actually made it better. The richness of this game is still remarkable, and the best battles I've ever had online have been in R6V.

2. Gears of War
No surprises here. This one is unique and gorgeous. The planet and it's architecture are a marvel. The gameplay is perfect, the online play is fast and furious. In fact, I will say that the online setup for Gears is the best way to get shooting and keep shooting all day of any shooter ever.

1. Oblivion
Immersive, addictive, complex, rewarding. I have friends who cut me off of their friends list because I went dark. If and when Bethesda makes an MMORPG for the 360, thousands of people are going to disappear from life, perhaps never to return.

Shooter's Evolution

It's probably impolitic to say so but I've been hungry for Halo lately. I love Gears, I love Rainbow Six, I love Splinter Cell. I really like Ghost Recon, and I've had a lot of fun in games like Counterstrike, XIII, Call of Duty and even Unreal Tournament. But my fingers and my tactics all come back to Halo. I've been thinking about that lately.

My clan buds, The Cult of Sun Tzu, and I have mostly been playing Rainbow Six Vegas since it came out. That's cut into my Gears time, and now I'm getting sloppy in that. But what really got to me was that I was doing something fundamentally wrong in R6 which was being aggressive. Aggressive play works best in Halo but it will get you killed very quickly in R6. So I spent a lot of time worrying about why my game was off and not thinking about it. It wasn't until I decided to play some Halo that it all came back to me.

Somebody may have the statistics somewhere for all games but in a Halo Big Team Battle the difference between the best player and the worst player in terms of average time between deaths is generally not more than 20 seconds or so. Staying alive for an average of 40 seconds and getting 3 kills per spawn will make you a pretty good Halo player. In R6 you're highly unlikely to do will if you only stay alive for 40 seconds in Team Sharpshooters, and you're probably not going to get 3 kills in that time. It takes 40 seconds just to get to the other players' spawn in R6, but that's another subject.

Rainbow Six is a slower, more deadly game than Halo. There's a lot of creeping and sneaking around, relatively speaking. But the very notion that you're on a team of six or seven makes your Halo senses kick in and your instinct is to run towards where the shooting is going on so that you can steal a kill as soon as someone's shield flashes. The problem is of course there are no shields and one of those shooters is going to be dead by the time you get there and probably hiding waiting to pick you off.

So there are interesting dynamics going on in the different shooters and maps, and you have to take that into account. Too much Halo is bad for your R6 and vice versa unless you are thinking about your tactics in each game as a completely different set of reflexes.

I'll probably be picking up a strategy guide for Gears after Christmas because I'm going to try to start getting ranked over there and the level of competition has started to rise. But I've noticed clearly that it's a much more intense short distance game. The new melee on Halo2 is a significant change too. I have yet to adjust to that. The way to use cover on Halo doesn't translate at all in Gears.

If I were to come up with a system of shooter tactics there would be some high level things I would keep in mind.

• Pace: How long should you stay alive in order to beat the averages?
• Vulnerability: Once someone is raining fire on you, how long on average do you have to escape or die?
• Stealth vs Aggression: Which does the game favor?
• Action Range: At what distance will you get the most kills?

Now I need to stop talking and get back online. All this talk is making my fingers hungry.

A Garden of Forking Paths

If you ever got into elementary geekery as I have then you have certainly heard of Schroedinger's Cat. You may not have seen it, or maybe you have, but not both. But what if, in combination with the cat in the superposition of states, you were also offered the Lady or the Tiger? In a game universe, this sort of thing happens all the time. But it has not quite happened as well as I think it will in the future.

What I'm talking about is tangential to a long overdue conversation I had with my best friend today. We were discussing the merits of the new show 'Daybreak' which is all about a detective who relives the same day over and over. His job is to save the life of his love who, for reasons unknown, is killed by mysterious mercenaries. He wakes up every day at 6:18 AM remembering what happened the day 'before' and then tries a new set of tactics to try and get the outcome. Some actions get him shot. Other actions get others killed.

In theory, or at least the last time I checked, one of the consequences of time travel would be that the universe might travel along a slightly different path were we to go back in time and change something. How large or small these changes might be on local events is anyone's guess. But it's certainly reasonable to presume several notions. Firstly that small changes made far back enough in time would have very large consequences. Secondly, it would take a great deal more energy to move someone further back in time. Thirdly, that the energy expended by the person who changed the past would probably only have a very few observable consequences for that person (if he retains his state). As a neutral observer of the phenomenon, one might conceive of what Borges called a garden of forking paths. All possible parallel universes existing as probabilities taken or not might resemble such a thing.

Someone else mentioned that this was the best time in history for television drama. It has to be in order to compete with all the other entertainments we have, so it's not surprising that film and tv are taking up this theme of time travel which is something we take for granted in video games.

For example, I'm playing Rainbow Six Vegas in Terrorist Hunt Mode. I am placed in Border Town and I have to discover and kill 30 terrorists before they get me. I have to learn the map by trial and error. The first time I learn there is one to the left of the first building and then one or two down that street. If I kill them first, I can proceed to the next part of this fictional neighborhood, but if they kill me first, I respawn and start the puzzle again. Although the transactions with these enemies are fairly simple, there is no reason that they cannot be as complex as they are in RPG (role playing games). The difference is that for the current crop of games, part of the experience is the showing off of graphic realism or fantasy as the case may be. That will probably continue to be the case until everyone gets bored with High Definition TV but still the paradigm for reliving a circumstance until you figure it out is well established in the gaming world.

So why not envision a game along the lines of 'survive through a day' in which it is your mission to discover all of the butterfly effects which cause your demise if you are ignorant? Instead of gaining powers to fight larger foes, or working to defeat innumerable enemies, such a game would be dedicated to your figuring out the causes and effects of things that are going on just beyond your peripheral vision. Every NPC might hold a clue. You might have to figure out, for example, why one of your allies in the game, at a certain point decides to turn on you. You might have to decide whether or not saving the life of a seemingly innocent bystander has an impact on your own future. You might have to discover secret relationships, or the location of something that gives someone a reason [not] to interact with you.

I'm envisioning a scenario in which you cross a street and get the last newspaper from a vending machine, read it and throw it away. If you get there first, then a particular businessman will not read that newspaper, and having not read it does not purchase the a new sports car. At some other point in the story that businessman gets carjacked by thieves who you must pursue in your own automobile. So instead of them having a fast car, they have a slow car, but no matter what you do in the story you are unable to stop the businessman from getting carjacked. Even if you kill him, his is the car the thieves steal.

The trick in designing such a game would be to create a sophisticated timeline with all the scripted plot possibilities. There's certainly software of the sort out there which makes it possible, but it's not a simple storyboard but a quantum storyboard with any number of possibilities. Game designers are very good (now) at designing optical effects which draw a player's attention to a particular part of a map - these are visual maze clues. But audio clues as well as dialog clues would be added in a Garden game, because the goal is not a destination, so much as a set of actions.

When the player encounters the setting of the game, it may seem to be a completely open environment. The player should be perceive that they have infinite moves and infinite time, but what they discover as they play the game is that certain things will have to have been done by a certain time or else their doom is inevitable. Certain things might seem innocuous, but later have larger consequences. I could see that there are certain checkpoints given in terms of judgments pronounced by various gateway characters. Perhaps you are to be seated in a restaurant and the Maitre'D makes a comment about your appearance, and you are therefore not seated on time.

In theatres in Denzel Washington's latest, Deja Vu. It's a very good thriller that makes use of something of this premise. The way the time-travel constraints are made determine the shape of the exposition. Also, the motive vehicle is an investigation of a terrorist act. But there are small things in the film that change or seem out of place that Washington must make sense of. Were they things he did in the future?

I'm looking forward to more of these kinds of time-travel adventure games. There are many interesting possibilities.

XBox in Japan: Who Cares?

I am trying to think of the best game that ever came from Japan for any platform. The answer is the Metal Gear Solid series. The latest and greatest involving Solid Snake has yet to be released on PS3. It probably won't come to the XBox 360. I probably won't lose any sleep about that.

What annoys me, however, is the news that XBox doesn't do jack in the Japan market. That may bother the guys at Redmond but it doesn't bother me at all. So I read..

Xbox 360's year-long head start was all for naught. At least in Japan. Since its launch one month ago, the PLAYSTATION 3 has outsold the 360 by 10,000 units. Both of them were, of course, outsold by the Nintendo Wii. But that's neither here nor there.

No, actually  it's there. Why is there so important? The way I see it, foreign games are just like foreign films. Interesting, quirky and sometimes of high quality. In fact, we're only interested in the best foreign films, and the best of the best always get translated nicely for the American market. So there's the world of games, then there is the continent of games for PS3, then there is the city of games for the PS3 that are actually good. Then there is the neighborhood of good PS3 games that are exclusive to the console and only available in Japan. By definition that's a little ghetto that doesn't amount to a hill of bean in this great big world. Yeah I know, but somebody lives there.

So I ask the question, honestly because I don't know, what do the Japanese get that Americans really want and can't get in the gaming world? My bet is that it's very little.

On the other hand there is the feedback from a bigger market. Sure there's value in that, but how do you characterize it? If Japanese gamers like robots with snaky arms, what are the chances that their having a larger market will change what's popular in the English gaming world? It is a distinction I think most American gamers don't care about, except of course for those who love the PS3 and hate Microsoft.

Cobb Vision VIII - Geometry Wars

It's Official: PS3 Sucks

There was only one part of the release of the PS3 that I thought they might be able to compete with the XBox 360 and that was the online. Ever since I saw the John Carmack interview two E3s ago, I knew that the difference between the graphics of the machines wouldn't be exploitable by most game programmers. But I did that since XBox Live has been around for 3 years, that the Sony guys might be able to take it to the next level. But according to this NYT review, they have flubbed it horribly.

If there is one thing one would expect Sony to get perfect, though, it would be music. Wrong. Sure, you can plug in your digital music player and the PS3 will play the tunes. But as soon as you go into a game, the music stops. By contrast, one of the things I’ve always enjoyed most on the Xbox 360 is being able to listen to my own music while playing Pebble Beach or driving my virtual Ferrari. Doesn’t seem too complicated, but the PS3 can’t do it.

In that sense it often feels as if the PlayStation 3 can’t walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. In the PS3’s online store (which feels like a slow Web page) you can access movie trailers and trial versions of new games, but when you actually download the 600-megabyte files, you’ll be stuck watching a progress bar crawl across the screen for 20 or 40 minutes. Astonishingly, you can’t download in the background while you go do something that’s more fun (like play a game). On the Xbox 360, not only are files downloaded seamlessly in the background, but you can also shut off the machine, turn it on later, and the download will resume automatically.

The PS3’s whole online experience feels tacked-on and unpolished. On the Xbox 360 each user has a single unified friends list, so you can track your friends and communicate with them easily, no matter what game you are in. On the PlayStation 3 most games have their own separate friends list and some have no friends function at all. There is a master list as well, but in order to communicate with anyone on it, you have to quit the game you are playing.

That's not only subpar, that's shameful. I spent many hours last week getting addicted and unaddicted to the the triple threat of online shooters releasing for the 360: Gears of War, Call of Duty 3 and Rainbow Six Vegas. The online shooting world is so hot now even the Rainbow Six Vegas Demo has captivated folks on my friends list. The full game debuts Wednesday.

I feel sorry for PS3 diehards, but not so very sorry. Actually, I wish there were a way to get them onto XBox Live, just so I could have the pleasure of fragging the lamers.

Gears of War

Gears of War is the best third person squad shooter ever. The only thing that came close in terms of the fun factor was Brute Force, a game that I think didn't get enough props. Gears of War works very well as a balls-out shooting match. You don't really have to think your way through it, you just shoot your way through it. It's the first cover game I've played and speaking as a Halo and Rainbow 6 guy, you pick it up right away. It feels very natural, a lot better than I thought a 3rd person could be. It does transform the genre.

The environments are as detailed and immersive as can be but not overwhelming. You don't feel as if you have to stop and look around and marvel at it. It doesn't freak you out like the stuff in Prey. Instead, the detail just adds to the gritty feel of the game. There are battles where you sometimes just wish the opposition would run out of ammo, because you're pinned down behind a block of cement and can't move.

There are some monsters in this game that are truly frightening. Very much like Halo, dealing with the various types of enemies, and in combination, force you to change your fighting style. The gameplay is flawless. The feel of your character's movements are as smooth as Halo and Half-Life. The AIs are competent whether they're fighting for your or against you.

What's great about GoW is that within 15 minutes you simply disappear into the game. After the first hour it feels like you've been playing this game all your life. The controls are that simple and natural. But because there are so many different weapons (frag grenade, smoke grenade, boom shot, sniper, chain gun, assualt rifle with chainsaw, shotgun, crossbow, pistol and magnum revolver) and so many enemies, you will find, over time, various combinations and strategies evolving, very much like Halo.

There are unique touches to this game that are subtle and some are profound. For example, reloading has become an art. If you pay attention, you can reload quickly, if you screw up, it will cost you precious seconds. It's something that, once mastered will give a strong advantage. There are very few 'circle dances' in this game, as with Halo, somebody will drop within two or three seconds.

Some of the cut scenes are annoyingly long considering the real lack of a backstory, however you won't likely be repeating any levels, so it's not a problem. You're just there and you shoot. And you never repeat a level over and over, well until you get to the final boss.

The online games are stellar. If you're like me, you hate to hang around in lobbies. You want to get right to the action. This game is perfect for it. Because there is no single player deathmatch, Gears forces you to communicate and although many of the squads don't, they get squashed. The ability to concentrate fire and flank enemies are two very powerful tactics. Teams that get those things right generally become invincible. It's not about weapons so much as it is about tactics. There is no weapon that is outsized and highly contested like the sword in Halo and they are pretty well balanced. The decision to make this a squad based coop game through and through is a very distinguishing mark and a good risk, I think. But in the single player I haven't found the directions to the squad as detailed (or onerous) as with Ghost Recon or Rainbow Six. You have to develop this on your own.

I've not been able to get into many ranked matches. People don't seem to be going for it rather in the same way people seemed to be avoiding it for PGR3. I don't know what's up with that - I sit waiting minutes to get into a room and then it immediately times out. Very frustrating and much inferior to Halo 2 in that regard. That's too bad because the point system for scoring matches is very well thought out and like Call of Duty 3, you get points for reviving teammates, which is an interesting turn in shooters I think all the better ones are adopting.

I haven't seen the strategy guide but I can see tactics evolving. Each map, all of which are exquisite, has unique features that make them interesting. But each of them invites close combat. Matches can be over in 20 seconds when the action gets hot and heavy. You don't respawn in this game. Once you're dead, you sit out the round. The spawn sites are very predictable so I don't think that will change going forward.

All in all, there are a limited number of ways you can play online, but it's focused on the most action packed way of all, medium sized maps that encourage close combat, small squads, deadly weapons and quick motions. I should also say that unlike with Halo there are no circle dances where you unload a whole clip into an enemy reload and start again. You will be dead in short order, make no mistake.

--

So here's what I don't like about the game. I already mentioned that the lack of ranked game availability sucks. I don't know what to do about that but I've heard other people complain too. I would have liked to see some average of my match scores kept track of, it might be there I just can't get to it in the ranked matches.

Second, there's a bug in which sometimes late joiners to a room can't be heard. This is a real handicap if the person is on your squad.

Thirdly, it's annoying that you can't change the configuration of your hosted room once you set it up. I know it adds to the amount of gameplay, but sometimes you do wish you could mix it up a bit.

--

Here are the things I've noticed that impress me.

I've seen a few times when I spawn and start running to wherever, that my skin detail isn't fully rendered. The fact that the designers anticipated system capacity and knew what to leave off is impressive. Same thing with raindrops.

Very little lag, and lag is always associated with a player that can be identified and kicked. Also very little mic echo although more than a negligible amount.

Recovery from a down is a great idea. How many times have we gotten hit by a noob and know that they were shooting completely random as they run right by you? In Gears, you can get back up and serve them.

--

Overall the game is truly excellent in just about every way. As a single player experience it's a little tiring. As a coop, it's great. There is a lot of richness, emergent tactics and lore associated with the game, and I can easily see this becoming a huge franchise. The Gears guys have done a great job.

Gearing Up

Thanks to a bit of clever manipulation of my Gamefly Queue, I'm getting mailed Gears of War on opening day. YESSS!!!

All the reviewers say that it lives up to the hype, and I'm getting more and more psyched about it and Rainbow Six Vegas day by day.

I finally burned through the demo of R6V which I had been trying to do while eating dinner or correcting homework or otherwise multitasking. I just realized that there were two more functions that I'd been ignoring all the time that made shorter work of the tangos. One was the night vision switch. I had only popped it rather than held it and selected. So I was only using infrared which is why I kept getting killed in the bell tower. The second was target selection on the Back button which allowed me to prioritize the targets for my crew. That allowed me to triangulate and flank very nicely. I'm also completely used to the cover system now of R6V and am actually falling in love with the way it opens up the gameplay.

The controller layout for R6V is stellar. I still have a gut instinct to toss grenades with the left trigger and it's a real strength I have in Halo, but for close combat Rainbox Six is back to the top of the pile. In this regard the distinctions between Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell and Rainbox Six are really starting to show up as fully rendered directions. Clancy (and the 360) need one more complicatedly rendered combat RTS to complete the set. Something like Battlefield 2 with a bit more realism that puts you in a Colonel's seat and allows you to move sophisticated assets. A flier that lets you plan sorties for example, or something that allows you to command a squadron of Apache helos for tank attacks or close ground support. Some game has to make that leap and none of them really have. The Unit was close but a bit too silly...

As for Gears of War, I haven't really followed the hype so I'm ready for a hugely pleasant surprise. One reviewer said that the game was designed for co-op and he enjoys this co-op mode better than that of Halo. That says a lot. I also like the idea that the online mode of this is going to be limited somewhat. That means there will be a lot of games, a lot of intense action and a lot of very specific skills that will come into play. Let Halo be the one for huge online multiplayer battles in massive maps. It's a much better run and gun game than GoW appears to be - anytime you have a cover system that's what you're asking for - close in battles, and those aren't the best things about Halo. (So if you hear this Bungie, don't go building a cover system for Halo, just let us fly dropships - unless of course you already built it and ruined Halo. That's what the super suits are for, allowing us to get out in the open and not worry about the small stuff). This is by the way what make Halo superior to Ghost Recon, I hate moving all over huge GRAW maps knowing that I can get popped at any moment and have to spawn 300 yards away from where I'm trying to get.

This season is going to be awesome with R6V and GoW, online shooters are going to absolutely rock. R6 was great except for spawn camping, just the right size maps for 4 on 4 action. Also XIII was damned good. Include the new online stuff for Splinter Cell DA, which I think I will indulge quite a bit more than the prior version which I basically didn't, and this is going to be the best time ever to be an online gamer. At least in the XBox Live world. Hmm. I'm just thinking about how cool it would be for there to be a way to take a Rainbow Six squad into Second Life and just plink off those weirdos.

Rainbox Six Vegas

I didn't think that it was possible, but I'm finding the game playing experience of the demo of Rainbow Six: Vegas to be very exciting. Even thought there's a bit of sloppiness when it comes to hugging a wall in the new feature of firing from cover (as compared to the crispness of Splinter Cell), I'm very impressed with the look, the feel and the new dimensions of navigability of the game. The ability to invert rapelling is worth it alone. Having finished the single player mode of the newest Splinter Cell Double Agent in less than a week (damn), I'm already looking forward to R6. That and Gears of War. Man, November is going to be cooking!

Halo: Late

Peter Jackson sez:

As was previously confirmed, we deeply regret that both Universal and Fox did not choose to move forward with financing the Halo film under the original terms of the agreement. At this time Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, along with their partner, Microsoft, have mutually agreed to postpone making a feature film based on the Halo video-game universe until we can fulfill the promise we made to millions of Halo fans throughout the world that we would settle for no less than bringing a first-class film to the big screen. We are fully supportive of director Neill Blomkamp's vision of the film. Neill is a tremendously gifted filmmaker and his preliminary work on Halo is truly awe-inspiring. While it will undoubtedly take a little longer for Halo to reach the big screen, we are confident that the final feature film will be well worth the wait.

I'm glad that Jackson is sticking with Blomkamp. His work is really exciting and the verisimilitude is perfect for Halo, not the glossy stuff like in The Island, or the semi-gloss of Star Wars. In fact, it was very reminescent of 'V'. Anyway, it looks like we're going to be stuck like Star Wars fans waiting for-goddamned-ever to see what we want to see in theatres. They should try Mark Cuban instead.

 

Rogue Warrior

This, I guarantee you, will be an absolutely great game.

Bethesda Softworks®, a ZeniMax Media company, today announced its plans to publish Rogue Warrior™, an authentic, tactical first-person shooter based on the best-selling book series by Richard (Dick) Marcinko, former U.S. Navy SEAL and founder of both SEAL Team Six and Red Cell. Rogue Warrior is being developed for the Xbox 360™ videogame and entertainment system from Microsoft, the PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system, and Windows by Zombie Studios in conjunction with Bethesda Softworks. Rogue Warrior is scheduled for a fall 2007 release.

I'm a big fan of Demo Dick in the most basic, little boy growing up with a slingshot and marbles in his back pocket kind of way. So say what you will about macho BS, I'll cop to it when you're talking about Marcinko. But what's going to make this game awesome is Bethesda's tiling.

You see when you play Oblivion, you can basically run for miles and miles without lag or reloads. You have an almost limitless open area which is chock full of plants and critters and NPCs and monsters and it's completely seamless. There have been many times when I've been playing Oblivion just wishing that other players could be in there with me, not that the native AI is bad, just that the environment is so good. I have no doubt that Bethesda's involvement is going to take FPS to the next level, and I can't wait.

In Rogue Warrior, you play Dick Marcinko, leader of an elite SEAL unit trapped behind enemy lines in North Korea on a covert mission to assess the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. When war breaks out between North and South Korea, you must try to lead your team back into South Korea while greatly outnumbered and with no support and limited resupply. Your journey will take you through a variety of never-before-seen environments inside of North Korea, including submarine pens, shipbreaker yards, prison camps, and more.

They're going to give Rainbow Six a run for their money. I mean is it just me or does this Vegas thing seem hokey?