The Darkness II

Above: Jackie quad-wields you in the face.

My review of The Darkness II is up now at thephoenix.com. Count me among many who were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the story. While the gameplay is a little slicker than before, I don't think it benefits by being more overtly game-like than its predecessor, and by having more traditional level design.

In the previous game, Jackie was the only one with magical powers, and his enemies could bring little more to bear than increasingly powerful weaponry. Here, they have enchanted abilities of their own, which may make for a more fair fight, but diminishes a key part of the allure -- the first game was like a monster movie where you got to play the monster.

The whole thing is a lot of fun and well worth playing, but after playing the PC version I would certainly recommend that you play on a console. The mouse and keyboard interface is all sorts of messed up. To use the Darkness slash power, you need to click the mouse wheel, and then move the mouse up, down, or to the side to direct it. It doesn't work well, and feels like you're flailing. Plus, you're likely to accidentally scroll and switch weapons. Additionally, when you're wielding two guns, mouse2 fires the lefthand gun, and the mouse1 fires the righthand gun. It feels completely unnatural.

Oh, and for some reason you use the N and M keys to swap between skill trees. Makes no sense at all.

At any rate, I expected the worst from The Darkness II and found it to be a worthy sequel. This has been a good winter for games, and Syndicate isn't even out yet. What a wonderful time to be alive.

Battlefield 3

Above: Jet gameplay. Not pictured: the pilot crashing immediately.

Ahoy-hoy! My review of Battlefield 3 is up at Paste. It is nice to be back at Paste.

This was a tough one to write, for reasons that I think will be clear when you read the review. When things go well, Battlefield 3 is stunning. The problem isn't just that things don't always go well, it's that sometimes they don't go at all. My play experiences tended to fall into one of five categories.

From best to worst:

1. Time of my life -- awesome squadmates, great connection, action-movie moments that make me weep with joy.
2. Dumbass teammates, but an incredibly fun shooter with constant surprises.
3. Connection troubles, lag, lost XP and unlocks. Starting to wonder if it's worth it.
4. "Joining Server" loop for three goddamn hours. Rebooting and cursing.
5. Single-player.

For instance, I once paired up with a squadmate who was a virtuouso with a tank. He was driving, and pummeling our enemies. I was acquitting myself serviceably in the turret, and ended the match with something like 10 kills to 2 deaths. (Usually, for me, it's the reverse.) Not only did we win the game, but we earned the ribbon for the best squad, and even though it was all him, it was a feeling of satisfaction that lasted me through many worse performances.

Even when there is little or no cohesion, the game is still somehow incredibly fun, if only because so many variables are at play. At times, I held down capture points by myself, just a solitary man lying in some tall grass with a heavy machine gun. Once, after respawning, I wiped out the entire squad that had cut me down just moments before. And then, of course, there are those magical moments when you accidentally crash a helicopter onto somebody. I find it hard not to run upstairs and recount these things to my wife in excruciating detail.

There's every reason to believe that the Battlefield experience will get better, and I hope it does, because right now the thin candy shell is not properly supporting the chocolatey middle. I don't think I'm done with this game, not by a longshot.

Rage

Above: Some manner of anger. Fury, maybe.

My review of Rage is up now at thephoenix.com.

The buzz I had been hearing was not good, and the game's first few hours seemed to confirm it. Where Rage attempts to modernize, it doesn't work. It is kind of creepy how much time you spend standing mutely while people give you orders, and how un-interactive the world is. But where Rage plays to id's strengths, it soars. I forgot what it was like to play a first-person shooter as pure as large portions of Rage are.

There is strategy involved, of the sort where you're deciding whether you want to do a little damage or a lot of damage. There are fun, unexpected weapons to use, like a mind-control slug that allows you to walk an enemy, zombie-like, into a crowd of his compatriots before blowing him up. Traditional weapons are all given a chance to shine, as smartly designed levels transition from close-quarters combat to wide-opeen battlefields.

Mostly, it's a game about shooting, and so it gives you the tools to do that. You can carry 8 weapons at a time in rage. Your sniper rifle scope stays steady, even when you're zoomed in. The action is smooth and lightning fast.The best summation of Rage that I've read came from the Dead End Thrills blog, which in a post that was otherwise all about id Tech 5, had this to say about the game itself:

It reminds us how far we’ve erred from the thrills of ‘run-and-gun’ into pedestrian ‘stop-and-pop’; how we’ve lost the rhythm of the firstperson shooter; and how look and feel are still more important than gimmicks and Gamerscore.

I couldn't agree more.

Of course, it's fair to say that not all of Rage consists of these shooting sections, and I'm with everyone who finds the vehicle portions and the world-building to be suspect. But I'm also the guy who will dismiss a game completely if I don't like the inventory menus.

I'm not contradicting myself. What I care about is what comprises the bulk of the experience. It doesn't matter to me how great the story is in an RPG if I am spending all my time grappling with the interface. And it doesn't matter to me that Rage's shooting portions are stitched together in a dead world with the occasional mandatory driving section, because those are easy and brief. If my buggy had constantly been blowing up, and if I had to spend long stretches doing more in the city hubs than picking up missions, my impressions would have been quite different.

As it is, if Rage had simply been a linear corridor shooter -- paced more like Metro 2033 than Borderlands -- it probably would be one of the best of the year.

Driver: San Francisco

Hey there! Forgot to mention that I reviewed Driver: San Francisco for Joystick Division.

Don't have much more to add that isn't in the review. It seemed like a good game and I kept waiting for the moment that I would completely buy in, and it never came. I had some fun with it, for sure, but I'd play a couple rounds of multiplayer, or a few missions in the campaign, and start thinking about other games I could be playing, or things I had to do around the house. I never had any problem turning the game off.

Next it's on to Rage, it looks like, with some time for the Portal 2 DLC and a little more Resident Evil 4 HD. There's not enough time in the day.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Above: Adam Jensen prepares to enter the Matrix.

My review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution is up now at thephoenix.com. I'll level with you: I don't think it's a very good review. There was so much I wanted to say that I ended up not saying any of it. I tried to explain the game in the broadest terms to somebody who had never heard of it before. I felt like I needed more words. That's what the blog is for.

Part of the problem is that I am still a little confused about what I think of the game. When a game shows itself to be capable of greatness, it is all the worse whenever it falls short -- which DX:HR does, often. It's not like a lot of mediocre games that maintain a baseline of competence the whole through. Those are easy to figure out. This game consists of stratospheric highs punctuated by crushing lows. The mental arithmetic necessary to give it a score, and then call it a day, seems like it's either overcomplicating or oversimplifying things.

Let's start with this: for sustained stretches, DX:HR is brilliant. It is, at heart, a game about corporate espionage, and they've managed to make sneaking around office buildings and reading emails into a genuinely thrilling experience. Part of that is due to the interface. The stealth mechanics are intuitive and robust. Taking cover might make your character a little too invisible, but line of sight works just as well, and you never get a sense that the AI isn't playing fair. Every time a guard spotted me, I knew it was my fault and not the game's. When I was successful -- such as when I snuck past a room full of guards in a penthouse apartment, and waited for the elevator while listening to them talk about how they were going to kill me -- I wanted to find somebody in real life to high five.

And it seems, too, as though the character building and varied playstyles aren't just lip service. I tried my hardest to avoid fights and to build up my hacking abilities. For the most part, it worked. One of my favorite parts was when I entered a new section of an office building, sneaking around as usual, only gradually noticing that nobody seemed to be around. I saw one guard dead on the ground, and then another, and then I encountered a security robot that I had re-programmed several minutes earlier. My own lethal Roomba, puttering through the corridors, taking out the trash.

Then again, sometimes the stealth approach just wasn't happening, and the non-lethal goal seemed unattainable, so I would slowly and methodically murder everybody in the room. If you don't upgrade your combat capabilities, the shooting is clunky, but it still is not an impossible task to systematically pick everybody off with a sniper rifle, especially if you're in a room with multiple levels and numerous back passages. And what's nice about all of this is that there is no sense that the game is guiding you one way or another. The environments, the enemies, the tools -- they are there for you to take or to leave.

But when the game stumbles, it faceplants. To some degree, it's not even the game's fault. I once read an article about air traffic controllers, who work one of the most stressful jobs you can have. For hours, they stare at a screen that is full of hundreds of little dots all moving in different directions, and their job is to know what each one of those dots is doing in relation to all of the others. Occasionally one of the controllers will lose his focus, and suddenly instead of seeing hundreds of planes flying through the air with clockwork precision, he just sees a bunch of manic dots. And then he loses his shit and has to be placed on leave.

This is essentially how I felt every time something went wrong in DX:HR.

There's something to be said for gameplay based on the idea of your careful plans going awry. (This was one of the central pleasures of Far Cry 2.) When this game is humming, you're like the air traffic controller who knows what's up. You know where every guard is. You know where all your cover is. Your weapons are armed and ready. You have a plan for getting through this area, and it's working, and you could not feel better about it. When you get busted, though, it's not fun, and there aren't often clever ways to regroup. Usually you just restart.

If you're playing as I did, it's not worth fighting or running. Since I put no skill points into making my character a fighter, getting spotted meant instant death. Often I just gave up and let them kill me. Occasionally I'd hide in a vent for five minutes, which felt like a moral victory, but was boring and less productive than reloading. And because of the way the game saves your progress, if you die after updating your skill tree or earning bonus XP, you have to do all those things over again when you restart.

This isn't the worst thing in the world; it's a small annoyance that happens over and over. And it's one of those obnoxious things that only happens in video games, which a smart game should have figured out get past. DX:HR feels like it should be smart enough for that. For all its brilliance, it trots out the same old classic tropes that have been stale since the first Deus Ex: crawling through vents, stacking crates, atrocious voice acting. You can emerge from a vent into a locked room, and the people in the room will start chatting with you as though nothing unusual has happened. Oh, and there are the boss battles.

I don't want to be the millionth person to complain about the boss battles, but some things are unavoidable. It's not that they represent sudden, jarring difficulty spikes. It's that the rest of the game is based on player choice, and the boss battles have an Optimal Strategy that you can't deviate from unless you are a masochist. Were the game true to its principles, then there would be a way to hack your way through a boss battle, or to avoid it altogether. Instead, you can pick up the weapons that are helpfully scattered around the room, and then discard them when you're done. That's lazy.

Would I recommend that most gamers play Deus Ex: Human Revolution? For sure. But you need to be prepared to struggle with it a little. Wrestle it to the ground. It is not perfect, but it is not quite like anything else out there.

Bulletstorm

Above: Can't say they weren't thinking big with this one.

My review of Bulletstorm is up at thephoenix.com. The short version is: gameplay good, humor bad. It's hard to criticize crude jokes without sounding like your monocle popped off just hearing something so uncivilized, but it wasn't a matter of being offended -- at least, not by anything except how low an opinion the writers seemed to have of me. The jokes just weren't funny. And a lot hung on the jokes.

But I did have fun playing Bulletstorm, even when things kept happening like my character falling through a wall and getting stuck outside the map, or my computer-controlled teammates continually running in front of my crosshairs. My fear was that too many of the kills would be canned, or that they would eventually seem repetitive. And that wasn't the case. I was still finding new ways to kill several hours in -- and usually it was on purpose!

The game also deserves props for giving us an interesting setting to look at. It still plays like a corridor shooter, but it doesn't feel like it, because so much takes place outdoors, with gorgeous backdrops that look like they're stretching out forever. No, you can't actually go there, but at least you don't spend all your time inside metal corridors. Not until the last level, anyway.

P.S. I thought about writing this like one of Patricia Marx's shopping columns in the New Yorker. A little bit of that made it in. I'm not sure why this is, because I do not like her columns.

Sister act

My review of BioShock 2 is up now at thephoenix.com. Games like this are fun to write about because they're really about something, and you can engage them thematically in a way that everybody will understand. Tom's point about emphasizing the "game-ness" of games hits home, but in the case of something like BioShock 2, story is such a huge part of it that I don't think you're doing readers a disservice by focusing on it.

Especially in the lead-up to Heavy Rain, it's been interesting to me to see how many people instinctively resist a game that emphasize story over play. Saying games have to be one thing or another seems to me to ignore the best thing about video games, which is how broadly they can be defined. You could write a review of BioShock 2 talking only about the story. You could write a review of it talking only about the gameplay. Either one could be honest and illuminating, because the game strikes a nice balance between the two, and even uses one to strengthen the other (though not to the extent of the original).

But BioShock 2 is the rare case that succeeds equally well on both counts. Most games land on one side of the divide. I think that's okay. The spectrum of games that has pure play on one end, and pure story on the other, is a long one indeed, and I don't think we should be trying to shorten it. A game with a great story may not need incredible game-ness, and history is full of examples of games with crappy stories that are still a blast to play. We can have it all!

Yet it is true that for all that I thought this game succeeded as a story, I still spent an inordinate amount of time trying to shoot people in the face with rocket spears. That doesn't really come through in the review.

Games of the decade: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

(2003, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC)

I can't be sure, but I think Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was the last game I played without the aim of writing about it. There may have been others, but it was right near the end. It was definitely the last game I fell in love with and played repeatedly, content not to rush on to the next big thing (or not so big thing).

A common theme on this list, among the games predating 2004, are games I got for Christmas, because that was the way I got them for the first part of the decade. This was no different. In 2003, I remember seeing TV commercials for two games: this, and Castlevania: Lament of Innocence. When either ad came on, I'd comment about wanting to play them, but when Christmastime arrived and my girlfriend handed me a suspiciously game-shaped box, I found myself desperately hoping it would be Prince of Persia and not Castlevania. I'm not sure why. I don't think I'd read any reviews. I'd been a Castlevania fan in the past, especially Super Castlevania IV and Symphony of the Night, but held no particular affinity for anything PoP. Still, when I unwrapped that gift and saw a sword-wielding Prince leaping out at me, I felt relief more than anything.

As I delved into the game, my relief turned quickly to excitement. Sands of Time is nominally similar to Tomb Raider, a franchise I have never liked because of its unforgiving and slow-paced platforming, but it solves every problem that Tomb Raider had, including some I didn't realize existed. The acrobatic Prince performs one impossible stunt after another, and the beauty of the game is that you don't often have to stop and line up your next move exactly right. Using only two buttons, you can wall-run over a gap, then spring onto a bar, flip around it once before leaping to a pole, then shimmy up it and disembark for a perfect landing, all in one smooth and unbroken sequence. Navigating the game's physical space is thrilling. I had never felt such freedom of movement in a game before.

Smarter still is that magical sand. I can't believe it took until 2003 for somebody to come up with the idea to let you rewind upon making a mistake. There's no such thing as a cheap death in this game. Instead, you learn what you've done wrong and can immediately correct it. That doesn't make the game too easy or simplistic. It makes it fun.

The sand is the linchpin of a surprisingly powerful story. From the beginning, the game is cast as a flashback, with the Prince narrating his incredible story to someone whose identity we don't learn until the end. The writing is fantastic, and so is the acting. Yuri Lowenthal, as the Prince, strikes exactly the right note of raffish charm. His sarcastic asides to himself as he progresses through the game are funny, and his gradual acceptance of responsibility for having unleashed the Sands of Time is both believable and affecting.

(Why Lowenthal was replaced in Warrior Within by some generic gravelly voiced dude, I have no idea. Nolan North did all right in last year's Prince of Persia by playing, as he always does, Nolan North, but Lowenthal is the definitive Prince.)

It's the game's finale that pulls the rug out from under you. Throughout the game, the Prince has been slowly developing a relationship with the Princess Farah, at the end of which they are well and truly in love. Standard stuff. Then, after the Prince topples the evil Vizier and rewinds time, back to before the Sands destroyed everything, it's as though they've never met. When we realize that the Prince has been talking to Farah all along, and not to us, it is a perfect storytelling moment: funny, surprising, achingly romantic. I don't remember if Farah falls in love with the Prince after that, but I did.

Games of the decade: BioShock

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

BioShock

(2007, Xbox 360 and PC; 2008, PlayStation 3)

Apparently there's been a backlash? These things are hard to quantify, but I feel like every time I hear somebody mention BioShock these days, it's to criticize it. No game is above criticism, of course. Still, when I played this game, I was fully swept away in the world it created, in the story it told, and the elegant way it fused shooting with user-friendly RPG elements. BioShock is ambitious in many ways, and wisely restrained in others. Everything it does, it does at the highest level.

One of the criticisms people make is the relative simplicty of the game's morality. Choosing to harvest or save the Little Sisters is a binary choice, and not even a tough one. I saved them, because that's how I play everything, and before long it was obvious that doing so wasn't costing me anything. When you harvest the Sisters, you get some ADAM right away, but if you save them, you'll get even more, provided you have a little patience. So there's no good reason not to save them, unless you want to be a jerk. As roleplaying goes, this ain't Fallout.

But it's not supposed to be. BioShock is an action game, and one of the things that's great about it is that it keeps its eyes on the prize. Nearly all of your powers are employed, whether directly or indirectly, in service of combat. I built my character up as a hacker, and I never got tired of turning the security systems of Rapture against its inhabitants.

One of my favorite memories was the early battle against an insane doctor. I had him on the ropes, and, in one last, desperate move, he sprinted out of my sight to a nearby aid station. Unfortunately for him, I had hacked it, and it dealt him the killing blow. That's the kind of game design I like: you've got nearly endless options for accomplishing your task, and doing it one way doesn't make you feel like you've missed out on another.

The biggest complaint people have about this game seems to be the escort mission at the end. I think it's brilliant. Not so much for the mechanics of it, gathering the bits of the Big Daddy costume and then escorting Little Sisters in a sequence that you actually can't fail, but for the drama. All game long, you've been encountering these hulking beasts. They leave you alone unless you attack them, which you will if you want to complete the objective of saving or harvesting all of the Little Sisters. They are faceless and anonymous beasts. You think of them as just another video game enemy, albeit a particularly cool one.

Then, suddenly, you find yourself one of them. You're protecting the Little Sisters. You're being attacked by selfish, bloodthirsty freaks. This sequence casts everything you've done so far in a different light. Every bit as much as the famous scene with Andrew Ryan and the golf club, this scene makes you stop and think about what you've been doing, and why.

Ultimately BioShock gives me everything I want from a game. I want to explore an interesting and unexpected world, which rewards my curiosity and which makes sense logically. I want my intelligence to be respected, my emotions to be provoked, and my sense of adventure to be piqued. I want to feel, when the game is over, like I did something that mattered. BioShock mattered.

More on BioShock:

• Why I won't download the BioShock demo
• BioShock!
• BioShock gameplay tidbits

Games of the decade: Portal

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Portal

(2007, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC)

The Orange Box was a whole lotta game, including as it did a brand-new Half-Life 2 episode, the long-awaited Team Fortress 2, and complimentary copies of Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2 Episode One, but it was the quirky puzzler/platformer/dystopian-nightmare Portal that made the biggest impact. I was tempted just now to describe Portal as something nobody saw coming, but it's not really true. It looked spectacular in previews, and I'm probably not the only person who fired it up first after putting the disc in the drive.

Still, I don't think anybody expected just how good this game would end up being. The possibilities of teleporting all over the place with a portal gun was sufficient to stoke my interest, and on this count Portal is plenty successful. Most puzzles can be solved with the same basic trick, in which you build up your momentum by falling from floor to ceiling a couple of times in one smooth motion, but there are plenty of surprises. One segment in particular, where you bounce up and down between floating platforms, opening a new portal at each successively higher one, was the closest I've come to getting motion sick from a game. That's intended as high praise.

The deft storytelling was something I don't think anybody anticipated, particularly via the hilarious and menacing dialogue of your robotic overseer, GLaDOS. So much ink has been spilled in praise of the writing team that I almost hesitate to add to it, but let's be honest here: this is genius-level stuff. For awhile you might not even pay much attention to what GLaDOS is saying, between her boring instructions and your sterile environment. When she starts slipping subtle threats and sarcastic asides into her speeches, you may wonder if you've heard her right. By the time you encounter the weighted companion cube, you start to realize what you're dealing with. No doubt Portal would have been fun even without the story, but would anybody still be talking about it today?

Portal is important for another reason, which is that it proves that a game doesn't have to be 40 hours long to be complete and satisfying. It takes no more than 3-4 hours to beat it, and probably less if you're good at it. Yet it's hard to imagine how it could possibly have been improved. This was a triumph, indeed.

More on Portal:

• A New Taxonomy of Gamers: Case Study: The Orange Box
• Prey

Games of the decade: Fallout 3

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Fallout 3

(2008, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC)

I tried so hard to be a curmudgeon and hate Fallout 3. Western RPGs have been my downfall for so long (and continue to be). Fallout 3 seemed like any other. Lots of choices about character builds that seemed to matter greatly, and even more choices about character appearance that didn't matter at all. A severely limiting inventory. Quests objectives that are, at times, downright stupid. The notion of guzzling irradiated water in order to help an NPC with her book was almost enough to get me to quit playing after the first couple of hours.

Why did I stick with it? I wasn't reviewing the game. Nobody was forcing me to play it. I could have stopped whenever I wanted. I kept playing, in those early hours, for the setting. A post-apocalyptic wasteland seems like such an unimaginative setting for a video game that you might forget how stunning it can be when it's done well. And it may never have been done better than in Fallout 3.

The moment when you step out of Vault 101 for the first time is one without compare. The screen turns blinding white for a second, to show the effect of natural light hitting your eyes for the very first time. Shapes and colors come into focus, and on the horizon you see the devastated ruins of Washington, D.C. It is a perfect moment. And though you'll never have that sense of wonder again, the map is constructed so that, at all times, you can see at least one other point of interest, and usually more. Resisting the allure of so many historic buildings and sites is impossible.

Even better, the stories within these buildings almost all stand on their own. While the main quest line is interesting enough, the subquests and side stories are the most compelling part of the game. Some of them are silly -- I still cannot get over having to steal the Declaration of Independence for a robot wearing a powdered wig. Some are strangely affecting, like "Agatha's Song," and some are terrifying, especially the trips into the other Vaults. None affect the central thrust of the storyline, and yet, without them, the main storyline wouldn't matter so much. Lots of games tell you that you're saving the world. Fallout 3 is the one that truly gives you a world to save.

More on Fallout 3:

• Anchorage aweigh
• O my soul
• The big picture
• Falling in and out of love, part 2
• Falling in and out of love, part 1
• How I learned to stop worrying and love Fallout

Games of the decade: Half-Life 2

Part of a series of objective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Half-Life 2

(2004, PC; 2005, Xbox)

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

(2006, PC and Xbox)

Half-Life 2: Episode 2

(2007, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC)

Half-Life 2 may have saved my life.

In 2004, my 1999-vintage PC was starting to show its age. I'd gotten a beastly Alienware machine as a high school graduation gift, which had served me well for most of its lifespan, but it wasn't up to the task of running two new games I desperately wanted to play, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. Unfortunately, I was dead broke. And even as the word on Doom 3 was less than stellar, by all accounts Half-Life 2 was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of a game. Still I put it off.

By winter of 2005, things had gone from bad to worse. My computer was infected with malware and viruses, and had become all but unusable. I needed a new one, but my budget was tight. I couldn't buy a new one. I couldn't even pay it off in installments without cutting something from my monthly expenses. After I ran the numbers, there was only one conclusion: I would have to quit smoking.

I finished the pack of cigarettes I was on, and ordered the computer. Somehow, seeing the cost in such stark terms made it -- well, not easy to quit, but not that hard, either. And by summertime, when I saw Half-Life 2 on the shelf at Target and remembered how important it had been to play it, I could even afford that, too.

And, as you know, it is so good. The original is still a masterpiece of self-contained B-movie storytelling, but the sequel broke ground with its more ambitious and ambiguous narrative. Gordon Freeman has gone from a plucky survivor to an unlikely messiah figure, and the threat has shifted from icky creatures to a totalitarian occupying force. Half-Life 2 is creepy, both in ways that make your skin crawl, and in ways that poke at your conscience.

It is also, at its most basic level, one of the most deftly engineered action games ever made. The optional commentary tracks on the later Half-Life 2 episodes are illuminating, and dispel any notion I may have had that the team at Valve had somehow lucked into the quality of their games. No other developer is better at tricking you into doing exactly what they want, while making you think that you're the one at the wheel. Half-Life 2 is chases, shootouts, and everything else exciting you could want from a game, all performed at the highest level.

In subsequent chapters, Valve has added new twists without taking away from what made the first game so great. The culmination of Episode Two, a massive battle sequence against the beastly striders that makes heavy use of both driving and the gravity gun, may be the series' high point. I expect even better from Episode Three.

So thanks, Half-Life 2. This January will mark five years since I stopped smoking. When I'm not dying of lung cancer at age 60, I'll play this game, and I still won't be able to breathe.

More on Half-Life 2:

A New Taxonomy of Gamers: Case Study: The Orange Box
Half-Life 2: Episode 1
Half-Life 2: Episode 1 user stats

Games of the decade: Borderlands

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Borderlands
(2009, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC)

On the long list of reasons why I don't play World of Warcraft, near the top are these two:

• The gameplay does not look interesting
• I am afraid it would consume my life

Borderlands takes the WoW formula and couches it in a more comfortable first-person shooting framework, and, yes, it has consumed my life. Gearbox's FPS bona fides are in order. Borderlands plays much like Halo, with the same floaty jumping physics, a rechargeable shield like Master Chief's, and even a Warthog-like vehicle. But it's also an uncommonly accessible RPG, with character progression that doesn't require a Ph.D to figure out, yet is robust enough to allow for an endless variety of builds.

It's worth mentioning the importance of cooperative play. This is obviously a personal preference, but competition for competition's sake isn't enough to keep me interested in a game. I'd rather have a tangible goal beyond winning, and I'd rather be playing with friends than sparring with douchebags. Borderlands is terrific for this kind of play. It's very long, there's tons of loot to find, and the different ways in which character classes can interact is always surprising. With the right class mods, you can have a party whose health and ammo are constantly regenerating, whose action skills cool down almost immediately, and who rain destruction on Pandora like the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

I'd almost always rather have a game with a good story, but in this case I think it would just get in the way. In fact, I barely knew Borderlands had a story until the very end, when I realized I'd been handing pieces of a key to somebody. I knew I was trying to open a vault, but the actual objectives had gotten lost amid all the grinding and looting. That's just right for a game like this. Stories have to end. Borderlands doesn't.

More on Borderlands:

• No rest for the wicked awesome
• Your level best
• Aquaman, you go... talk to some fish!

Games of the decade: Far Cry 2

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Far Cry 2
(2008, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC)

I thought a lot about Far Cry 2 while I was playing through the Modern Warfare 2 campaign. Their approaches couldn't be any more different. MW2 leads you like a dog on a choke chain, viciously correcting you every time you stray off the pre-designated path. Far Cry 2 lets you wander and explore, and take time to plan your next move. It's slow-paced, almost meditative at times. Yet compared to the overstuffed plot and sloganeering of MW2, Far Cry 2 is the game that truly leaves you thinking that war is hell.

The dynamic approach means that Far Cry 2 is brimming with indelible moments that will happen to you and only to you, and which resulted in many players sharing their war stories as though they were real memories. I lost track of how many times I thought I'd planned the perfect assault, spending ten minutes or more skulking through the tall grass like a lion, marking all the enemy emplacements on my map, only to see it all go to hell once the first shot was fired.

Things in happen in Far Cry 2 that you can never account for. Weapons jam and misfire. The winds change, spreading fire back toward you instead of toward your foes. Enemies happen upon your rear flank by chance. Things can go disastrously wrong, or gloriously right. Though all these factors play into how the game develops, ultimately it's you, the player, who authors the experience. You don't have to do things in a prescribed way.

We all have our war stories. My favorite is a very simple one. I was on a mission at a train depot to destroy a tanker full of fuel. The depot itself was bustling with enemy activities, but I'd found my way to a ridge overlooking the place, right on the edge of the woods. From my perch there was a straight shot to the tanker. Perfect chance for a hit and run. I steadied my rocket launcher. Once I fired, I planned not even to stick around for the fireworks. I would disappear into the woods as quietly as I'd arrived.

It would have been a great idea if the weapon hadn't misfired. When I pulled the trigger, the rocket flopped onto the grass in front of me, smoking and hissing. I don't know what attracted more attention, the explosion or my hasty retreat down the side of the mountain. What had started as a surgical strike suddenly became a Black Hawk Down-style shootout. But I still had another rocket and some of the enemies, incredibly, were still hanging out next to the tanker. The explosion rocked them sky high, and when it was over, there was only silence.

More on Far Cry 2:

• Cry, cry again
• Gamestop.com User-Submitted Previews: Far Cry 2

Grateful dead

Above: Malls of fury.

My review of Left 4 Dead 2 is up now at thephoenix.com. This is a terrific game, although it's not all on an even keel like the first one was. There are things that are absolutely brilliant, and some things that are kind of frustrating. What was great about the original was how simple it was, almost arcade-like: run from here to here, and shoot this, this, and this along the way. Left 4 Dead 2 adds a lot of wrinkles, many of which are spectacular, but which also take away from the elegance that made the first one so great.

For example, it's pretty cool that now you can choose different types of health items. A medpack lets you heal yourself or an ailing teammate, as before, but you can also choose to carry a defibrillator instead, which will revive a fallen teammate. That adds a layer of strategy that was missing before, but it also means that there will be plenty of times when you're carrying one thing and really need the other. The same goes for the temporary-boost items, adrenaline and pills. Adrenaline can be insanely useful in the right situation, such as when you need to retrieve an item, although the right situation rarely occurs.

And, as I say in the review, the more robust mission objectives are a double-edged sword (or a cricket bat, if you like). As soon as you're doing something besides running, you start wondering why you're doing these things, and most often the answer is nothing more than Valve saying, like an exasperated parent, "Because!" The Dead Center finale is the most egregious example, but even most of the Dark Carnival gives me this impression. On the other hand, Hard Rain is such a great idea that is so well executed, it's worth playing the game for that campaign alone.

Although the voice cast is just fine here, especially Cutty from The Wire,* I really miss Louis. We found ourselves saying things like "Pills here!" in Louis's voice, just so he would know he was loved. Honestly, I also miss the easier difficulty of the first game. Maybe our group is just terrible (okay, I know we are), but it feels to me like easy in the sequel is about equal to normal difficulty in the original, which was plenty hard for me. And this time they've stacked even more levels of difficulty, culminating in realism mode, which I will admit right now I did not attempt.

The Joystiq crew has caught some flak for their review of the game, which focused on nothing but the difficulty, but it's a perfectly valid point. I can't take more than about three resets per chapter before I'm done with the campaign, let alone five or more. The AI director this time is vicious about throwing the special infected at you, and never seems to adjust even if you're struggling. That's not the worst thing in the world, since the actual intelligence director can just switch things down to easy if you have no shame, which I don't. So while I'd take the first game over this one if forced to choose, it wasn't hard to make Left 4 Dead 2 more like the game I wanted it to be, and that game was pretty awesome.

*Be honest here: You would play a Left 4 Dead mod set in Baltimore, with the voice talents of Michael K. Williams, Wendell Pierce, Dominic West, and Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, wouldn't you?

A well past due Modern Warfare 2 review

Above: Much rushin'.

My review of Modern Warfare 2 is up now at thephoenix.com. After playing long enough not to totally embarrass myself in multiplayer (harder to do than you'd realize), I settled in on liking it, but not loving it. The multiplayer is fully featured and robust, if the single-player is much less effective than that of Call of Duty 4. So it's good, not great.

I find myself asking the same question I always ask when a game is this commercially successful: Why this game? Why Modern Warfare 2 and not, say, Killzone 2? I'd put those games about on par in terms of quality. They both have splashy, unsatisfying campaigns, and deep multiplayer modes with tons of character progression and unlocks (excessively so, in the latter case). Yet Killzone is already forgotten, while MW2 is the biggest entertainment launch of all time. It's strange.

That said, it's certainly not a negative review, and I'm glad to have had a chance to play the game. I hope that Infinity Ward shows a little more restraint the next time out as far as the campaign goes, but they have a solid multiplayer foundation that's obviously working for a lot of people. What can you do but tip your cap to them?

Draggin' age

Above: The author, after the game wiped out an hour of progress because he hadn't saved.

At long last, now that I've lost any interest in talking about it further, my review of Dragon Age: Origins is up at thephoenix.com.

I am pretty happy with the way this one came out. It is no fun to feel like the person on the outside, when everybody else seems to be loving a game that you just don't get. Fortunately, thanks in large part to your comments, I felt like I did come to a pretty decent understanding of the whole thing before I had to write about it. Even if that wasn't enough to change my opinion, it did help me to state it more clearly (and Krystian Majewski's Mass Effect essay was a big help, too). Dragon Age is such a big game that it's impossible to cover everything in 600 words and still make a point, but I feel like this one came close.

We are still in the thick of things, reviews-wise. All the whinging about Holiday 2009 delays is laughable in hindsight. This fall has turned out to be stacked. I feel pretty confident that I've already played my game of the year, but with Left 4 Dead 2, Assassin's Creed 2, and New Super Mario Brothers Wii all theoretically on the docket, that could change in a heartbeat. Now if only anybody would send me any of these games...

No rest for the wicked awesome

My review of Borderlands is up now at thephoenix.com. As you've ascertained by now, I really liked this game. I can't seem to stop playing it. I have vague memories of grumbling my way through the first few hours, making mental notes of everything to complain about. Not that there's nothing to complain about -- is that ever the case? But this game gives so much and asks so little in return that it'd feel tacky to run down a list of problems.

Actually, here's one major complaint: I haven't reached level 50 yet. Damn you, Gearbox!

Monkey business

Above: Guybrush drinks in the beauty of Flotsam Island.

My review of Tales of Monkey Island episode 1 is up now at thephoenix.com. There's a brief mention of the voice acting, although not to the degree that I talked about it yesterday. Instead, I spend more time in the review talking about what works in this game, because on the whole it's a pretty entertaining way to spend a few hours.

Still, it feels pretty insubstantial on its own, and depending on your play style it may be worth waiting for the entire series so you can play through all at once. That was the case I found with the Sam and Max revival, anyway. But there I go scooping myself again. It's all in the review!

Friday afternoon tidbits

Let's hit the links before the weekend.

-At Gamasutra, Ian Fisch details 10 game design pitfalls. It seems to me that almost everything he lists comes down to the same lesson: playtesting, playtesting, playtesting. I was also interested in pitfall number 8, "Entering production without something fun." Consider how much fun it is to jump from building to building in Crackdown, or how Horde mode was the way to play Gears 2. If a game doesn't absolutely nail one core mechanic, it doesn't matter what else the developers add to it.

-So, not a day after I do a faceplant trying to tell the world that PC gaming is broken, I see that Electronic Arts thinks the PC is the biggest platform of all, thanks to digital distribution. The lesson, as always: I'm an idiot. Let's just move on.

-Speaking of which, if you want to read somebody who knows what he's talking about, Ed Borden explains why digital convergence is a myth. His core observation: we thought that PCs would take on the functionality of the rest of our consumer electronics, but instead, the rest of our consumer electronics have taken on the functionality of our PCs. And that might be the worst possible news for Microsoft.

-I don't have anything to add to reports of 3D Realms' closure, but it strikes me as huge news all the same. Somehow, that this would be the final word written on Duke Nukem Forever -- that it would go out not with a bang, but a whimper -- is more tragic and more appropriate than any ending I could have imagined. I'd been prepared for anything from a monumental success to a Daikatana-level catastrophe. But I still thought they'd eventually release something. As is usually the case, if you want the smartest take on an important story, read what Jeremy Parish has to say.

-Ben Fritz leaves the Cut Scene for the Los Angeles Times. He'll continue to do great work no matter what he covers, but I hope they're planning to put him on the games beat at least part time.

-Still trying to summon outrage about major league baseball players using performance enhancing drugs. Frankly, there's no one who would surprise me at this point. And if everyone's doing it, then it's a level playing field. This is the world we live in.