Cobb

More Zombies

I just got a copy of Dead Rising. Now I know how much I don't particularly dig zombie games. This one has a decent premise, and it reminds me very much of one of those zombies at the mall movies. The execution is fairly decent for a third person romp & stomp, with control that feels roughly like GTA. But it just doesn't quite cut it for me. I'm sending it back. This is the second ever photographer-hero game I've ever played. The first one was on Nintendo with those Pikachu characters, remember them? You get points for taking cool pictures of the action in the game. With zombie violence, it's a bit voyeuristic, and considering the clumsiness I felt with these controls, I lost interest is trying to score big with it. The hero runs like he has bad knees and the gun has no reticle. It's rather cool that you can pickup objects like steel bookshelves and cash registers to beat upside the heads of your pursuers, but it gets tired. I got two miserable achievements and it's back into the orange envelope. Nice try guys.

There's a Hole in the Sky Through Which You Can Fly

Awesome. I just finished Prey and was suggesting that what they've done with gravity was definitely going to be copied. Voila. This is exciting. It's almost enough to make me want to be a PC Gamer. Well, I've been thinking about that for a while, ever since I realized that XBox 360 controllers can work via USB into PCs.

Prey

Prey is one of the most innovative and subtly annoying games I've ever played on the 360. It shows both brilliance and age.

What I know of Prey is that it is an age-old project finally brought to life by its developers. I recall seing a preview of it at last year's E3 or someplace important. Everybody was treating the authors with much respect so I was interested in looking forward to the game. But I completely forgot about it and it wasn't until about an hour into the game that I realized where I was.

1. Prey is the creepiest game I've played in a long time. It's the slimiest world I can recall being in, and the alien biotech is truly alien. I finished the game and I still don't have names for the creatures and weapons.

2. The use of gravity in this game makes its style of play and the environments extremely unusual. It makes you wonder why nobody else has done anything like it. It makes me want to say that Prey is really the first thoroughly 3D game in the industry. In the world of shooters this innovation is totally unique, like the psychic powers of Psy-Ops and the unusual skills of Riddick in the Escape from Butcher Bay game. There is nothing to compare with the cool of standing sideways on a wall, aiming to the left and watching an enemy fall up.

3. Prey's fleshing out of the game is juvenile. There are really no humans to interact with that add to the creepiness of the overall storyline. Maybe it's because I'm fresh from several months of playing Oblivion but the human, even the beastial element of the AI is pretty lousy. It's not mucked up completely with idiot boss battles (there are only about 4), but for a would be Cherokee warrior, your protagonist is never called to do anything but destroy every living thing in this world.

4. The environments are spectacular. They go from the DOOMlike dark and claustrophobic, to the intricate three dimesnional mazy, to the double gravity system of twin asteroids.

5. The dialog sucks, period. The game could use a whole lot more humanity and voice acting. In the beginning, things were very compelling because it appeared that there would be a lot of humans that you would encounter in the space ship that would assist you through various parts, but that never materialized. Instead we just had zombies. I will give props to the use of the radio DJ, but the parallel plot never materialized, therefore making it a real throwaway effect.

6. The spirit world life-restoring minigame is inspired. That's really a great concept and I expect that many games should copy that. It never really got tiring although I thought it would, but the idea that you have to earn your life back is great. On the one hand, it obviates the need for formal checkpoints, and you never have a situation where you get caught at a checkpoint with 2% life that sometimes ruins really good games. Secondly, when you're never guaranteed to return to your savepoint with full life, that's a very good challenge too. Very well done.

7. On the whole it's not a very challenging game when played on the normal level although there were some puzzles that had me really stumped for a long time. Some of the more interesting puzzles and levels could have been a whole lot harder and I'm glad they left them simple, because playing in 3D where any wall or floor can become a cieling is very radical. That could burn out your brain.

8. The Ghost walking is also brilliant. I just wish the ghost could have been a little bit more deadly with his bow. Still, it's a great plus to know that you can work this kind of magic. I loved it in PsyOps and it was done well here too.

9. The eagle familiar was sometimes useful and sometimes distracting. I would have liked a way to power it up to help fight off some enemies, or be able to make it do specific tasks.

10. The multidimensional references back to places on Earth was a brilliant touch that added to the creepiness, especially when the jukebox could be heard. On the other hand we could have done without the slot machines.

Overall, this is a very innovative game you just don't want to miss. If they add some of the unique elements to their next game, it will be a triumph. Prey is a flawed classic.

Blazing, Boring Angels

I've finally raised my head out of Oblivion after three months and started to play other games on my 360. The first of these is Blazing Angels - Squadrons of WW2. Though I just finished Call of Duty 2, I'm still not sick of WW2, but man what a letdown Blazing Angels has turned out to be.

The tutorial went pretty nicely. In general, when it comes to flying games, I suck. But I don't suck enough to not have fun, just when it comes to competition. So you might find me playing Crimson Skies solo mode, but I've long since abandoned hope on XBox Live. So I was pleased to find that I could fly this plane pretty well. Hmm, this might be enjoyable after all, but I figure that it's bound to get tougher.

It does get tougher, on my ears. Since I'm spoiled by the best combat dialog, like that in Star Wars Battlefront and Ghost Recon, but the fifth time I hear 'Tommies and Yanks, Tommies and Yanks' from a German fighter pilot (and since when can we hear their radios?) I'm completely sick of this game. The gratuitous dialog just ruins the whole game. Not since True Crime: Streets of NY have I wanted so desparately to turn off the volume.

I'm sorry but this one is going right back to Gamefly. Tomorrow.

Mehrunes' Razor

I have come to as close as I can see, the end of my adventures in the realm of Tamriel in the Cyrodillian Empire which is on the verge of collapse.

That may sound very strange to those of you who are not gamers, but I have spent over 200 hours in a game that is about as rich as any novel I have ever read. I'm not sure there are any books I've ever spent that much time in. Anyway, the game is Oblivion and I have finally mastered just about every aspect of it, and I took my time. It is widely acknowledged as one of the best role playing games ever, and obviously I agree. It is the second that I've played in the Elder Scrolls series, and whereas I tired of working the first one, this one kept my attention all the way through, and still does. Except now I want to be evil.

I rather hope that my experience in the game is instructive and somehow indicative of human nature. It basically works like this, although there are simple pleasure kind of exceptions, once you have done all the good anyone expects of you, your attention and desires turn to evil. This is precisely where I now stand as Champion of Cyrodil, Arch Mage of the Mage's Guild, Master of the Fighter's Guild, Grand Champion of the Arena and Listener of the Dark Brotherhood. I've saved the empire, as it were, now I want to see what damage I can do.

And fortunately, the creators of the game have made an added package which allows you to quest for the ultimate weapon, a blade called 'Mehrunes' Razor' which allows you to kill enemies with one blow. I doesn't work all of the time. In fact, it's less reliable than other weapons I have used, and herein lies something we may add to Cobb's Rules as 'Mehrunes' Razor':

Given the chance to kill with one blow, one will strike as many times as necessary.

And still you will not doubt the weapon, because you have seen it work. In fact, this is exactly what happened in the game. The first time I used the weapon, it worked as advertized. I slew a Gloom Wraith, a not inconsequential creature, on the first shot. Subsequently it took six or seven blows to defeat enemies with the Razor.

I see this pearl of wisdom in the context of a couple other aphorisms. One is "What do you give the man who has everything: An irresistable opportunity the throw it all away". And "People don't have weaknesses, they merely overuse their strengths."

Gangstas (Not) Played

Snoop Dogg just got fired.

simoniker writes "Midway CMO Steve Allison has been talking about why he thinks the urban game genre isn't worth entering, suggesting of the cancelled Snoop Dogg/John Singleton collaboration Fear & Respect, which was in development at Midway: 'We killed Fear and Respect... because we have enough data-points to know the hood thing is basically dead. It would be dead before it came out. And you don't want to come out on a dead vibe.' Do people really not care about GTA-style urban shooters any more?"

Anything that empties the future pockets of John Singleton & Snoop Dogg is cool with me. I think they played themselves. It's time for their time to be over. Snoop hasn't said anything in rap worth saying since Gin & Juice and Singleton's attempts at gritty urban drama in 'Four Brothers' just doesn't cut it. So anything that gets them out of future markets with their same tired formulas is just peachy.

Having said so, I enjoyed the hell out of the experience of being low man on the ghetto pole in GTA San Andreas, for about ohh 30 maybe 40 hours of play. Then the grind of Do or Die just became tiresome, just as did the suspension of morality one has to engage to enjoy shooting cops and trifling bangers. Not that destruction in and of itself should be off-limits in gaming, just that doing so on the wrong side of the battle of good vs evil is something I simply can't sustain, nor much recommend. Revulsion gets you in the end, and for those who don't have this problem, well, the smaller that market the better.

A Successful War on Drugs

What if you could do this in the real world?

Electronic Arts has announced that it has confiscated approximately 15 trillion gold pieces from within its long running PC massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Ultima Online, which the company claims was obtained “through the abuse of bugs or exploitation of game mechanics”.

In relation to this, in a statement posted on the game's official website, the company noted that it has canceled over 180 user accounts that it found connected to the accumulation of what EA referred to as “dirty money.”

PSP vs Essentialism

Image is Nothing. Obey Your Thirst.
-- Sprite

There's some jabber going around about alleged racial stereotypes in PSP advertisements. Obviously they're not taking direction from Sprite. Or maybe they are, and they're just thirsty for nonsense. It's all over this ad and some like it. Joystiq has the other two as well. I see what the big deal is, I guess. It's controversial. Why? Because it's using a black woman to represent a videogame. What nerve! I mean black women (tm) are only supposed to be represented in ways and means approved by the Black Women's Collective. I know they have an address on K Street but I left it on my other PC. For the time being we have to listen to every loser with a laptop express their concern for the images of black women.

But seriously, you can only give folks so much time with this kind of silliness. The serious criticism is pretty much the same as I made against the Washington Post, people are always ready to substitute new stereotypes for old ones about blackfolks. Why? Because they don't know enough black diversity to subsume those fictions. The only 'real' blackfolks they know are those who conform to some racial stereotype, and thus provides a robust set of embarrassments and false platitudes about black capability. But this is not about black people at all, but a black colored video game.

So the people who should be the least upset about these are blackfolks themselves. Why? Because we know more than enough real blackfolks to dismiss stereotypes. But what exactly is the stereotype here? Black submission? I'm really not going to guess, because anybody who wants to take the symbolism out to that level needs to have their head checked. You can't do that without recognizing that (gasp) the first PSPs, a killer product, were black. Blacks were here first! Big whoop. This is all about fashion, not sociology. No amount of whinging can change that.. or maybe it already did.

Speaking of fashion what is going on with sunglasses? I mean here in California, all the rage is these big fat Jackie O looking goggle-riffic wraparound sunglasses? It's so 80s. I'm kinda wishing I had a big vocab about the pieces and parts of glasses. You know where the over the ear part meets the front part of the frame. Usually they're skinny, now they're as fat as the kind geezers with cataracts wear. Basically, you can't see people's eyeballs any longer, not even from the side. I think that means people are basically getting more insecure about being seen in public. It's the perfect accessory for the Hummer crowd.

Kids & Multimedia

As part of my continual bashing of people who don't get it with respect to technology and kids, I offer yet another thought provoking moment...

Seriously though, I just completed burning a CD for my daughter's 3rd grade book report. The heck you say? Yes, she's going to do a presentation for the class about McGrowl, the detective dog, but her presentation will have a soundtrack. In fact, she's dressing up like a Jamaican Chef and pretending to do a cooking show. Huh? What? F9 is a genius like that. After my announcer voiceover intro and the reggae music fades, she's going to kick it up a notch, Bam!

For props she has a large orange mixing bowl. "If you like dogs and puppies, ya put 'em in", she'll say in her pretty good patois. "If you like superheroes, ya put 'em in, mon". She'll mix it up with a wooden mixing spoon and then pull out the McGrowl book. Neat huh?

There's more, but I'll spare you the details, except for this. She even made me record one of those speeded up voice disclaimers at the end of the soundtrack. I tried to convince her that I could just change the tempo and leave the pitch alone, but she thinks it's cute that I sound like a squirrel. Sheesh. But that's her creative vision and I really want to work with her again. You know how it is in this town...

Now that I think about it, this isn't the first time. Boy did a complete radio program complete with traffic report and a special bulletin. Not long before that, he put together a powerpoint presentation on China that had at least 50 slides. F11 put together a commercial spot for a cereal complete with a custom soundtrack I burned onto CD. And here I'm thinking how special I felt when I got to be the kid that advanced the filmstrip. I didn't know it but my kid's middle school has a daily news video show they produce on campus. Something's up in education, and it sounds all good to me.

I'll take more swiping swing though. I'm not sure if I'm repeating myself though. Almost any interactive videogame that's not completely boring or vulgar is better than watching television.

Parents who dismiss the gaming industry today are just as bad as parents of yesteryear who dismissed MTV. That is to say that a lack of informed opinion and experience with the medium will only lead to a complete inability to offer constructed criticism. The market will be overwhelming soon enough and all people with no contextually relevant critical skills will be just as lost with gaming tomorrow as they are with hiphop music today. You'll never control it with a V-Chip, you can only offer mature guidance. And while there isn't global convergence today, the same skills are applicable across all these media, and it all involves interactive critical discernment.

If you don't know what makes a game credible, or a program credible, or a powerpoint credible or a website credible, you're going to be the victim of scams. You and/or your kids will be owned, phished and namejacked and otherwise doomed to the fate of the clueless newbs of the 21st century. If only your kids have online friends, and you cannot believe that responsible adults can be, then you are abandoning that one place kids are free to be totally expressive and free - online.

In a neighborhood like mine, there are only two activities that aren't micromanaged and adult-supervised. That is skateboarding and online. And the panic that is sweeping through PTAs over sites like MySpace is really only the beginning. When legislators start to legislate and wags start to pontificate, we're going to lose more folks to uninformed blather, and the creative and responsible people like me who have no fear of the domain are going to get squeezed out of the conversation by paranoia.

I'm going to continue to write about online, games and gaming. This is where some of the most interesting creative and intellectual productions in our society are happening. If it becomes vulgarized by abandonment of thoughtful criticism, it will go the way of hiphop. And some of you forget that Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock were making hiphop in the 80s. Think about it.

Puritans I Like

I was quite amused by this take on gaming by a cat named Rabbit. He essentially says that games make him work and that's not what games are supposed to do. They're supposed to allow you to have fun, so why keep some large portion of what's distributed undiscovered and unplayed simply because a gamer hasn't gone through the ardor of levelling up. It's a complaint I've felt but it never really itched me enough to scratch in public. Now after some thought, I think there something else to be said. First, to wit:

"I play games to escape. To go somewhere else. But our industry has so ingrained this concept of 'earning' our fun that the best is somehow always saved for last. Like modern day Puritans, we've convinced ourselves that we are not worthy of that for which we've already paid. Sinners in the hands of an angry god, we don't deserve our fun until we pay in blood."

Like Rabbit, I'm a gamer with a job, which is to say specifically, I am not one of those strange individuals whose 'life' consists of levelling up and destroying other online players and mouthing off about it. Like in any competitive endeavor gaming has its share or people who make a point of addressing the humanity of others strictly through the prism of the game itself. If you've ever been to a bank teller who looks at you differently depending upon how much money you have in your account, you know what I mean.

So I'm thinking about Rabbit's gripe and then I think about kids online who spend half their time using cheat codes, glitching and modding. Sure it might be the programmer's fault for allowing cheats, glitches and mods, but the gamer who hacks the game is destructive of the spirit of the game. These are not the kinds of people I want to game with or spend any time with in real life. I prefer folks who enjoy playing by the rules, even if, and probably especially if that means work.

I just learned, for example, in Oblivion, that there is a cheat. You essentially can kill a particular individual in such a way that his pocket never empties of gold. He has about 50 pieces of gold, and so if you kill him 1000 times, you can 'earn' 50,000 in gold, which is enough to buy weapons of mass destruction and beat the game in no time. BTW, I've spent about 95 hours in the game and I'm level 25. I've finished about 38 quests and generally had a ball doing so.

What makes Oblivion in particular an interesting game vis a vis its hewing to the Puritan standard is how well its challenges match your skills all through the game. In a way the game is learning along with you. If you go to Black Dog Camp when you are level 1, there will probably be a wolf there to challenge you. You can beat a wolf with an ordinary iron sword. If you return to the same place in the game at level 20, there will probably be 2 bears and an evil wizard.

What I can't stand, I say repeating myself, is listening to knuckleheads bragging about how they breezed through Black Dog Camp by jumping up and down in the fire three times so that the bad guys disappear through a glitch in the softwear. See what I'm saying?

Now there is a game that has made good sense of Rabbit's complaint - since surely it has occurred to game developers before. That game is my other favorite, Project Gotham Racing 3. In the prior version, you essentially had to beat every AI driven car in every race on every track to get the fastest car in the game. At the time it was the Cerbera Speed Twelve. This time around every track is unlocked and you can buy the fastest car in short order. The trade off is apparent. In this case it's the Ferrari F50GT. Like the Cerbera, it has got quirky power and speed, so it takes some time to learn how to control it. In other words, newbs will crash it into every wall as will cheaters. In the first version, there was a way to purchase a download of the Cerbera. When we witnessed people crashing it, we knew they were newbs.

The point is simply this, in sophisticated games, you can tell who has earned their way up and who has cheated their way up. For single player games I might concur with Rabbit's sentiment, but online as in real life, I prefer playing with people who work.

Return to Mugello

The other night I downloaded a new demo game from XBox Live. How cool is that, neh? This was MotoGP 06, the latest version for the XBox 360. This was the first game I ever played on XBox Live (or maybe it was Mechassault). And the memories came rushing back.

This is good old-fashioned fun, if you can call racing online in realtime with 7 other human beings and 8 AIs 'old-fashioned'. But this is what we did in the good old days when we only had the XBox Live demo disk. Mugello, Mugello and more Mugello. One track, lots of gamers and huge hoots of fun.

The track is exactly as it was before only sharper. There are more details in the backgrounds and that little bit of annoying and challenging blur as you hit the gas is gone, but the feel is very much like it always was. One thing that the Moto GP folks have going for them is by far the most interesting set of tracks in all of online racing, and they must have nailed it the first times out because there are no changes. What we online racers know is that Nurburgring is substantially different between Project Gotham Racing 2 and Forza Motorsport with Forza coming out on top for detail and presumeably, accuracy as well. But in PGR3, the track is much more closely aligned with what the Forza guys did, and so, I believe it is more accurate. So here's the deal. If MotoGP 06 has Nurburgring, it will be the absolute bomb.

I'm very much looking forward to the new game, and meeting some old friends online that I haven't seen in years.

I Told You Sony

Slashdot confirms my predictions:

To put things in perspective, the Curmudgeon Gamer has created graphs showing inflation-adjusted console costs. The PS3 is far from the most expensive console in history (that would be the Neo Geo, at almost $1000 adjusted price), but that hasn't stopped analysts, publishers, developers, and gamers from grumbling about it the week after E3. ABI Research has publicly stated that Sony may have 'hamstrung' itself with the console's high price. Publishers and developers are worried because (despite Sony's protests to the contrary), developers just don't have the kits to make the games. From the GameDaily article: "'A lot of developers have not gotten the kits,' said Sega of America president Simon Jeffrey while attending E3 last week. 'There certainly will not be a lot of titles available.' The result is that publishers that do want to take part in the PS3 launch will have to release games that don't fully take advantage of the power of the Cell processor, added Jeffrey."

Here's what I said before comparing Sony to Apple:

Sony puts rootkits on CDs, fueling rage, hatred and alienation among former devotees. The Minidisc never goes anywhere and the usage of DATs is considered selling out in the underground of hiphop. Nobody can pronounce VAIO and nobody really wants VAIO laptops any longer. They're overpriced and they break. Sony is so over.

Infinite Hours of Oblivion

If you asked me to name the most sophisticated pastime available in the world of entertainment, I would have to say that thing that is the book circle. Half of my life I've attempted to cajole people I've had the opportunity to meet in the flesh to spend as much time as I do reading the books I think matter. I had no idea that would be a failed enterprise, and with that beloved community in mind I have wasted many years on the web in pursuit of some sort of collective pseudo mind meld. And so if I interpret the gist of Thomas Mann correctly, I've been on a fool's errand. The individual, like the cheese, stands alone; absorbing, fermenting, smelling solo, hoping only one day to be appreciated at cocktail parties among the brainy, powerful, wealthy and beautiful. End of metaphor.

What I have found to be a much more reliable form of sophisticated shared experience has been online gaming.

I'm a writer you see. All day it's what I do. Except that I write for computers, which in turn, control people. I've been aware of this fact since day one. I am one of those people who hates to be misinterpreted, so I have some satisfaction in knowing that those fruits and delights my programs serve up cannot under any circumstances be delivered to those who don't follow my precise instructions. This is the secret power of the programmer. We change human behavior. It's the same writer's conceit, the same as any Hollywood screen or jokewriter. We change lives.

Now I recognize that online gaming is not really the be all and end all. It could be, but it's going to take another generation for it to evolve to the level of sophistication and interactivity of, say playing in a marching band, and probably two before improvisational jazz. But hey, a flute has too many buttons for most of us. When I'm doing real-time analog first person gaming, all I care is that my child can catch the ball. For most of us, what's out there works just fine.

I have yet to play an MMORPG for a substantial amount of time. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, I have a fairly high resistance to cheesy sword & sorcery. Your basic dungeons & dragons stuff doesn't impress. Secondly, I've found some of the players, well.. too many of the players to be just juvenile or perversely odd. Let me qualify this by saying that the bulk of my experiences are dictated by There, SecondLife and the original Everquest. I have flirted with getting World of Warcraft this year, but I have yet to make the leap. But there is something about this league of PC gamers who get completely immersed that feels a bit too weird.

Now I can say that I do want game immersion. I was a big fan of Myst from day one, and killed countless hours hacking and slashing through those lovely logical jungles. I also enjoyed the early Tomb Raider stuff, and The Dig earlier still. But there seems to be a fine line between immersion and obsession that I simply cannot cross. Being committed to online millions in the form of some avatar is just wrong. Those who know me know that I'm all about do instead of be, and most of the MMORPGs seem to be about be. So I like online shooters and racers, but not those in which you invest significant time trying to seduce other people into recognize your avatar socially. See the difference?  Besides, who's going to outdo The Sims?

If I'm going to sink hours upon hours of time in a virtual world online, I prefer real-time strategy. So you will have found me fairly deep into Rise of Nations. Rise of Legends is <strike>coming</strike> here(!)and having seen the preview, I think it's going to be even better. When it comes to RPGs, I truly enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic all the way up the the final boss battle, which in the end seemed completely superfluous. KOTOR2 held my attention for about one fifth the time and then I dropped it like a hot rock. Fable, depsite the criticism that it was too short, seemed to me to have achieved perfect balance. That's one I played twice.

None of this, however, compares to the passionate work that is the creation of Bethesda Softworks, Elder Scrolls IV, Oblivion. Imagine Myst but bigger, scarier, and richer. Even for an inveterate player like myself, the visual experience is stunning. There are areas within the world of Oblivion that generate visceral reactions as powerful as any film visual. Oblivion is, hands down, the grand universal heavyweight dominating champion of RPGs.

Because My Kids Have Homework

The following comes as no surprise to conservative dads:

Here are five fun facts culled from the event sponsored by the Entertainment Software Association.

1) The average game buyer is 40 years old.
2) The average game player is 30 years old.
3) Thirty-eight percent of all game players are women.
4) Twenty-five percent of Americans over the age of 50 play video games.
5) Forty-four percent of game players say they play games online one or more hours per week.

The boy has demonstrated that he has some of the same tastes in gaming as the old man. This is satisfying. But he and the girls cannot play Monday through Wednesday, period. And homework always comes first.

In other E3
There's a lot of interesting numbers coming out of E3 here in town this week. I'm Tivoing the G4TV broadcasts, but I'm so deep into Oblivion this week that I haven't paid much attention to the news except for the occasional Slashdot coverage. The rumors about Sony's upping the price on the PS3 are true which is just going to accrue points for MSFT.

All this motion-senstive controlling, I think is a mediocre to poor idea. Nothing shouts 'newb' like somebody working their shoulders when gaming. Quite frankly the whole thing makes no sense to me from an ergonomic perspective. As I was implying here, it's all in the fingers. I mean look at classical pianists. The most sensitive and lightning fast moves humans can produce come from eye-hand, not eye-shoulder coordination. Fighter pilots, diamond cutters, any ultimate skill of the sort you can name are going to do their best work with their fingers. Making people sweat when they could sit is for the DDR crowd. Not buying it over here.

360 Finally

It's 4 months after Christmas and I finally got my 360.

Was it worth the wait? Well, since I'm a grownup, the answer has to be yes. It's got what I liked about the original XBox and more, so of course I'm satisfied.

Anybody who has been poking their heads in at the local Best Buy has seen Call of Duty playing on the HD Samsung on the display. Having the 360 at home is even more mind-rocking, especially if you have an HD set. I don't, but it's still pretty awesome. So the first question is whether or not new 360 games look better than old XBox games without the addition of HD and the answer is a resounding yes. Sure 'Call of Duty 2' has been hyped, but not overhyped. It's that good, and the standard of graphics is that much better. The same is true for PGR3 and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, two other must-have titles that I have.

I'm simply shocked at how often you hear arguments about how many PS2s are out there and how the greater number of titles makes them a winner against XBox. That's completely silly. As every real gamer knows there are good games and there are great games. The very good games and the great games are almost always on both platforms. There are only a few exceptions, namely (Guitar Hero, Resident Evil) and (Halo, PGR, ) for the XBox. It really comes down to that handful, which is essentially nothing if you are a PC gamer as well.

News from the talk on XBox Live.

• A big Microsoft / Bungie announcement on the last day of E3 on 'The Forerunner Project'. Everybody knows it's Halo 3. The question is when does it ship? I say 30% odds of it shipping this Christmas.
• If the PS3 goes for 600 bucks, it's the beginning of the end for the PS3.
• Gamers hate the new controllers for both the PS3 and the Wii.

More on the actual games later.

The new wireless controller eats batteries pretty quickly. Then again I'm sure I've done some 20 hours of gaming over the past two weeks. Other than that, thinking that I might hate it because it's too small - I basically retrained my hands. Now I'm cool and I almost never think about it. They must have known something like this might happen. I've got a good 50 foot range on the wireless controller and no lag or anything like that. Once again the ergonomics pros at Microsoft have pulled off a surprising success.

It took me about 30 minutes to setup the new console. It was a snap, actually easier than the first time. All of my old Live info moved over with no problem.

The new panel interface is also a fairly brilliant piece of design. There's a huge amount of information that can be set from there, which I've yet to navigate. But it's very intuitive for a guy like me and a significant improvement over the prior version. Concretely, the XBox Live panel being available at anytime is brilliant. The ability to send game invites to multiple friends is a big improvement. The update of friends coming available is very nice, especially now that you can see, essentially when somebody accepts a friend invite. The messaging interface defaulting to voice is very nice. Some of the defaulted selections could use a bit more contrast in the default skin. I've moved it to the Halo theme and it's better.  I would have been happier to allow gamers to upload any avatar icon and leave it to feedback to determine whether or not they were too 'underground' rather than have it the way it seems to be now.. locked up with a dozen goofy defaults. MSFT needs to publish an avatar studio.

I have mixed feelings about Microsoft Points. They work too easily. It's a convenient way to spend too much money on gaming.

Sony: Past Tense

Sony has been rolling up lame in a lot of areas, but this latest announcement reaches new heights of suckitude.

First, the PS3 is delayed. Then they say it costs 800 bucks to build. Then it's going to be either or with the HD DVD or BluRay. Now they announce this dumb thing called WA!PS3, which is sorta like XBox Live, but only for downloads. It's not online multiplayer, it's a software store accessible by console. Big whoop. I mean, XBox Live for 360 is already there. If you just look at the PS3Today website, it's bad news after bad news. God of War 2 won't be built for the PS3 but for the PS2 in '07. Yike.

Now this is my year for Hi Def. And the more people I talk to, the more they say forget Sony for flat screens. I've heard they don't even make plasma TVs any longer after getting their asses handed to them by Pioneer and Panasonic. That's a damnable shame. Sony used to be somebody. But you know who *is* somebody? Apple.

Let me take you back briefly to what used to be one of the coolest places on earth. It was the Metreon in San Francisco. Back in 1999 and 2000 in the middle of irrational exuberance, every high tech Stanford Mafia don worth his VC connections could be seen eating sushi in this joint. IBM announced their whole e-business strategy there. XPlay back when it was called something else and it was only Adam Sessler, had every other episode shot there. When the PS2 premiered, it was at the Metreon that the camera crews watched the midnight lines. And smack dab in the middle of the Metreon was Sony Style, the coolest thing since Starbucks.

Fast forward to now. Sony puts rootkits on CDs, fueling rage, hatred and alienation among former devotees. The Minidisc never goes anywhere and the usage of DATs is considered selling out in the underground of hiphop. Nobody can pronounce VAIO and nobody really wants VAIO laptops any longer. They're overpriced and they break. Sony is so over.

Apple has done what nobody thought could be done, which is they have a killer product in consumer electronics. Yes the iPod is bigger than the Walkman. The company which spawned the Walkman is on the outs and the Apple Store is cooler than Sony Style ever was, if for only one reason. Sony Style thought they were so cool (and they were for a minute) that they had armed guards walking around rousting people who weren't buying. The Apple Store allows you to rent a Genius, which sounds snooty - you have to have an appointment, but actually works out nicely.

So here's to the hope that Apple does in the next 10 years what Sony did after their Walkman success, become bigger in consumer electronics. They're the only American company with the cachet. One word of warning however Apple. Don't try gaming.

Finally, a Plausible 360 Excuse

Dean Takahashi finally comes with the hardline.

One of two companies supplying the Xbox 360's storage memory chips, Infineon, has had trouble making enough of the chips at the right speed for the game console that debuted last November, according to the sources. As a result Microsoft has not been able to meet the demand for the console.

...

Specifically, the sources say Infineon wasn't able to make enough GDDR3 (graphics double data rate) memory chips for the Xbox 360. Each box has 512 megabytes of GDDR3 that stores a game's data. Both Infineon and Samsung supply GDDR3 chips to Microsoft.

Some Infineon chips ran slower than 700-megahertz speed that was required, according to the sources. This was a big problem because the Xbox 360 has only a single highway (dubbed unified memory architecture) connecting memory with two processors, the graphics chip and microprocessor. When either of those chips can't access memory as needed because of the slow memory chips, then the processing within the entire system bogs down.

As a result, Microsoft has had to start sorting the slow GDDR3 chips from the fast ones, adding a delay to the production of the boxes and limiting the total numbers it can build.

I think that if we would have been told this a while ago, we (meaning techie folks) might have pointed a bigger finger at MSFT for backing away from IBM. It was hard for me to believe that Flextronics and Wistron would both have serious problems meeting demand.

Bottom line, all of these demand planning excuses were a smokescreen to cover Infineon's ass.

The Predictability of the Future of Gaming

According to a few (hardly) pregnant paragraphs, the future of gaming is bleak.

Pachter expressed doubts that the Xbox 360 could make up for a deficit in the six-month sales total equivalent to 2005's. "We think that it is important to note that total U.S. console and handheld software sales over the first six months of 2005 were approximately $2.36 billion; the current rate of next generation software sales implies that Xbox 360 software will total less than 20% of this level over the next six months, indicating the potential for year-over-year sales declines for the foreseeable future."

I'm really trying to understand what this guy is comparing gaming sales to. Perhaps the best comparison is to microwave ovens. My original XBox lasted about 3 years before it came apart. So I think that qualifies, at an initial price of about 200 bucks, as durable goods. The 360 is double that price, so it makes a lot of sense, in terms of cannibalization, that they're not going to duplicate the sales figures.

As it stands, you can't go buy a 360 right yet. So this lack of availability is a real skew to what the market ought to be like. But here's where I really have difficulty with the basis of this prediction. This industry is capable of doing some remarkable things in terms of generating excitement in the market. Recall the scandals around San Andreas. You also, in some parallel to the movie industry, have fans who wait years for the content to come out. This is not like iPods, it's a very different dynamic. So if this guy sees year over year declines in the offing, I think he has no clue what he's talking about. There's a huge future out there for MMPORGs and PC crossover with the USB XBox Controller. It only gets bigger from here.

Going To Ravenholm

This holiday I have discovered why gamers have been raving over Half Life 2. It's a brilliant game. It's creepy. It's way interactive. It's puzzling and inventive. It's got a compelling storyline (so far) and it's got the best zombies ever. As a single player game, it's probably one of the all-time greats.

Now this is not news for most PC gamers, but this one has got me, a console gamer pretty excited. I cannot say with any surety that as a single player game I like it more than Halo2 but I understand how Halo's hype plays into the excitement of that game. I don't particularly like switching out characters so while that was an inventive part of Halo2, I find that it reduces rather than adds to the replayability for me, although it probalby make the game overall more exciting. However the puzzles on Half Life add some real spice to an action shooter, whereas Halo puzzles are just mazes.

I'm about 6 hours of play into this game, I guess, and what I estimate is about halfway through Ravenholm, which is by far the creepiest joint this side of Silent Hill. The

The navigation is pretty good and very consistent. It's not as smooth and realistic as Splinter Cell or any of the Tom Clancy shooters. In fact that I can't see my character in any way is something of a weird feeling to get used to. I see no hands when climbing ladders or swimming, and the reticle action on this game is pretty low. However the shooting action is first rate. Sound effects are top notch.

What makes this game world class are the graphics. The environments put together in Half Life 2 are absolutely superb. They have captured the industrial wasteland like no other game. There are only two that come close in showing this level and scale of depressing rust, one is Brute Force, the other is Chronicles of Riddick. There actually is one other that has this level of puzzles and inventive environments which was PsyOps: The Mindgate Conspiracy. But that game was so much fun and your character had so many different powers that you never feel quite as vulnerable as you do in Half Life 2.

Half Life has got great geek appeal. As much as I game, I am still surprised by the goodies I get in this shooter. So add me to the chorus of ravers for the Gravity Gun. Holy smokes is that a nice one. The indestructable sawblades are just splatterific. Launching one of those babies through a crowd of zombies is one of the unique experiences in all of violent gaming. The airboat with the gattling gun is also a very inventive piece of gaming. Nowhere under any circumstances have I face a more deadly helicopter. That is one of the most relentless foes ever. I put it right up there with the UAVs in the latest Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid 2. I'm sure there are more interesting goodies to come.

So there it is. I'll be in Ravenholm for a while.

360 Supply & Demand & More

Well it's perfectly clear now. The 360 is a hit; way bigger than anybody suspected. So let's ask some stupid demand planning questions. Who screwed up in MSFT's manufacturing orders department? I mean they've got people saying stuff like this (as of 12/8):

Market research firm, NPD Group, the top game-statistics firm in the industry issued its November report stating Microsoft sold 320,000 systems in the month of November. That’s roughly 80,000 shy of the company’s 400,000 expected units.

That makes no sense at all. Are they sold out? Yes. Are they not selling enough? Yes. Did they miss their target Yes? Anyway, selling more than a quarter of a million per month of anything that retails for 300-400 bucks is a pretty hefty cashflow. So get it right already guys. You have no excuses. Well. They do, and it sounds like this:

"...I'd hate to be in the marketing department at Xbox. It's a no-win situation. If I were a marketing dude (and I'm surrounded by them every day), then every red blood cell in my body would be selling this amazing new thing called the Xbox 360. We're not talking about a Cuisenart here. This is a high-definition, next generation gaming experience. I'd be shouting from the rooftops. Except... the core audience (read: pre-sold audience) for this product is having difficulty getting their hands on one. And the more I shout about it, the more gamers (and the general public) becomes bitter about the "shortage." So instead of using my marketing degree, I've got to bite my tongue until January, or even February - when supply starts meeting demand again. Except that I don't have a marketing degree, and I don't work at Microsoft, or at Xbox

I don't think I'd mind being that guy.. except the profile picture on his blog is too small. In fact, I think the profile pictures on most people's blogs are too small.

Anyway, I've had a serving of Halo2 over the weekend and I'm getting re-hooked into the gaming - stuff I haven't done in a while. I don't feel left out of the early adopter stuff since not even Wal-Mart has any 360s on hand, and I can basically wait until January or so. The fact that I can play my favorite games on the 360, except for Splinter Cell (grr), is the best news.

It turns out that there are a few bloggers who have come out as gamers. Or rather I should say more m'softies who blog as well as game. That's good news, so I'll be linking to them from time to time. At the top of the Gamer Pile would be Major Nelson.

Here are some I find intersting:

Grumpy Gamer

Thinking With My Fingers

XBox (official, boring) Blog

Joystiq (of course)

Scoble has the best dialog on the supply and demand issue. I can't find where the discussion is anywhere that says Flextronics is still making them. I know I read it. Even Google Desktop missed it.

BTW Joystiq has a fascinating little reminder that not too many years ago, the very thought of Microsoft being a leader in gaming was unthinkable. I know I killed that thought, as I pounded away on my Sega Saturn with the home version of Virtua Fighter.

Oh and one more thing. The French have made Halo 0. A 2d side-scrolling shooter. Hee Haw!

Wait Wait There's More!
I cannot prove it, but I swear to God that somewhere I wrote that the thing to do in the next Splinter Cell was to let Sam Fisher go undercover. It turns out that I was prophetic. That's exactly what they're doing in Splinter Cell Four.

True Crime: Streets of New York

I wanted to like this. What a stunningly huge disappointment.

The original was a fun game marred by poor control of fighting. This one seems even worse. The whole thrill of walking through New York is destroyed by and incredibly monotonous stream of repeated invectives. You walk up the sidewalk and all you hear is 'What the hell?' and 'Oh shit!'. I kid you not. They've added rain, big deal. This one is horrible.

BUT. I'm going to keep it for another few days just to see if there are any goodies worth waiting for. The game is still a great idea with a very cool soundtrack. Couldn't they just sell the franchise to the GTA guys? At least that way it will get done right. I'd much rather be the cop than the thug, but I have to tell you - if you compare the two games, it's a whole lot more enjoyable being the thug in San Andreas than the cop in New York City.

Zero Hour

The verdict is in, at least among the clan I've been hanging out with. Get the XBox 360. Now that Zero Hour has arrived, I'm going down to the local EBGames and see if I can get this controller to fit in my hands. All my friends are doing it.

Stay tuned.

3/6th T

I think it's the new Beemer that has effed up my attitude, but I have to say that I'll probably join the ranks of the multitudes of the unwashed who are going to hold off on XBox 360 for a while. I want to play the new Project Gotham as much as anybody. In fact, I'm going to message Black Ricco tonight and find out what's up with the other Oops Clan Gamers that I've been ignoring for months (I hope they let me back in), and see if he's rushing out to get one. Somehow I doubt it. I just emailed Lethalme to see what his attitude is about the new set.

I've been disappointed with the 360 since day one. I'm one of the folks who doesn't think it's a good idea to have a big piece of sculpture in the living room. Me, I'd just like another blackface rack mountable component for the rack. They could have made the faceplate translucent with crazy lights, but no.. they have this cream colored hourglass monstrosity.

I've also got my paws trained for the Duke controller. I have a feeling it's going to be a long time before I cotton up to the new one. I do like the idea that they will be able to map it into PC games so that's a big plus, but I'm not sure that it will overcome the minus of it being made for pint-sized mitts.

So I'm basically half-enthused about this goody, which aint hardly enough to get off the 4 bills to replace my perfectly acceptable XBox. In fact, I just ran through Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory once again for the fun of it, and I'll probably do it again. That's a game.

See I like the idea of HiDef gaming a whole lot, but I'm not going to start doing it until I actually have the HiDef TV, so it's pointless for me to get this console without the new bigscreen, and that's a tall order at this particular moment. So I'm going to chill and listen to the hype and believe it, but I ain't spending the ducats any time soon. Same thing Gamecrapper says.

What's fascinating is that, yeah I'm sure everybody knows that the platform is all that, but nobody's going to get off the bills until Halo 3 comes out, next year probably around the same time as the movie. The release of Halo2 was the biggest event in gaming, well that and Half-Life 2. It's all about the games, guys.

Forza Motorsport

It has been a while since I've been XBoxing, but finally Gamefly has delivered Forza Motorsport and I'm into it again.

I haven't had any occasion since old box broke to go online. That was primarily because of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which had me very intently doing the single player thing. After that KOTOR 2 took up my time, but then I got weary of it. So my old buds in Black Ricco's lobby on PGR and other shooting clans had missed me. The other night for the first time in months, I caught up to them on Forza.

When I say I caught up to them, that only means in the lobby. On the track they dusted me. Forza is very challenging as a driving game and after about 10 hours I am just getting the hook. I just passed level 10 and I own about 5 cars and now it's starting to get interesting.

The controller layout on FM is just like that in Project Gotham Racing 2, so that gave me a bit of a headstart in getting on the road quickly. The interface is a lot like Rallisport Challenge in the way that cars and tracks are selected. But Forza is clearly its own game.

The driving experience is a lot more realistic and there are a great deal more subtleties in handling. But it doesn't make you feel like a complete dweeb. None of these cars, even the supercars seem super. They're all fallible and the differences between them

Nurburgring is better on Forza than PGR2.

San Andreas

I'm not much of a gangbanger, but I'm trying to get better.

The first thing that strikes you about playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is that it's hard and you better get with it. The game is an order of magnitude more interesting than its predecessor for several reasons that are apparent within the first hour of gameplay.

Firstly, they're out to get you. In GTA Vice City, you basically walked around as a badass looking for trouble to get into. It required you to have an positive attitude towards mayhem and corruption. It was all about becoming a dangerous bigshot. In San Andreas, the moment you show up on the scene, you need to watch your back. Cops are out to get you, rival gangs are out to get you. You are broke and bony and your mama has been shot dead, you have no respect and people who walk by are constantly reminding you how badly you stink.

Secondly, the music is bomb quality. There are several soundtracks to choose from as you cruise around in stolen cars. The folks at Rockstar have pulled off a licensing coup. These aren't just rehacked samples, there are real songs by real groups you know - Rage Against the Machine, Stone Temple Pilots, Rick James, Isley Brothers, Cameo, Roger & Zapp. Even the soft music and country music is real.

Living as CJ puts you into a number of knuckle dragging situations. You beat down busters for fastfood money. Life is cheap. You generally get maybe 15 dollars for braining somebody with the various melee weapons you find in alleys and under underpasses, or on unconscious bodies.

I'm about three hours into the game and I've probably killed 15 civilians 3 cops and 25 rival bangers. I've got a couple cool tatoos and I've stolen every kind of car in the game, including a Bentley, several motorcycles and a police SUV. I've tagged half a dozen buildings, done several drive-bys and dented so many cars and pedestrians that I can't keep count. It's not fun. All I care about is getting respect from my homies. I want to beat the game, and I use the tools that the environment provides.

San Andreas feels very clunky as a shooter and it's much easier to get sent to the hospital in this game than any other violent videogame I've played. I swear I felt a great deal safer commanding commandos in terrorist territory. So there is never a real sense of confidence one gets in the San Andreas mayhem. The easiest thing to do is jack civilians while they're eating at Cluckin' Bell. I've come to resent the busta civilians; they just walk aimlessly through the 'hoods of San Andreas without the need for respect and without a bounty on their head.

How accurate this portayal of gang life is, depends on people like DJ Pooh in the credits, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that it is a lot more compelling as a game than I imagined it could be, although it's hardly the guilty pleasure of True Crime. It's more akin to Silent Hill. You're in something of a horror movie and you have to see how it ends.

Advent Rising

I picked up Advent Rising from the Blockbuster rather than waiting for Gamefly. It's a fabulous game, but M11 likes it much more than I. The concept is great, no doubt because of the influence of Orson Scott Card. But what strikes me about this game is that it is clearly a genre breaker. It has every intention of being its own movie, and I very much like the direction that takes.

Advent Rising, in aiming to be its own cinematic experience sets a new high for scope, just short of Halo, but something of a new low for gameplay. For me the battle action was just too sloppy and fast. It felt like Unreal but less precise. Unreal is already too fast for me, not that I don't like fast action, I just don't dig the physics. It's simply unreal, blurry, jaggy - the edges don't meet.

There's one thing that is astoundingly cool about Advent Rising is that it gives your fighter a lot more power than any avatar usually gets, and in this I find the greatest possibilities. Most games until this point make you slave very hard to get your powers, and the best of them like KOTOR or Fable, make results strategic. The best multi-forker in that way was the LA street cop game True Crime: Streets of LA. But like most video games, you are all too human. In AR, you very quickly get to superhuman skills, ala Psy Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy another great favorite of mine. (I'm surprised that I hadn't already written a review of Psy Ops, and I certainly hope to be that character in a sequel.) And although AR gives no indication that it will do any forking based upon choices between good and evil, it's just the kind of mix of action, role-playing and strategy that hopefully will arise in the next generation of games.

Right now Psy Ops has the best chance of taking our hero off-world to battle greater forces. Here's the great fork. Allow your guy to rampage or crusade to a level where he's got country capturing skills. Instead of just defending an oil refinery from terrorists, let our guy vaporize one with mind powers and plunge a nation into chaos. He walks among the streets, impervious with an edict to 'take me to your leader' whom he crushes instantly. He directs epic battles from the front and conquers the globe. Just as soon as world domination is his and he gets the ultimate power, aliens drop in and exile him to another planet on the far side of the galaxy. Now he has to start over, a planet at a time. This is more on the KOTOR scale, and I haven't gotten far enough into KOTOR II to see if this is the arc - but I basically don't want to have to deal with Pazaak, see?

Anyway, Advent Rising has already announced itself as a trilogy, and the guy behind the effort has already said it is the 'least awesome' of his many ideas. Bears waiting for. Meanwhile, I gotta turn it in today - not worth the late fees.

Gamey Weekend Stuff

Sudoku
OK I'm hooked. But at least I can pretend that it's educational. 2/3rds of my kids are somewhat hooked too. What a fabulous game. It's something that was designed with geeks like me in mind. You see it's a perfect seed for cyphers. Sorta.

Advent Rising
OK so it's full of glitches and the speed is unnatural. It is imaginitive and Halo-like in it's immersion. For a third person shooter, I much prefer the action of Brute Force, but hey, it's Orson Scott Card and it takes itself seriously as a cinematic experience. I haven't been bored yet, although I'm only an hour into it. I still wish it didn't have boss battles. How tired is that?

KOTOR Again

Once again I have jumped off the high dive of Star Wars myth and legend thanks to XBox and Lucas Arts. I have assumed the person of Fargo Tazmin and am fighting mining droids in the Paragen asteroid belt. Trying to find my way off that rock without being a total butthead so that I can get light side bonus points is a bit more time consuming than I expected. But it's better than dropping quarters in an arcade.

Unfortunately the XBox is literally on it's last legs. I don't think I'm going to make it to Christmas and the Xbox 360 release. It has been about three months since the green light blew out, and the disk chugs like a old cement mixer. Last night it spontaneously turned itself off a couple times. I've got a bad feeling about this.

E3

The Playstation 3 is way more beautiful than the the XBox 360. I say this as a diehard XBoxer. It's not a pity, because I love my XBox now and it's ugly as dirt. Still you have to give MS a little credit for making their new box look like a large iPod, sorta. But Sony has done the right thing and gave us a swoopy burnished machine in three different finishes. Nicely.

I'm following the E3 happenings on the GamesBlog. So far so so. I live in LA but haven't had a moment's rest, so I haven't been able to cruise the bars near the Convention Center and catch some drippings. I can't say that I'm really that excited anyway. It turns out that we've got THQ and Activision as customers. I heard EA uses our stuff too, so sooner or later I'll get out to see these guys, LA being the headquarters for all things gamey.

In the meantime, I haven't been on Live for months and am still enjoying the heck out of being Sam Fisher.

XBox 360 Pictures

This is what the rumors say the new XBox 360 is supposed to look like. There's a rather amazing discussion about whether or not it's fake or just photoshopped to look good, or photoshopped to look fake or photoshopped to look photoshopped. It's an interesting conundrum for disinformationists like me. Either way it keeps all the fanboys guessing and the industry astir.

I think it looks stupid. I like the color but I'd much rather have something with a 19 inch low profile kind of thing that fits in with the rest of my home theatre electronics. The new XBox should look like a sweet 1U rackmount server with some iridescence on the faceplate. That thing looks like somebody stepped on an iPod. It's a hideous looking mess and all the proportions are wrong. I did a Malcolm Gladwell blink on it and I say it's very fake. If it's real, it's real ugly. Fix it.

Oldies but Who?

I've never played Legend of Zelda and I've always thought that Mario was a dweeb in every way. In fact, the only thing Nintendo ever did for me was in the arcade. You know, arcade? That place you had to go to and put quarters in the machines?

Quite frankly I couldn't really tell you which of any of the arcade games I liked were made my Nintendo. Maybe Donkey Kong, but I played it more than I liked it. Clearly none of the games I did like wound up impressing young musicians like this dude, The Video Game Pianist.

Yes I do believe it's art. I just don't recognize it. Oh except for that little thing by Liszt, the Transcendental Etude #10. That's actually one of my all time favorites.

Xenon This Year

I've cranked up my gaming a bit this past week. For two weeks I didn't even touch Halo. Now I'm coming back around to it and I can see that the new skills I picked up from the Unofficial Battle Guide are becoming more smoothly integrated into my playing style. I'm winning more frequently, and still finding new routes and tactics. Man this is a rich game.

But I don't know what Microsoft is thinking in releasing the next box in October. Halo2 would have been out less than a year, and it's going to chill the market from now until then. I'm telling my boy only to get old games we used to rent. So from here on out, no new games. Unless maybe HalfLife comes out on the platform.

In any case it seems to be a done deal and the beginning of the hype starts now.

They've got to do a removable storage thing, and have some security feature so that you can copy games onto the [removeable] disk. I'm getting rather tired of the performance of some of my older games. That would be killer. I suppose some form of HD would be nice, but I really don't see how the graphics could be improved. In short, from my perspective, everything on XBox2 would be gravy, and that means they are going to have to do some convincing to get me to upgrade.

After October, the original XBox is going to start to look like a real bargain. As it stands there are a lot of good, cheap games out there to be had, like PsyOps, a real sleeper. BTW, Is Yu Suzuki on board?

Gaming Metadata

In addition to the GamertagDatabase, I have signed up to Defas. Their ideas about global stats are right on time, right on target and soon, right up my alley.

The question must be asked. Why don’t more game developers reap the benefits of this technology? A step in the right direction of tapping into the full potentiality of the Xbox Live is proliferating community developers with the tools they need. Bridging the aftermarket gap by honoring community conduits as such increases product awareness. If that’s not enough, appeasing any percentile of your fan-base is a good thing. The opportunity here for communal growth is astonishing, and the interest ridiculously prevailing.

Their stats are fairly cool. I dig it.

Massive Shooters & Adhoc Clans

CNET reports that a record of sorts has been set for hosting simultaneous online gamers.

Hardware maker Unisys announced Wednesday that its ES7000 server helped set a record for the most online game players ever hosted on a single server. The feat occurred last June at DreamHack 2004, a major computer conference in Sweden.

Game enthusiasts at the conference set up a session of the popular shooting game "CounterStrike" with 1,160 simultaneous players hosted on a single Unisys server, equipped with 32 Intel Xeon 2.2GHz processors and 32GB of memory. The Guinness World of Records recognized the session as a world record earlier this week.

So let me see if I understand this correctly. There were over 1100 gamers playing at once?

If this is correct, then it opens up the possibility of huge games. Now I don't play MMORPGs like Everquest, but I have been There and on Second Life. So it's possible that this kind of stuff could actually happen. But in shooters, there is so much more going on in realtime than just chat and dance moves.

Halo2's 'proximity' feature is particularly notable in this regard. They have already breached the barrier of having what goes on around a player in more focus than what's going on in the background. I can see the game glitch occasionally enough to see objects I move towards get less jaggy. So I know that they have mastered the first person experience with regard to prioritizing events close up and deprioritizing remote ones. So this suggests to me that a 'Halo 3' could do some rather intersting things. Let's speculate.

If the user experience of the game is prioritized by proximity it means that the immediate environment 'renders itself' around the player - it's work that is piped to the client by the server given a 'gps location'. This means that there's a kind of limit to what you need to know as if you were in a Newtonian field of an Einsteinian universe. In otherwords, your playing field can be massive beyond comprehension but all you know, or need to know, you can handle with your own little compute box. A massive server however can keep track of global Einsteinian events. So where are we headed? We're headed towards shooters that have battles which last longer than individual gamer and clan sessions.

Right now the greatest thing about Halo2 is its ability to deliver the cool guts of shooting action to an individual gamer by matching them up relatively quickly with people who want to do the same thing. This is very important and I'll talk about it more later. But the fact that the Bungie folks understand this key feature menas that they will be open to the idea of adhoc clans.

So in a massive shooter served by a massive box, you can be delivered to a battlefield, get orders, and try to take positions in a battle that was going on before your arrived. Here is the nature of an adhoc clan. Halo3 could have waves of Earth fighters engage city after city in the Covenant planets. Battles that last for days can be engaged...

Beyond Halo 2

I finally finished the Halo single player campaign. It was a blast. Like a lot of folks, I was fairly perplexed by the ending. The cinematics in this one were insufficient, by my reckoning, to give me enough details to fill in plot holes. On the other hand, I was very interested to get to the next level, just fresh from the exhiliration of beating the last set of baddies down.

It's true that Halo2 is more expansive in every way than the first. I can see how Halo3 could be even greater. What seems to be the huge surprise, and I may be reading this wrong, is that Earth itself is the Arc, and the Prophet of Regret came to warn humans that the Covenant was on a course to glass it. The Arc, if I'm reading that correctly, is the place where all of the Halo rings can be remotely activated. If Earth is the Arc, then it alone is safe from the Halo weapon, and/or the Founders were the original Earth inhabitants and Humans are the decendants of the Founders. With these pieces, Halo now approaches a new level of sci-fi drama. Or as this guy explains:

the halos don't kill flood...they kill their only means to spread which is all sentient life (meaning everyone else)...the halos were created to contain the flood, so when the rings were activated, they were already quarantined inside the rings, which is why they were able to survive.

The "Ark", which in Biblical terminology, is a safe haven for remaining life (eg. Noah's Ark contained animals, humans, etc, that were to be "saved" from utter destruction (the Great Flood).). So the theory about the humans actually being decendants of the Forerunner are actually likely. This would explain why Regret's fleet only had few Covenant warships (which if they had more could have easily obliterated Earth's defenses) at the start of the game, because he didn't know that humans were on the "Ark".

Earth contains the key to activate all of the Halos, as stated by 343 at the end of the game. If you all remember, at the Halo2.com site, when you point the cursor at the continent of Africa, it says "This is what we came for", which means the key is in Africa. This explains why the only place you get to fight on Earth as MC is Old and New Mombasa (which are actual cities in Africa). This is why the Covenant did not fully glass Earth, as they did with Reach, because they need to get to the key and begin their "Great Journey" into godhood, which they believe the forerunners became after activating the rings (foolish bastards!)

thats, more or less, what i came up with after beating the game, except for the Africa bit (totally looked over that :err: ) lol.

Im just curious what would be if the covenant ever find out the true purpose of the Rings, or worst yet, they actually manage to activate them. Thats why I think they bought in Abriter. Use him to help rally the covenant against the Prophets and help them to realize the truth of what the rings actually do (wipe out all life). This, consequently, i think will result in a truce/agreement between the Humans and Covenant converters to stop the flood and the religion of the false prophets.

Basically the whole story references, and in some instances, are identical to the Bible. i.e. Master Chief the savior and the one true hope to save mankind, the Ark as a haven for life, 7 Rings - the 7th day, Sunday (holy day), etc...

The question is whether or not Ridley Scott believe so, because he is being pitched this movie like nobody's business. You just have to get the right writers interested in taking up subplots and complications on the various alien races of the Covenant and voila.

In the meantime, I've got my ranking up to 5 in the online game and can now concentrate on that exclusively.

Halo 2 Rules, Changes the Rules

Halo grossed $125 million in its opening 3 days. Bigger than Spiderman2.

Halo 2 sold through 2.4 million units in its first 24 hours of North American release, Microsoft announced today. That adds up to $125 million in gross receipts, giving Bungie's latest Xbox project a place in the record books for both games and the entertainment industry at large.

To pull a couple of examples from the movie business, the all-time record for a movie's opening weekend belongs to Spider-Man 2, which grossed almost $115 million. Pixar's The Incredibles, launched this past weekend, drew a $70 million gross in its first three days. Shrek 2 owns the record for the highest single-day gross, drawing $44 million on May 22, 2004.

That's what I've been doing all day.

Halo 2: First Look

I didn't think I'd be writing this early, but it turns out that I have a break at work. Yes, I'm at work.

I picked up my copy last night at EB Games in Torrance. I was 26th in a line of about 75. The headlines say that MS has already done 100 million worth of business. I have no doubts. I was going to wait actually, but last evening I saw my MS communicator show that a couple of my buddies were already online playing. I couldn't stand that kind of peer pressure. I felt midnight pass through the states like New Years Day.

I got back to the crib at 12:28am and popped the disk in calmly. I hate shrinkwrap like the next guy, but I wasn't going to do something stupid with my big knife. So I patiently created my profile, inverted my look and logged onto Live. As I expected, there were already people I knew online playing including eedad, my fearless clan leader. I decided to go the long way and start a new campaign offline.

The trailers pick up the story reasonably well. The head Covy is getting branded for goofing the Halo mission and the Master Chief is getting a medal for his participation in the same. We're in orbit. I basically played a couple deathmatches and CTF online for about half an hour last night and another 90 minutes or so to complete the first chapter last night and this morning.

The gameplay seems smoother and faster. I've been playing Black Arrow for the past few weeks and I can tell that my aim is a lot better than it has been. At Medium, the grunts and other aliens come and drop at a predictable pace. The opening is not quite as heartthumping as the first Halo but then again, I'm hardly the noob I was. I dual-weilded all the indoor battles and it's brilliant. With a couple of plasma rifles, the MC is about as deadly as any FPS character ever. It rather reminded me of Berserk mode in 'Brute Force', except that the two rifles fire independently. So you can go lefty or righty or both. It will take me a while to get used to the different combinations of dual-weilding, but it's really a great dimension to gameplay.

The headsup is disoriently different at first. It took me a long time to get used to looking for life bars in the bottom left instead of the top right. Also, in multiplayer I had voices coming out of the TV and the communicator. Furthermore you can really jump high in the new game. As I get used to these fundamental changes, Halo 2 should soon feel natural.

The AI is definitely improved. You can immediately see that when you get to do a little Warthogging. Let a Marine drive and ride shotgun. He'll drive you to the right places and with the gunner, get the job done even if you kick back and relax. I noticed a bit of a glitch in firing if the driver does a quick 180 - plasma goes in weird directions, and your range isn't that good, but shotty is good.

Recharging is quick. Not only your shields for the battle armor suit but for the big gun on the Scorpion. Spend all your time fighting and no time looking for health packs. Brilliant again.

Eleven Nine

Yes I stood outside at midnight like a kid. Yes Halo2 is better than the first in just about every way. It's faster. The weapons are cooler, the environments seem larger.

And yes I *am* going to work today.

The Vast Greatness of Gaming

I missed an opportunity to dignify my rantings through appeals to authority the other night. I was too busy drinking margaritas and consuming juicy steak with my wife and friends. So instead of being at Beckman Auditorium hearing:

Techno-cultural historian Steven Johnson is a contributing editor for Wired and Discovery magazines, and is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of FEED, the revolutionary Internet magazine that managed to blend technology, science, and culture. He is also the celebrated author of the award-winning books Interface Culture; Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software; and, most recently, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life.

I was just telling that story of Mandume, the Seville, and Jersey Highway Patrol again.

Be that as it may, I happen to think that this cat Johnson is onto something once again. I really dug his explanation of emergent behavior. And I was pretty thrilled to hear him talk about what he has learned over the past few years about thought centers in the brain. Notably that you're supposed to use only 10% of your brain at a time. Why? Because the brain is a collection of specialized tools that have evolved to do different kinds of thinking. Basically take your left-brain / right-brain theory and break it down a couple dozen times and this is where cognitive theory is getting us. So the MRI of a guy solving crossword puzzles is different than the MRI of the same guy playing piano. Different mental task, different part of the brain.

As a reader of Oliver Sacks from way back in the day, such matters have always been of deep interest to me, and I'm definitely going to change the way I start thinking about how my kids brains are developing. Speaking of which, he said that we now know with a great deal more certainty that emotional states are deeply related to thoughts. A happy person remembers happy times. A sad person remembers sad times. Until you're happy, you forget your self-esteem and all the good things you did when you were you. Stuff like that. Anyway, that's just another big incentive to remind me not to make the kids cry when I correct their homework.

But Johnson's newest book is of a revolutionary piece. 'Everything Bad is Good For You' is due out this spring. He argues that television, movies and videogames are not the mind-rot they once were. In fact that they stimulate the mind in ways previously never considered. There are all kinds of tangents one can take with this, but it's something I understand. I long ago decided that it would be better for my kids play videogames than to watch television because of their interactivity. I expect Johnson to discover a nice set of concepts of mind-jigger that vids give us.

A simple example in obviousness might be the comparison between 'I Love Lucy' and 'The Wire'. In the old days, the plot basically focused on one caper with a small set of characters that was resolved in 30 minutes. A show like 'The Wire' mixes multiple clans of characters with clashing interests going in several directions at once. Watching shows like 'Gunsmoke' only required one glance to get in on the fun, but if you tuned to an episode of '24' in the middle of the season, there's no way your are going to be able to make sense of its complexity.

Online videogames, especially what MMORPGs are morphing to, expand on this even further because behind each character is another human being, not a screenwriter. They are not simply games, they're economies. This is not your father's idiot box.

Finished Fable in Fifteen

Fable is nowhere near as big as Knights of the Old Republic. Its story is not as complex, its scope is smaller. But I'm ready to play it again from start to finish, and that's something I'd never say about an RPG of this sort.

I think that the authors of Fable have come up with a very happy medium, and that is because of the fighting system. I spent most of my time in Fable battling, sometimes with (dumb AI) allies but mostly singlehandly, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. I cannot think of any other fighting game I've ever played that allows such a wide arsenal of offensive and defensive weapons to be weilded in real time. The targeting is nice but not too easy, the spell gradations are very cool and the variety of enemies is really nice.

While it's true that the boss battles leave quite a bit to be desired as boss battles go, I don't particularly like boss battles, and so it suited me just fine. It took me three days to beat Bastila in KOTOR and I was really about to give up completely. When it came to fighting the last boss, I just said forget it. It wasn't worth a one minute cut scene after having played the game for weeks. But I think the folks at Lionhead understand that even in a great fighting game, it's a lot more fun to hack and slash legions of enemies than to conquer big monsters.

I went pretty much straight for legendary good-guy status and spent almost no time interacting with anyone who wasn't directly involved in my quests. I think part of that has to do with the fact that it's far easier to select and emply use a variety of weapons than it is to use the variety of expressions. I am at a loss to explain why it was so easy to map the skills onto my right thumb but the left d-pad was a monstrosity of cascading menus. If I wanted to laugh or belch in someone's face, they will have walked halfway across town before I could engage them, but in a second, I could slow time, zoom through them, summon a creature, make myself berserk and triple club them with a flame augmented obsidian greathammer. Then again, I can belch at people in real life.

I cannot describe how delicious it is to have this array of weapons and spells at your disposal. But playing them has left several other dimensions that the game has completely unexplored. I'm going to explore them while I patiently wait for Amazon to deliver Halo2 to my doorstep.

In The Can

Halo2 has gone gold. This is the software industry term for the Hollywood term 'in the can'. Which means the master is complete and off to manufacture. Which means somewhere on the planet, there is already a bootleg version. It doesn't matter because the game is priced right and the consumer feels adequately served by a $50 videogame that will play for months. I've already pre-ordered my copy. The countdown continues.

This is a much better deal than a first run movie for example. If I pay 8 bucks for 90 minutes, that's about a buck for every 10 minutes. If the original Halo cost that much, it would have cost someone like me hundreds of dollars considering the time I spent in that game. I know that I've played PGR2 at least 150 hours the last time I checked, which was several months ago.

I've been playing Burnout3 for a little while and I'm already burned out on it. It's a lot of fun but lacks the control I prefer. The crashes are perfect and so are the games, although I'd rather have a first person view I could switch to (I always drive first person). Nascar is in the mail. It should be good.

25 days to zero.

Halo2 Making Epic Strides

OK I have to admit that I'm a sucker for a new sense of things right about now. I'm dropping the sensitivity screens in order to develop a vocabulary for things hot. In my new role as CTO for a very, very cool web venture coming up I'm courting an interesting audience not too far off from where I was 10 - 15 years ago.

What has this got to do with Halo2? Well it turns out that Bungie has hooked up with Nile Rodgers (yes that Nile Rodgers) to produce the music for the Halo2 soundtrack. The first single is by a group called 'Breaking Benjamin' which sounds like a grown-up Blink 182 Linkin Park with a touch of Korn. It's called 'Blow Me Away' and it is slammin'. It's... (hmm how do the young people say it these days?) The lead singer has a touch of that Matchbox 20 guy and the guitars have a touch of the STP when they go epic. This is damned good music for a video game. It's actually damned good music, period.

I am starting to get the feeling that what we're going to be hearing a lot after the release of H2, is that video games are turning the corner into real cross-media starmakers. I've been playing Burnout 3 so I know how EA has been dropping little rock tracks into their cut screens, but that's kind of disposable stuff. As anyone who has played Halo knows, O'Donnell and Salvatori's music is outstanding. Now it rocks and a lot of people are going to be paying attention.

I'm just listening to the streaming version available here, and I've played it 8 times just writing this piece. It's that good.

H-Day

Do you know what November 9, 2004 is?

It is the debut of the most eagerly anticipated game in the history of gaming: Halo 2. This past week the Beta of the game completed. All the news is awesome. New weapons, new vehicles, new capabilities.

We have predicted that grades and productivity will drop all over the nation, as gamers get immersed in Halo2.

The Dynamics of Spawn Camping

The most happening game on XBox Live these days is the latest installment of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, known as Black Arrow.

I started playing Black Arrow last week. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, it's basically the most popular combat simulator online. If you have absolutely no interest in squad-based first person shooters, this may seem tedious but it's actually rather interesting, especially if you worry about how the socialization of your sons is progressing. If you have no son, it's still a fascinating foray into game theory.

XBox Live
What goes on here? Well, it works a little something like this. Your son has his XBox hooked up to a large anonymous network of several thousands of others people's sons. He drops in a game disc, which is essentially a $50 DVD that almost nobody tries to bootleg, and all the other gamers that are online at the same time appear. Now your son has a list of 40 or 50 (up to a hundred) other gamers on his 'friends list'. Most of these friends will be people he has, and will never meet in person. They could be from Alabama, Alberta or Allemagne. He just knows them by their 'gamertag', their alias, and perhaps by their voice if they've played enough. Voice? Yes, that's what that silly Bobby Brown My Prerogative headset is for. He can hear what all the other players in his room are saying, and of course he can talk back to them.

For generations people have been shouting back at sports players on the television. Your son may be stupid, but at least he knows that the people on the other side of the screen can actually hear him.

The Room
So boy turns on the game, enters a PIN through his handheld controller and now there are several thousand other gamers playing Black Arrow with which he may cooperate or compete. He chooses which kind of game he wants to play, say 'Total Conquest' (that would be compete via cooperation), and all of the hosts who are hosting that kind of game show up on the screen after a quick search. Not their faces, just their gamertags in a list. He can then enter any hosted game of any particular host and get started gaming. He can't start playing a game until he gets into a room. No matter what time of day or night, there's always a room with plenty of English speakers.

The Host
I mentioned hosting a room. Who is a host? Anybody who wants to be a host is a host. Your son might be a host. Maybe he's even a good host. So there is a choice your son makes. Maybe he wants to host a room, maybe he wants to join somebody else's room, maybe he wants to join a room wherever his friends are. Let's say he chooses to be a host and serve up his own room. He then configures up his room depending on how he wants to play. He will allow 16 people to play, two opposing teams of 8 each. He will allow friendly fire and he will ban grenade launchers. The game will be Total Conquest.

The Clan
In addition to having a large set of friends which are visible across games other than Black Arrow. You may join an identifyable clan within the context of the Black Arrow world. These clans can arrange to compete exclusively against each other in tournaments, but most of the action has unaffiliated individuals mixed with clanners.

Ready Up
One more thing. Your son and everyone on his squad has to decide which compliment of weapons they are going to employ. They do this in the lobby before the game starts. There are assault rifles, chain guns, pistols, sniper rifles and a variety of explosives. Take your pick.

Juinor Modders

In Project Gotham Racing 2, I am ranked 4999th in the world, or at least I was at 3:30 this morning when I signed off. That's not bad out of 224k people who race this online game. I've been around the block a few times, but last night I saw something I never saw before. Upon reflection it doesn't seem to be much, but I was very impressed at the time.

Just like in the Matrix, everything about these simulated worlds are driven by rules. Sometimes there are gaps or glitches in the rules which allow the observant and persistent to bend them. For the most part however, most people play the game and enjoy themselves within the constraints of the playing field.

Last night, a modder went 450 miles per hour. This is the equivalent of Neo flying in the Matrix.

A modder is someone who takes apart a digital appliance and modifies the hardware or software to add features to an ordinary game. This is very much like the aftermarket for cars, except it's chips. By doing so, a modder can bend or break rules or even add their own.

In PGR2 there are a collection of about 100 automobiles for racing, each with its own speed, colors and handling characteristics. In the original version, which has twice been updated by the manufacturer with expansion packs. A well known, and perhaps the only flaw in the game was known as the 'Color Glitch'. Through a series of button clicks on the XBox controller, a player could change the colors of a car. This was notably done on the Porsche GT1, one of the most desirable cars in the game which was only available in white. Players who mastered the Color Glitch would appear at the start of a race with orange or black GT1s, thus announcing their status to the rest of the players. As more people learned the Color Glitch, races would take forever to start as players would try to outdo each other by picking cool colors. That all stopped three months ago with the addition of the Paris Booster Pack which also patched the bug.

I was in the company of two young modders, a 19 year old kid from Philly and a 13 year old from somewhere in Canada. Philly did the hack. Canuck offered to set up a webcam session and show me how to mod my own XBox.

Stay Tuned.

A PhD in Mortal Kombat

(full reprint)
A PhD in Mortal Kombat
By Mary McNamara
Times Staff Writer

June 6, 2004

A pioneering USC group tries to get into the heads of players to learn if the pastime harms or can help.

Ever since they were children, Steve Choi, Ethan Levy and Elaine Chan have been told by people who never met them that the great passion of their lives, the thing that captivated and moved them, was the enemy of intellect, emotionally damaging and quite possibly the end of civilization as we know it.

Choi, Levy and Chan are gamers. That is, they play video games with serious devotion and intensity. They are also students at the University of Southern California — Choi and Levy, both 22, are entering their senior year, and Chan, 21, is working on her PhD. But far from merely overcoming their digital predilections to succeed in college, these three and others like them are using their knowledge of games like Mortal Kombat and the Sims to further their education. As members of USC's Computer Games project, they are the local vanguard of a new academic discipline: video game scholarship.

Choi recalls that his mother gave him a computer when he was 8 because she felt computer science was the career path of the future; she was, however, less then thrilled when her son began spending much of his on-screen time playing games.

"All our lives we've heard how terrible it is," Choi says. "I wanted to offer the other side of the question."

Created through the Annenberg School for Communication, the Annenberg Studies on Computer Games is a multidisciplinary, multigenerational, multilingual research group dedicated to the study of computer games. The year-old group is one of several game-related projects springing up at universities around the country. MIT, Stanford, the University of Michigan and Northwestern University have various projects researching different aspects of interactive media. But USC's computer games project is probably the largest and most diverse collection of professors and students studying the vast yet mysterious world of video games. The research at USC focuses on the gamer rather than game design or development, and much of what they are doing is groundbreaking.

The project is the creation of Peter Vorderer, who heads the school's entertainment studies program, and Ute Ritterfeld, a German research associate professor with a background in health sciences and psychology. "We are trying to find out not only what is bad but what is good," Ritterfeld says. "Every new technology is met with fear and criticism. When picture books first came out, people said they would ruin children's imaginations; with radio it was the same; movies, television the same. We are trying to find out what is real and what is just fear."

After years of snubbing video games as a phenomenon not worth researching, scholars are now frantically attempting to catch up with an interactive media industry that is increasingly prevalent, seemingly permanent and still so new that the people developing it are the ones who are using it.

Ritterfeld says the topic itself is polarizing. "The nongamers consistently criticize the games, the gamers defend them. They honestly can't imagine any harm in them. What's really needed is more research."

Chan knows what true gamers face — she spent one summer doing nothing but playing the online role-playing games she favors. Over the years, though, she has learned to keep her gaming habits to herself. "Whenever I mention that I'm sort of obsessed with video games everyone is shocked and horrified and asks, 'Well, how did you make it to USC?' " she says. "Even in the computer group," she adds with a laugh.

The 20-person USC group is an international lot, including members from Germany, China, Ukraine, India and Korea as well as all over the U.S. In the past years, it's developed or launched studies into areas as diverse as the effect of violent games on brain activity, the motivation of gamers, the benefits of interactive learning, and the role of narrative and character development in the games themselves.

While two of the studies will focus on the hot-button issue of violence, most are geared toward discovering what psychological needs the games fill and what role they can have in education and mass audience entertainment.

In one study planned for this summer, researchers will test the conventional wisdom that interactive learning is more productive than rote. "Everyone assumes children will learn more if they are playing a game," Ritterfeld says. "But we do not know that because it has never been tested."

Vorderer, who has edited several books on the psychology of entertainment, is already compiling a book about gaming, which he believes is changing not just the industry but the definition of entertainment.

"When we started, we thought, 'Well, games are cool and under-researched so this will be a good area,' " Vorderer said. "But the more work we do, it is so striking how everything is connected to games. The military, the movies, education, everyone is doing games."

Full Spectrum Warrior: First Look

As combat sims go, I have to say that this is the most realistic I've played. I think it's going to have a serious hold on me for some time to come.

I've only gotten through the basic training of Full Spectrum Warrior, something that took me the better part of 2 hours, and I am very impressed. The first thing I notice about this is that it doesn't give you a whole lot of fancy weaponry. It gives you soldiers. What's so incredibly cool about FSW is that it's not cool.

I've played Ghost Recon, its follow up Island Thunder, Rainbow Six 3 but this one is by far the most realistic. Although Splinter Cell comes close, I'm more dependent on info over the squawk in this game than any other. Whereas in Metal Gear, it gets downright annoying talking to Otacon, I really look forward to hearing Charlie 32. Second only FoeHammer, Charlie 32 is the best voice to hear.

On the last part of the MOUT, I encounter the tank. Hey, I can call in support! Gnarly! So I light up the tank and the mortars start dropping and the whole damn place is shaking. I'm a whole block away and it's still scary. Brings it home.

XBox Fantasy

The game world just gets better and better. This weekend I'm going to be immersed. Say bye bye family, daddy's going gaming. I've got four new titles to play with and it's going to rock.

Riddick
This is a big surprise. I've only played a little bit but this is a really innovative game. It's one part Splinter Cell, one part Doom, one part Deus Ex. It's totally cool and confirms that Vin Diesel is going to be the next Bruce Willis. It's got the most fabulous use of shadows I've ever seen in a game. I'm going to have a lot of fun with this one. I thought the latest Hitman was too dark. This one seems to have struck the right balance.

MX Unleashed.
OK this one is for the kids, but I had to try it. Not bad. Not quite as engaging as Moto GP or Rallisport Challenge, but not bad.

Full Spectrum Warrior
I'm going to write a whole piece for this game. The greatest thing about it is that it's not cool.

Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow
I turned this one in much too soon. Forget Blockbuster, this is on Gamefly now, so I'll keep it until I finish all the levels. I just got to Paris and am still in the subway.

The Ultimate War Sim

You have got to read this. Split your sides and think deeply at once. Damn!

I want that "Public Support" meter to rise and fall according to Troops Lost, Length of Conflict, Innocents Killed and Whether or Not There is Anything Else On TV That Week. I want to lose 200 Public Support points because, in a war where 8,000 units have been lost, one of my Mutalisks happened to be caught on video accidentally eating one clergyman. Then, later, my destruction of an entire enemy city goes unnoticed because the Nude Zero-Gravity Futureball championship went into overtime.

PGR2 Paris

As of this moment I am ranked 1710 in the city of Paris for Project Gotham Racing 2. I've been playing it all night. There are several new tracks and cars that are finally downloadable from XBox Live for the game. It costs 5 bucks and of course it's more than worth it.

There are a couple of really good tracks. Several of which (of course) run around the traffic circle at L'Arc du Triumphe. There's a really nice tri-oval called Les Deux Ponts (The Two Bridges) which I predict is going to be the Paris equivalent of KGB Corner. It's fast. And there are some interesting hairpins and cresting turns that throw you a curve. But by far the most challenging aspects of the new Paris tracks are the traffic circles. There are some you can more or less take a straight line through, some you have to angle towards and accellerate through and some where you have to slow down and do a chicane-like maneuver. Sometimes there are two of them and you have to remember which side is deadly depending on which direction you're going. These dividers are trickier than the ones in Chicago, so be prepared.

The playing field is leveled a bit. The TVR Cerbera Speed 12 is available in the download. Ha ha to all you scrubs who paid 30 bucks for the cheat. I've heard that the color glitch has been fixed, but I haven't verified that.

There are seven new cars in the download including the Speed 12. The most fun to drive so far is the Ferarri 288 GTO. It's got nice accelleration and speed and it's a real slider. Somebody said that it's the one Magnum PI used to drive, but that was a 308. They look very much alike. Also the new BMW 645 and the Corvette C6 are included. The 'Vette's about the same as the Z06 with a slightly growlier engine and what seems to be taller gearing. The BMW has amazing brakes. The others I have yet to try.

Interestingly enough, there's no weather selections when you're hosting Paris. I would have really liked to have seen the Eiffel Tower at night, but.. il n'est pas possible. Alors..