Gamestop.com User-Submitted Previews: Devil May Cry 4

The holiday rush is nearly over now, but the new year will bring a whole new slate of exciting games. One of the games I'm most excited about this winter is Devil May Cry 4. Judging by the pre-release response at Gamestop.com, I'm not alone:

I hope this Devil May Cry is better than the others because i almost beat Devilmaycry2 so i hope that i can beat this one too and nero looks so cool and the graphics looks cool and so does Danta also

Maybe if this one is worse, he'll actually be able to beat it.

And what would a game discussion be without bizarre expressions of fealty to a single platform?

I say so what if this game went to the 360! Let it and lets show our new dmc brethren that we can master this game way faster than them! So any time they wanna think they are better just laugh and think how we've had the series for over 7 years and they haven't so it will still be our game!

I wonder how to break it to this guy that some Xbox 360 owners also had PS2s. Would it be like telling him Santa Claus isn't real?

I think this game is going to be one of the actually good PS3 games. But one thing that makes me wonder is that why some people think Vergil is coming back. If you remember that in DMC 3, setting was before DMC 1. And in DMC 1 Vergil was controlled by Mundus and went by the name Nelo Angelo. The one guy you have to fight like 3 times. Then he exploded leaving his half of the amulet. So he is probably dead.

Actually, the injury report given to the media lists Vergil as "Probable (explosion)." He's a gladiator, that one. And deceptively quick!

I like this next one because it starts on such a high note before dive-bombing into self-pity.

devil may cry kiks so much ass that it should be made into a movie oh wait i think that they are in japan....i think...anyway devil may cry 1 and 3 are the best games ive played my entire life 2 eh not so much i mean heck yea the moves guns swords and graphics are awsome but it laked that punk-asss-i aughta bitch slap you -rocker-cool attitude of dante but other than that its awsome.now for devil may cry 4 when i heard that it was coming out i pissed in my pants of exitment (not really) but when i heard that its only gonna be for the ps3 my exitment whent down cuz i only have the ps2 and no i dont have any money to buy a ps3 or a 360 so im screwd but still DEVIL MAY CRY FAN FOREVER!!!!!!!!!/\_/\

It's a good thing he slipped that disclaimer in there. I really thought he peed himself! Made me want to call him a homo over Xbox Live. But he didn't, so it's cool.

this game is so hot .I saw the new trailer and it was killa man i hope this not going to be short like cod4 .this is probably going to be the game of the month.

That's a pretty bold statement to make in a month when Pimp My Ride and History Channel: Battle for the Pacific come out.

Faint praise?

You may get that impression from my review of Super Mario Galaxy. But anything would sound that way when you're talking about the second-highest rated video game of all time. It's good. Very good. Maybe great. But it's not even the best 3D platformer to come out this year. That honor goes to a certain Lombax and his robot pal.

Recommended reading

Several smarty-pants writers have convened over at Slate to have a highbrow discussion about the year in games. N'Gai Croal, Stephen Totilo, Chris Suellentrop, and Seth Schiesel are participating in the inaugural year-end "Gaming Club," and if you've been looking for some deeper criticism than where a game plots along the graphics-sound-control axes, it's the place to be. It also provides Totilo another venue in which to advocate for Desktop Tower Defense.

On the Totilo front, I have only recently begun to read the MTV Multiplayer blog, and I like it a lot. It's a group blog that follows the Kotaku/Joystiq/Destructoid formula, but -- how to put this -- is interesting to read. They're currently running a series about women in games that I highly recommend.

One of the dark secrets of the game playing community is the way the prototypical male player really does seem to jealously guard his hobby. It's not exactly a "no girls allowed" club, but any woman in the industry, from Jade Raymond back to Killcreek, is always judged as much by her looks as what she produces. Most men don't have to deal with this. When Jack Tretton says something idiotic about the PS3, the reaction may be rude and crude, but the criticism is aimed squarely at the content of his comments -- not his hair, fashion choices, or inherent frailty. (Cliff Bleszinski is the exception that hilariously proves the rule.)

As always, the solution isn't to preach or moralize, but to provide a dialogue just as MTV Multiplayer is doing. Good stuff.

Like nothing you've ever seen before

You could make a decent argument for the PlayStation 3 at this point. There's a handful of good games in the library, including Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, and Resistance (even MotorStorm is a better bet since they actually, you know, finished it). $399 is a reasonable enough price considering you also get the Blu Ray player and a free copy of Spider-Man 3. The Xbox 360 is still probably the best choice for most people, but it's no longer a no-brainer (plus, as great as Xbox Live is, not having to pay $50 a year for online play is nice, too).

Not sure how to feel about Sony's latest commercial, though. The current ad campaign has been doing a good job of showcasing the PS3's games, and nothing but the games. Last night I saw one that featured such highly available titles as Burnout Paradise and Metal Gear Solid 4. No, it's not dishonest to advertise a system on the basis of what will eventually be available. But overpromising and underdelivering has been Sony's M.O. with this system since it was announced, and every time you think they've learned their lesson they prove you wrong. Why not focus on what's available now? There's something I want to tell them. Something about birds, hands, and bushes. Can't quite recall it just this second.

In good company

Here's a silly end-of-the-week post. Game|Life ran a bunch of gaming blogs through a readibility tool and posted the results. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most scored at the "junior high level," meaning you need at least a junior high education to understand them. Both Ars Technica and N'Gai Croal's Level Up scored "genius," which must make them feel good.

Insult Swordfighting scored at the "college" level, equal to powerhouse blog Joystiq. I guess I'll take it, even if I haven't blogrolled them yet.

Sometimes it is that simple

Gamasutra is running an excerpt from the book Inside Game Design that features an interview with Guitar Hero dev Rob Kay. There's a lot of interesting stuff there for people who want to know how games are made, but I thought the most interesting part was this almost throwaway bit about Guitar Hero's appeal:

It was pretty fun; the controller really was the kind of magic sauce for what we wanted to do. It's very difficult to make games attractive and accessible, and I'm sure that 90% of what draws people into Guitar Hero is that plastic guitar. They instantly say, "I get it! I pretend to be a guitarist!"

Obviously this is much like what Nintendo was getting at with the Wii, but it can be easy to forget that when non-gamers look at somebody playing a game, they don't see those virtual worlds we get lost in, or the infinite calculations passed back and forth between our brains and the system's. They see some guy holding a remote control and staring into space.

N'Gai speak

You listen.

Since the Gerstmann thing broke, I've been waiting for Mr. Croal to weigh in, as he is so often the most measured and reasonable voice on these matters. Alas, he had seemed to turn his attention to more empirical matters like the Activision-Vivendi merger, which is part of what makes him a real journalist. It is why I respect and fear him in equal measure. But now he does have something to say about the relationship between publicists and media, and as usual it's a doozy.

Another Orange Box review

My review of The Orange Box has been posted on Paste's website. Not that I imagine anybody's still on the fence about this one, but you need to play it.

They've also posted their best of 2007 list, which I contributed to before I'd had a chance to play at least three worthy entries. As a result, I submitted a couple of ports that probably shouldn't have been eligible (Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition and Guitar Hero II, specifically), and padded the bottom of the list with the good-but-not-best-of-the-year-good Super Paper Mario. My final year-end list, which I think I'll be compiling soon, will look a bit different.

Now let's never speak of it again

The Mass Effect review is up. One point of clarification: It does read a bit like I'm criticizing the game based on what the previews said it would be, which is neither terribly fair nor my intention. Rather, the point is that every game has to cut stuff out in order to ship, but it's not usually so obvious.

You stay classy, Eidos

On the heels of the Gamespot controversy, now comes word that Eidos is fabricating review quotes in ads for Kane and Lynch. Actually, fabricating is the wrong word. I'm not sure I have a problem with publishers excerpting preview copy in their ads. Those quotes are barely taken out of context, even if they are talking about an early build of the game. If this practice bothers game critics, perhaps the solution is to stop publishing such fawning previews.

What does bother me is the company slapping fake ratings on there. I can't see any justification for that. But you know, for all the sturm und drang in Blogistan about conflicts of interest in game publications, the same thing happens in Hollywood. Even Earl Dittman hasn't killed the movie industry.

They grow up so fast

Hard to believe it's been a year to the day since I acquired a Wii.

Harder still to believe that they're still going for twice market value on eBay.

Define irony:

Dave Jaffe, lead designer of God of War, bitching about the difficulty of an action-adventure game.

People believe what they want to believe

Since it's "late to the party" day here at Insult Swordfighting, I may as well mention the Jeff Gerstmann/Gamespot/Eidos flap. Briefly, Gerstmann was let go from Gamespot after something like a decade of service, and sources within the company are saying it's because he panned Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, a game that was heavily advertised on the site.

The problem with a controversy like this is that people already believe what they want to believe, and everyone's going to say what they're supposed to say. Unnamed sources will swear up and down that Gerstmann was sacrificed on the altar of ad revenue. And they have. Executives at C-net (Gamespot's parent company) will say that he was fired for reasons unrelated to his Kane and Lynch review. And they have. People who already thought enthusiast publications were corrupt will claim vindication. And they have. I don't know if it's worth discussing until somebody who is willing to be named steps forward with actual information. Otherwise, it's just rumors and speculation. And even if Gerstmann himself comes out and says he was fired to please Eidos, he'd hardly be an objective source.

I will say this: Gerstmann did not pan the game. He gave it a 6.0, which his own site defines as "fair." And if the issue is his tone, as some have suggested, then it's certainly not evident in the review itself. It reads as objective and fair, criticizing what doesn't work and praising what does. It's hard to imagine what else Gerstmann was supposed to do. I'm not a habitual reader of Gamespot, so I can't say anything about the rest of his body of work.

The accusations being levied at C-net are powerful ones, and that means that we have a responsibility to make sure we have proof before accepting them as fact. If they are true, it's a chilling indictment of Gamespot, particularly considering that it has a reputation for being tougher than many sites. I'm not sure how many people count on the big sites for game recommendations in the age of blogs and message boards, truthfully. Probably fewer people today than yesterday.

Rock Band impressions

Better late than never, I suppose...

We put a few hours into Rock Band last night and I came away feeling that it had met my lofty expectations -- although, strangely, I was not as awesome at playing the drums as I had been in my dreams the night before. It's that damn kick drum: either I hit it every time I hit one of the pads, or I forgot about it all together. Hitting the correct pads with the sticks is not too difficult to pick up. (What's a good synonym for "hit" in this case, anyway?) I can imagine the drums being more rewarding to master than the guitar parts, because it's more of a transferable skill. You will have to develop a sense of rhythm to play them well, and play them using much the same mechanics as playing real drums. I want to do a lot more of this.

Playing the guitar required a bit of an adjustment, thanks to the new peripheral itself, and the different design of the note charts. The biggest challenge for me was the lack of any space between the fret buttons. I usually use those to orient myself when shifting my hand position up or down the neck. The strum bar is much different, as well: without the obtrusive "click" of the Guitar Hero strum bar, I found it hard to tell if I was doing it right. It was a bit like driving an unfamiliar car: you need to orient yourself to the little things, but you're not in danger of veering off the road. And there's no question that the Stratocaster design is the most aesthetically pleasing of all the plastic toy guitars.

Singing was the most problematic aspect, and here's why: it was the place where it was the hardest to lose myself in the rock fantasy. When you play the guitar in Guitar Hero or Rock Band, your input doesn't result in something that sounds like the guitar part -- it is the guitar part. The drums are a bit worse in this respect, because even though you hear the correct drum sounds on the soundtrack, you also hear the click-clack of your sticks hitting the pads. While singing, I was aware only of the limitations of my own voice. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy it, or that I didn't throw myself into it (particularly the optional yelling parts). Just that of everything I did in Rock Band, singing was when I felt the least like I was rocking thousands of worlds in a packed arena, and felt the most like I was in my friend's living room playing make-believe. Still better than any other karaoke game I've played, by far.

Better than a certain other recent guitar game, too.

Note to reviewers: It's broke. Please fix it.

Apologies if this stuff is only entertaining to me, although I'm starting to suspect that it's also amusing to the Metacritic editors. I was poking around for more examples of GameTrailers.com's grammatical pratfalls -- and they are legion -- when I encountered the best example yet of lazy clichés multiplying like Tribbles. The game is Guitar Hero III.

GameTrailers.com gives it an 85, and writes:

Guitar Hero III abides to the "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" approach by sticking to the tried-and-true formula established in the first game and honed in the second.

In the very next excerpt, also an 85, Electronic Gaming Monthly writes:

The "ain’t broke, don’t fix" approach is evident.

As is the "short deadline, tired critic" approach.

Not to rip off Magical Wasteland or anything

I was just reading the Metacritic page for Assassin's Creed and came across this gem from GameTrailers.com, which was also flagged a couple weeks ago by Magical Wasteland:

The first half of Assassin’s Creed is a truly clairvoyant experience. You’ve never played anything like it. The sagacious story, incalculable crowd interaction, and unprecedented freedom to traverse the environment how you choose are landmark moments. Over time, repetition rears its ugly head, combat becomes a necessary routine, and dimwitted foes snatch you out of the third crusade and remind you that you’re playing a game. The potential here is undeniable, but there’s been some dust swept under the rug that places a blemish on an otherwise beautiful piece of art.

I cannot even fathom what the author meant by calling it a "clairvoyant experience." Perhaps Assassin's Creed was reading his mind -- sort of a modern Taboo: The Sixth Sense. Also, "sagacious story?" "Incalculable crowd interaction?" I do not think these words mean what the author thinks they mean.

On the cliché tip, check out these consecutive sentences: "A confrontation ensues and Altair ends up on the short end of the stick. Returning to his master with his tail between his legs..."

No wonder there's no byline.

Big Tools 4 U

The Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction review is up now. It's just what the PlayStation 3 needed: a fun, breezy game with colorful visuals and plenty of jokes, and few attempts to be groundbreaking. Great controls, too. Just an awesome game.

The culprit

A site called Magical Wasteland takes a look at Mass Effect and determines that most of its problems probably stem from a hard ship date -- meaning that the game wasn't necessarily done, but BioWare was committed to a November 20 release. It's a fascinating, measured look at the compromises that often must be made in order to put a product on the shelves (and of course the writer loved the game, despite the problems he elucidates). A few of the writer's observations:

There is no loot other than finding more weapons, and these automatically get better (in a completely linear progression: Assault Rifle I, Assault Rifle II, and so on) as you advance. Because they’re the only thing you can find, you’ll soon have piles of pistols and shotguns, which you can sell for cash to buy– what? The only thing you can buy is more weapons.

Not to mention that you can only carry a limited number of these items, but the game doesn't tell you that. Nor does it tell you how close you are to the limit. So all you can do is sell them, or melt them down into omni-gel.

One of the first things noticeable in Mass Effect is the tremendous amount of texture-popping that goes on as the player enters new areas. Occasionally, even just running from place to place results in a loading message appearing while the disc spins wildly inside. It’s clear that the popping wasn’t something the artists knew in advance to work around, since there are often shots in cutscenes that don’t even last as long as it takes for the texture to pop in: by the time the texture has actually loaded, the camera isn’t even on the object any longer.

This last part really bothered me, even though in theory it's the sort of thing that shouldn't matter. Quite often, a camera angle will shift during a conversation or cutscene and a character will be smooth and featureless, and then suddenly his face will "pop" onto his head. For a game that is so largely driven by conversation and story elements, this is distracting. Like so much of what happens in Mass Effect, it's like a developer shouting at you, "Hey! Don't forget you're just playing a game!"

Playing normally, I got stuck on geometry several times, with no way out but to reload an earlier save. I flipped my supposedly un-flippable Mako vehicle. A step that I had not yet taken was registered as completed in my quest log. None of these bugs severely impacted my ability to enjoy the game, but they do affect the "fit and finish" of the final product.

And here, again, is where I seem to depart from most other people who've played Mass Effect. These things do affect my ability to enjoy the game. I want to get lost in the game. I want to forget I'm even holding a controller. Mass Effect does not allow for that possibility.

There's one other point that this article raises, as well. Given that Mass Effect wasn't even finished when it went gold, it casts some serious doubts on the early reviews. Game Informer magazine, in particular, ran an extremely early review that scored the game a 9.75 -- while still making excuses for patchy AI and a terrible interface.

My question is, what was Game Informer reviewing? The Mass Effect in front of them, or the Mass Effect they expected to arrive in stores months later? Were they willing to overlook certain problems to secure the exclusive? Were they willing to furnish a certain minimum score? Do I have any evidence for these assertions? Is that why I'm writing them in an annoying "could it be" style, allowing me to make inflammatory accusations without taking responsibility for them?

The answer to that question, at least, is yes.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here!

First, I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving.

Second, I have never felt more out of step with the public than I do with Mass Effect. The full review will be posted next week, but for now I want to make a couple of observations -- with the help, as always, of Metacritic.

Planet Xbox gave this game a 98, while noting:

Other than the AI issues, graphical glitches, and insanely confusing equipment screen Mass Effect is the perfect video game.

Oh, other than that. How often do you even have to contend with AI, graphics, or the equipment screen? Just, oh, every ten seconds or so. The perfect video game!

A site called Gamer 2.0, scoring Mass Effect a 92, has this caveat:

It may be difficult for some to overlook the new combat system, but once you get a grip on it, and look past the shoddy vehicular combat, you’ll find a game worthy purchasing.

So if you're willing to look past, er, a gigantic component of the game that is horribly and irretrievably broken, you'll find a game "worthy purchasing" [???]. And this excerpt doesn't even mention the menus!

Da Gameboyz [???] observe:

But in the end it really is the gameplay and story that counts here, and Bioware has wonderfully combined both in such a way that any of the minor complaints can be ignored.

The thing about minor complaints is that when there are so many things to complain about, as in Mass Effect, they stop seeming so minor. It's like death by paper cut. How can you enjoy the story when it's such a chore to get from plot point to plot point?

The excerpt from Hardcore Gamer Magazine most accurately captures my feelings, although again their review is largely positive (an 80):

As it is, it's merely very good on several different levels, and is more or less a must-play for RPG fans. It will drive shooter fans completely up the wall, though.

Up the wall and out through the ceiling.

Maybe it's time for some new clichés

Metacritic is an invaluable resource. Even if we agree that game scores are generally inflated, aggregate scores provide an accurate way to compare different games. A ten-point difference in a Metacritic score is definitive and often correct -- consider a score of 89 for Ratchet and Clank Future, and 79 for Heavenly Sword. Will anyone argue that those should be reversed?

There's just one problem. I don't know how painstakingly the Metacritic experts choose their excerpts for each game, but they tend to reflect horribly on game criticism in general. Here's the excerpt from Gametap's review of Ratchet and Clank Future:

It's rare that a game critic feels the way I do about this game, but in all honesty, I find it really difficult to find something that's not to like. The controls feel great. The graphics look great. The score sounds great. The weapon selection alone make me want to play the game over and over again, just to test out all the cool offered.

You've got the useless appeal to authority (Really? A game critic feels this way? Wow!), repetition of a fairly meaningless accolade, and, to top it all off, the grammatical abortion in the last clause. "Cool" is not now and has never been a noun. This stuff wouldn't pass muster in a high-school essay class. Maybe the full review is better; I didn't click through to see.

We're all guilty of employing clichés now and then. It can be unavoidable when you're on deadline. But it's rare that you see two reviewers employ the same cliché to make opposite points about the same game. It happened in the reviews for Uncharted. IGN's review, good for a Metacritic score of 91, declares that "The final sum is far greater than the individual parts." But EGM, doling out a pitiful 85, ruefully admits that "Everything's fun and exhilarating, but it never builds to more than the sum of its parts."

Hilarious, yes, but it speaks to the utility of the site that even such disagreements still contribute to the conclusion that Uncharted is a pretty good game. That's what I like about Metacritic: it's the sum of its parts.

Still interested in BlackSite

Wired's Clive Thompson takes a brief look at BlackSite: Area 51. I've been interested in the game for awhile, but it's going to be drowned out by the season's heavy hitters. It's too bad -- I'd like to support the team that made it. There really should be more games that are politically aware, even if the allusions are as blunt as Thompson makes them sound. But games have to be fun, too, and on that score it doesn't sound like BlackSite fares too well.

The soapbox

I sure hated Manhunt 2. This is the rare review where I feel like it actually says what I meant it to say, and have nothing else to add here.

I'd also recommend Ryan's feature article about Rock Band.

Uncharted demo impressions

Last week, Sony graced us with a demo for their upcoming PS3 action/adventure, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. This is the second of their two-pronged holiday attack, following the excellent Ratchet and Clank Future. Although it's necessary to withhold judgment until the full game is out, it seems unlikely that Uncharted is going to live up to its end of the bargain. The short demo certainly isn't bad, but its flaws could be fatal over several hours of play.

What should be one of the game's greatest strengths actually makes it creepy to behold. Half the time, it's a marvel to watch Nathan Drake scramble over fallen logs, leap gracelessly from one pillar to another, and slam up against a wall like a sack of potatoes. The developers have opted to make him a rough-and-tumble hero from the Indiana Jones mold, and it works especially well when he fights -- instead of the same identical, telegenic punches, Nathan throws off-balance haymakers and throws his weight into vicious tackles. I can't think of another video-game hero who behaves quite this way.

But there's also something a little unsettling about it. The lifelike animation places the characters deep in the uncanny valley. While playing Ratchet and Clank Future, one of the most visually appealing games I've ever seen, it occurred to me that graphical horsepower is better used for the fantastic than the realistic (take a spin through the asteroid belt in R&C and try to tell me otherwise). If developers want a grittier aesthetic, there's still a way to render a world with verisimilitude without plunging into zombie territory. Gears of War is a good example of this. As fluid and convincing as this animation is, a computer can't render life in a character's eyes -- at least not yet.

As for the gameplay, Uncharted is a strange mix of the cover-shooting mechanic of Gears of War and the environmental swashbuckling of Tomb Raider. The demo showcases wide-open jungle environments with lush greenery overgrowing crumbling, ancient architecture. There are only a couple of scenarios, and each is the same: clear out some foes, climb and jump your way to the next area, repeat. But there are some indications that it could end up more fun than it seems. At one point, I rushed an enemy from his blind side and hit the melee button, fully expecting to throw a punch. Instead, Nathan leaped onto the guy and broke his neck. I like when a game can surprise me like that. A wide enough variety of attacks and animations could keep the game fresh throughout.

One other point: the island is just littered with exploding barrels. They're everywhere. I'm not going to pretend I don't enjoy wiping out a group of opponents with a well-placed exploding barrel shot, but it'd be nice if there were at least some half-assed attempt to explain their presence. Who brought them there? What are they for? I could buy that the mercenaries needed to bring demolition with them, but dozens of unwieldy barrels just strewn evenly around the jungle? It would make more sense, say, to have a truck loaded up with them. Or to have them grouped around the exterior of a cave. Not lying on their side on top of a low wall. That shit makes no sense!

Gamestop.com User-Submitted Previews: Mass Effect

I pre-ordered Mass Effect today, and I thought I'd check in with my fellow Gamestop customers to see what the buzz is.

I believe this game is going to revolutionize the rpg and maybe even gaming as we know it. What other game is melding shooters with rpgs.

Let's see... nope, no other game is doing that.

This game is gunna be sick. it is oblivion, but in space and with guns.

And BioShock was Oblivion, except underwater and with guns. Need for Speed ProStreet is Oblivion, except in modern cities and with cars.

this game looks really fun. in a weird way, it kinda looks like halo..shooting, adventure, KILLING..lol ya..killing is fun...but thats all u want from a shooter game, right? good graphics, kick butt online play, and cool player customization is all i need to have fun in a shooting game! so yeah...looks like alot of fun

Yep, kick-butt online play is all you need. If only Mass Effect had any!

I'm so excited for a game that really knocks my socks off this year as I was so sure that Jericho was gonna hold that mantle because I spent so much time obsessing, but apparently I was wrong. this one I've been careful about only to obsess on it a little. OMG i cant wait!!!

This guy is way off-base. Since it didn't work on Jericho, the solution to make Mass Effect great is obviously to obsess even harder.

This game is going to be awesome. It has Gears of War like combat along with a KOTOR style combat system where you can change at will.

I thought it was like Oblivion, except in space and with guns.

And like this

My high-school classmate Leigh Alexander has written a deconstruction of Portal over at GameSetWatch that does a nice job of exploring the role of player choice in the game. She also psychoanalyzes GLaDOS for good measure. It's a lucid and thoughtful piece, and if you don't fear spoilers you should check it out.

Predictably, the first couple of comments on the column are haughty and dismissive.

More like this

I've had The Escapist over there in my links for quite a while, but I'm not a habitual reader of the site. I think I like the idea of The Escapist more than I like the end product. The world desperately needs intelligent games criticism that doesn't focus on how good a game is, but what a game means. Usually, Escapist articles don't go far enough in pursuing an argument. They leave threads dangling.

That's not the case with "Slouching Toward Black Mesa" by Tom Rhodes, which attempts to contextualize the Half-Life series within the archetype of the hero story, and does so convincingly. Rhodes does a couple things well in this piece: he draws parallels between the game and Yeats's poem "The Second Coming," and he also examines the relevance of both to the modern world. It's sober and thoughtful stuff, showing great respect for Half-Life and for games as a medium. If gamers want to argue that games are art, then the way to convince skeptics isn't to nag at them -- it's to keep producing insightful criticism like this.

Call of Duty 4 -- who knew?

With several precincts reporting, Call of Duty 4's Metacritic score is a robust 95. More convincing still is Tom Chick's review, which praises CoD4's "engrossing, even astonishing single-player campaign," and calls it a "must-have game." I wrote this game off when it was announced, and haven't followed its development at all. Now it's just another on the long list of good holiday games that I'm missing in order to bring you reviews of dreck like Manhunt 2. (To be posted next week.)

Hardcasual: The Groundswell

That would be a great name for a fantasy fiction trilogy, wouldn't it?

Anyway, a post on Level Up today addresses something that's come up in this blog a few times: the incompatibility of the hardcore gaming experience with the time demands on your modern adult. Nintendo talks a lot about recapturing people who fell away from gaming. But there's another huge swath of us who never gave it up, who started playing games as young children and kept it going right through college. The games didn't leave us -- they didn't stop being fun, or become too complicated. It just turns out that when you work a full-time job and have a family, gaming in six-hour sessions becomes less appealing, not to mention impractical.

Often, I read complaints that a game is too short. This is a value consideration: if you spend $60 on a six-hour game, that's only $10/hour. If you spend $60 on a forty-hour game, that's a piddling $1.50/hour. Objectively, it's clear to see which is the better deal, especially if the gamer in question is, say, a college student with unlimited time and extremely limited funds. On the other hand, I'd think it's worth the extra money for the salaried professional whose time is at a premium. $60 isn't cheap, but it's not back-breaking either. And let's say that, realistically, you can only squeeze in an hour or so a night of game time. This six hour game now takes almost a week to complete -- or about as long as it used to take me to plow through a 40-hour game in college. Both of these straw men spent $60 on a game that they completed in a week, using most of their free time to do so. They come out even!

This isn't to say that there isn't a place for both types of games. But I would hope that publishers understand that there's a large, well-heeled segment of the market that actually does want short games, or games that can be played in bursts, without sacrificing complex gameplay or mature themes. If "hardcasual" is to be the term, then so be it. Just don't confuse lack of time with a lack of interest.

Uncharted: The reviews are in

I think I could spend the rest of my life reading the user-submitted previews at Gamestop.com and never get bored. Today, we're looking at some advance reactions to Uncharted: Drake's Fortune for the PlayStation 3. It sounds like a winner!

• 5 star game from what i seen. i seen all the videos made for this game from the playstation network, from how they made it to the gameplay and i got to say i like what i see nice graphic excellent storyline and great gameplay. i got to say this is a top notch game. In my opinion they should of somehow added some online play but hey the game is already perfect as it is.
• from the trailers ive seen it looks pretty damn good i just its not a disaster like heavenly sword which was about a 5 hour game and no weapons just a stupid sword uncharted has everything you can dropkick your enemies give them a a floy mayweather haymaker punch and to mention all the weapons the graphics look reaaly good
• Uncharted Drake's Fortune is a action sort of thing. On the Playstation 3 with its Blue-Ray drive it offers the best graphics yet. If you were in to action and adventure games I would recomend you get a PS3 ( if you dont have one yet ) and get this game. About the game, it is a very action pack thriller like James Bond. If I were you I would spend 5hours playing the game. But it doesn't come out till next month. I am asking E3 please don't dissapiont all of us.
• gotta be honest with ya, at first, i thought this game was gonna be gay!! but the more and more info im seeing is changing my mind, im actually getting kind of excited for it, it looks pretty sweet!!! so ill just see how it is when it comes out!!!
• This game is obviously very good, but microsoft will probably buy this game of sony like it did with all the other games. Face it the ps3 has no exclusives. This game will be Alot better on xbox the ps3 is a dreamcast with no chance of getting any excusives and this will be another xbox gain. Way better on xbox.

Guitar Hero III multiplayer impressions

We put some time into multiplayer Guitar Hero III last night, and as I'm not reviewing it for the paper I'll just share some thoughts here.

To put it simply: the game is a blast. My understanding is that Neversoft didn't get any of the code from Harmonix, and had to build their engine from the ground up. That makes it all the more impressive that they've delivered, on a short timetable, a game that plays just as well as its predecessors. I've heard some complaints that the hammer-on/pull-off mechanic is more forgiving this time around, and while I agree that it is, I don't agree that it's a problem. You already have real guitarists getting elitist about Guitar Hero; let's not have expert-level players getting elitist too.

The tracklist is as good as I'd hoped, with the usual amount of bad songs that are surprisingly fun to play and good songs that are surprisingly lame to play. I wasn't expecting to be thrilled by the bassline of "Reptilia," but there you go. Metallica's "One" was worth the price of admission. Our biggest complaint in playing through the co-op campaign was that the final encore is a song called "Monsters" by a band called Matchbook Romance. The guitar part was ordinary, the song was boring, and coming as it did on the heels of songs by Metallica, Iron Maiden, and Living Colour, it was almost a cruel joke.

The new "battle mode" was a disappointment, at least from the brief time we spent with it. The idea of power-ups doesn't bother me per se, but it seems antithetical to the idea of Guitar Hero that a game can end within about thirty seconds. Any competitive mode ought to encourage more rocking, not less. As it is, we found that whoever sprang the lefty flip on the other guy first tended to win. Not really my idea of a good time. Fortunately, it's optional except for a couple stages in the single-player mode. I am willing to believe that battle mode is more fun when you get good at it. Still can't imagine it's worth playing over co-op or pro face-off.

I'm not sure I'll end up buying Guitar Hero III, if only because I don't know how much time I can devote to it. Plus, I'm still fairly convinced that Rock Band will be better. But it is pretty great, and the highest praise I can give it is that my wrist is hella sore today. That's rock and roll!

The walls came tumblin' down

Really too bad about Jericho. It's an ordinary game, executed ineptly. Not much to recommend it. Clive Barker seems really excited about games in general, though, so maybe he should steer clear of Metacritic for awhile.

Guitar Hero III counterpoint

Bill Harris has a different take on the demo than I did.

Rock Band video!

Again I lament that I was not able to partake of the Rock Band excitement after watching the Phoenix's video recap of their day. How great does this game look?

Guitar Hero III demo impressions

I had been anticipating Guitar Hero III: Legend of Rock with some trepidation. Harmonix is staffed almost entirely by musicians, so they really nailed the first two Guitar Hero games. Without knowing much about Neversoft, my fear was that they'd have less of a feel for the subtleties -- that they wouldn't know if what they were making accurately simulated the sensation of rocking out. On the basis of the demo, I needn't have worried. If there is a difference in the control, it's not even as dramatic as the tweaks from the first game to the second. And playing a master track of "Even Flow" was about as great as I'd hoped.

There's no denying that Neversoft has sexed the game up quite a bit. I'm not concerned about character models or anything, because that's not what I'm looking at when I'm playing. The display functions the same, although with brighter colors and funkier fonts -- again, it doesn't affect the gameplay at all, so it's hard to feel strongly one way or another. The only thing I actually didn't like was the constant text notifications in the center of the screen. Getting a "Star power ready!" message is one thing. But seeing "50 note streak!" is just distracting, especially since it bounces around a bit before disappearing. I'm trying to look at something here, dudes.

You knew it was coming

It's the Orange Box review!

Rock Band interview

Due to some last-minute scheduling issues, I wasn't able to make it to Harmonix to play Rock Band. Ryan did go, however, and he interviewed Sean Baptiste about song selection, licensing, what the team learned from making Guitar Hero, and a lot more. My favorite part was what seemed to be a subtle dig at Neversoft and Guitar Hero III:

There are a lot of musicians working at Harmonix, how would you say that helps the game as an experience to gamers?
Given that the people here are in bands themselves and are musicians, their desire to show the authenticity of rock and to show how awesome it is to make music and how rock and roll it is – that’s first and foremost above the excess, sort of cartoony aspects of it, and that’s huge for them.

Read the whole thing.

Inevitably

Okami, my pick for 2006 game of the year, is coming to the Wii. This follows up the mind-blowing Resident Evil 4 adaptation that Capcom released earlier this year. I'd still like something new on the Wii, but it's not the worst thing if people want to keep improving on already great games.

Sony gets agro on pricing

The rumors were true: the 40 GB PlayStation 3 drops in America on November 2, for the low, low price of $399. This may just be cheap enough to convince people to start buying the damn thing. The Spider-Man 3 Blu-Ray pack-in is a nice touch, too. And with the 80 GB model dropping to $499 -- which still includes a fairly decent pack-in game -- Sony is very quickly putting themselves in a tenable market position. Remember, this all happens less than a year after the 60 GB model launched at $599. That's probably the fastest price drop in history.

The problem, of course, is the 40 GB model's lack of backwards compatibility. For all the bad will generated by the initial launch price and Sony's various PR pronouncements from Bizarro World, you'd have thought a simple price cut would turn gamers around right quick. Instead, they have to go and neuter a fairly important feature to the PlayStation brand. I won't go so far as to say that backwards compatibility is essential -- the Xbox 360 seems to have done just fine with its own, uh, unique interpretation of BC -- but it's a hell of a lot more important than, oh, SIXAXIS control.

Is it a dealbreaker? I don't think so. I think the price is the single biggest thing people have held against the PS3. Sometimes it's easy to forget that we hardcore gamers -- we who read and comment on gaming blogs, for example -- really don't represent the majority of consumers in this market. We are the most vocal and most visible, but your average holiday shopper just wants the shiny new thing. And now it may nearly be affordable.

Your very own Weighted Companion Cube (contains spoiler)

Folks who have played through Portal will be delighted to learn that a Weighted Companion Cube desktop toy will be available for the holidays. Sounds like the perfect stocking stuffer!*

*Provided you don't have to throw it in the incinerator.

In praise of the episodic model

Kotaku commenters are making much hay about Nintendo's proclamation that gamers were "bored" before the Wii came along. I don't know what Perrin Kaplan actually meant by her comment, but there's one way to interpret it that makes sense to me. When you settle in for a serious gaming session, which I'd define as more than an hour of continuous play, you do eventually reach a zone where it'd be hard to say that you are having fun in the traditional sense. Instead, it's about accomplishing the goals the game has set before you. What enjoyment you derive is from the satisfaction of victory, not so much the moment-to-moment action.

Consider some of the more robust single-player experiences of recent years, like Oblivion or the recent Zelda. Both contain long sequences where you're not actually doing anything. You're walking across a field, or engaging in a meaningless fight with a weak and inconsequential enemy on your way to doing something that will advance the story. Or take one particularly silly task in Final Fantasy XII, in which you have to run around sowing the seeds of revolt by proclaiming the resurrection of Captain Basch. Is this fun? It may be satisfying or addictive, but it's not fun in the way that Nintendo has defined the term. It seems that hardcore gamers are after something else entirely.

That doesn't necessarily mean that we're bored, either. In a recent post, I lamented that I can't devote as much time to games as I used to. I enjoy playing the Wii with my friends because it's something we can start and stop as the flow of the evening dictates. I can't do that with a more hardcore single-player game. The flow of the game dictates when and how I will play. (This is the reason why I've started Metal Gear Solid 3 three times in the past year and never gotten more than an hour into it.) It means, unfortunately, that when I do get to play something, it's more about plowing through to the end than enjoying the journey.

Enter Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Like the first two Half-Life games, as well as Episode One, it's a honed, focused action-adventure that represents the apex of the genre (full review to be posted next week). But unlike so many games, it's only five hours long. This has been the sole point of contention in reviews of the game. But is there any better way to split the difference between the immersive experience I want and the "pick up and play" dynamic that suits my lifestyle? Episode Two's clearly delineated chapters made it easy to find a stopping point, but its expert pacing and ridiculous setpieces ensured that I kept coming back. And the short length made sure that it was never -- not in any tortured sense of the word -- boring.

Maybe it's not ideal for everybody, but that's my idea of fun.

Critics are irrelevant

I was poking around the "Coming Soon" section at Gamestop.com and stopped to check out the PS3 shooter Haze. Although the game doesn't ship until after Thanksgiving, that hasn't stopped some enterprising citizen journalists from weighing in with their thoughts. Here are some choice selections from the user-generated previews.

• Pre-purchased Haze just now and I've already booked 5 consecutive vacation days off from work with the first corresponding with Haze's realease date. I will be romping on you all when you get online. Watch out for the proffessional gamers lurking the big corp downtown; we watch everything you do and I'll teach ya a lesson about online gaming.
• This game looks to be pretty decent about 8 out of 10.
• This game is not another far cry because it doesn't take place on an island it goes from citys to the South America to dessert. The scenery changes and so this will be better than farcry.
• this game is gonna keep us glued to our seats. i read all the previews for it on mags and stuff and they played some demos of it and it looks big. so pre-order now guys and c'yall online
• The graphics are incredible and gameplay will be awesome. This(although it seems to be a normal FPS) will be different from the rest. I just know it will.

With insights like these available at no cost, I'm not sure if eggheads like Tom Chick have much of a future in this industry.

Board is life

EA's Skate is a solid, mostly non-flashy game that's a lot of fun. It reminds me in some way of Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis -- the emphasis is on depicting the core sporting experience, and not so much on bells and whistles. This being an EA game, there is of course a "rise to prominence" storyline, but it's not so lamely executed as in some other games I can think of. And Skate doesn't lose anything if you ignore the story aspect completely.

My anecdote is better than your data

Bill Harris says:

I checked Wii availability today and it's as low as I've seen it in months in the U.S. Nintendo has said both that they've greatly increased inventory shipments to North America AND that they still won't meet demand.

Counterpoint: I finally saw Wii units in stock just this past Sunday. It was at the Target in Leominster, and there were at least two in the case. This is the first time I've seen a Wii for sale anywhere, save for the time I got in line at 6:30 AM to buy one. Obviously this doesn't actually mean anything, particularly because the Wii probably will be no easier to acquire this holiday season. I just thought it was fascinating that it's taken nearly 11 months before I randomly encountered a Wii. Contrast that with the Xbox 360 (five months) and the PS3 (two months). And the only reason Target had the units in stock is because most people probably aren't thinking about Christmas shopping yet.

The Father, the Son, and the Master Chief

Ryan sends along an article in yesterday's New York Times about a nationwide trend: churches using Halo as a recruiting device. It's fascinating stuff, and a little difficult for me to get my head around.

On one hand, it seems like a distasteful bit of bait-and-switch. As one person quoted in the article says, "If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it." I don't necessarily agree with the comparison, but the difference between games and those other vices is, in this case, a matter of degree. The M-rated Halo has been deemed inappropriate for kids under 17 by people who (mostly) know what they're talking about. It almost seems lurid, like the holy flipside of luring a kid into the back of a van with promises of candy. Give them what they want -- and then get what you want. (In some industries, this is known as "marketing.")

On the other hand, the church officials behind the Halo congregations have their heads on straight when it comes to games. The stereotype of the foaming-at-the-mouth games censor in my head is certainly that of the far-right Bible-thumper (even though the facts don't bear this out -- some of the most stridently anti-games politicians in recent years have been Democratic Senators Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton, and Illinois Governor Rod "The Bod" Blagojevich). Instead, the pastors quoted in the article take the pragmatic approach: "We have to find something that these kids are interested in doing that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol or premarital sex." As someone who spent all of his teen years playing video games, I can confirm that such a lifestyle definitely does not lead to drugs, alcohol, or premarital sex.

Who knows? Maybe these types of church programs will even help to turn down the heat under some of the more excitable culture warriors. As a general rule, I think whatever starts a dialogue is a good thing. If a kid has to defend Halo to his parents on theological grounds, then he's probably looking at the game more critically than most professional reviewers do. And if this is merely another fissure in America's ever-crumbling religious foundation, then we godless gamers will achieve final victory!

Wait, scratch that last part.

Krpata to gamers: Screw you

I'd like to say a little more about the Halo 3 review.

To some degree, this review criticizes the hype and the culture surrounding the game moreso than the game itself. That's for a couple of reasons. One is because I like to take a different angle than you get from the bigger publications, if I can. The other is that the hype is as much a part of Halo as the plasma pistol at this point. Between the soda cans, the fast food promotions, the MIT hacks, and the endless media coverage, well before last week it was obvious that Halo 3 was going to break all kinds of sales records. Which, in and of itself, is not a bad thing.

What bothered me was the sense of inevitablity I was detecting on various game blogs around the web. So much muted criticism accompanied by a shrugging admission that people were going to buy Halo 3, and buy it the first day it was out, as if they had no choice in the matter. In reading some reviews of the game, it seemed like a lot of critics were copping out -- admitting that they didn't love it, but assuming the public would and scoring it accordingly. The glut of pre-release scores of 9.0 and above only added more fuel to the fire. If you were a gamer, it was pre-ordained: you were buying Halo 3.

Now, the critics may be right on one point. The public does seem to love it. But how could the press have known? They played the game before it was publicly available! Tycho of Penny Arcade said he was not willing to reject something just because idiots like it, but when consorting with idiots makes up a primary component of the experience, I'll reject the shit out of it.

By the way

Yes, the avatar in my Skate video was supposed to look like me. I think it's funny that I can put at least ten minutes into such an advanced, multifaceted character creation tool and end up with a guy who barely resembles me, but taking less than five minutes to slap together some cartoon features can result in an eerily accurate simulation.

Stranglehold review

As much as I love the film Hard-Boiled -- and believe me, I love it a lot -- Stranglehold left me a bit cold. It starts off great and goes downhill fast, so in that respect it'd make an ideal rental.

This is pretty neat

Skate allows you to edit a replay of your last 30 seconds or so of gameplay, so if you do something awesome you can make a movie and hopefully become the next Spike Jonze. The replay editor isn't terribly robust, but it is easy to use -- much easier, in fact, than signing up at skate.ea.com in order to actually view your uploaded video. It took three separate confirmation emails and several different EA web portals before I finally found my video, but here it is.

I do this for you, the readers.

Also, I am not good at this game.

The PS3 has taught me a valuable lesson about early adoption

I could deal with the price cuts, and even to some degree with the lack of quality software on the PlayStation 3. For some reason, the announcement of a Dual Shock 3 really bugs me. Besides spending $100 more on the hardware than I had to, and besides leaving it powered off for months at a time, now it turns out that my controller is lacking a fairly significant function. It would be nice if Sony sent a free Dual Shock to those of us who've kept them afloat for the past year, but of course that wouldn't happen. I'll get to spend even more money on these bastards without getting much in return. Ratchet & Clank had better be good.

Although I guess I wouldn't have gotten a PS3 yet if I didn't need one for work, so I guess it's a wash. Nevertheless, I plan to apply what I've learned here to other kinds of technology. I won't be dropping twenty grand on a 3D display any time soon, no sir!

Contrarian

The review falls short of what I really wanted to say, but the takeaway is that Metroid Prime 3 is inexplicably dull. It almost hurts me to admit it, given how big a fan I am of the series. I spent the whole time waiting to get into it. And just kept waiting.

Paste reviews online now

I just moseyed on over to Paste's game section and found that some of my reviews have finally been posted. These are a little different than the usual Phoenix reviews. With only 200 words to play with, it becomes more important to give the review a narrow focus. You've got to whittle an entire video game down to one sharp point. On a professional level, I think writing for Paste has helped me develop a more incisive critical faculty, thanks in no small part to the help from (now former) games editor Chris Dahlen.

Anyway, check out the reviews of Odin Sphere and The Darkness.

There's one thing Rock Band needs that it doesn't seem to have

Double kick drums.

Fall preview

The fall games preview is up now. This year's is exciting for two reasons: first, because it's one of the most exciting slates of games I can recall, and second, because nothing in the piece got delayed after it went to press. In 2005 they postponed Bully, and last year Super Paper Mario got pushed back right after I filed the story. This year, we actually got confirmation of one of the release dates after I'd sent the story in (Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, if you were wondering).

I think it's a sign of great things to come!

Victory strikes again

I finally did it: I completed Guitar Hero 2 on hard mode. "Carry Me Home" was the final stumbling block. I'm not entirely sure how I made it through, in fact. I'd never even made it past the intro riffage before. It's not a good song.

I know this isn't terribly impressive to at least two of my expert-level readers, but I'm pretty proud for a couple reasons. One is that I had never played beyond medium difficulty at all until shortly after I picked up the 360 version, so playing that fifth fret button was all new to me. Second is that I don't typically stick with things that don't come easily, so taking this kind of time to accomplish something is uncharacteristic.

More important, I think it speaks to Guitar Hero's quality that I have continually found time for it over the course of five months. Sometimes it's frustrating that I have to drop a game I enjoy in order to move on to the next one. As great as, say, Rainbow Six: Vegas was, once I no longer had an obligation to play it, I stopped. (Had to make time for Tomb Raider Anniversary, you know.) Since I picked up Guitar Hero 2 in early April, I've reviewed well over a dozen other games, including three that I've given equal or greater scores to. And yet I keep coming back to it in a way that I won't to The Darkness or even BioShock.

Mostly, that's because those more complex single-player games will require an extraordinary amount of effort and dedication every time I sit down with them. It would be hard to revisit them for less than an hour and feel like I'd gotten the full experience. They require a commitment that Guitar Hero doesn't, and as a result I've paradoxically been able to commit to Guitar Hero as I have to few other games. If I were trapped on a desert island, I'd want those immersive, narrative games to pass the time. In the life I live now -- the one that juggles a day job, a family, and friends -- I'll take Guitar Hero.

Uh oh, another BioShock post!

And I said I was done. Oh well.

This isn't really news, but the Cult of Rapture web site has BioShock's orchestral score freely available for download. It's pretty good, if you like strings. You like strings, don't you?

The impending Xbox 360 holocaust

Microsoft has never really owned up to the problem with the Xbox 360 hardware, but at this point it seems pretty clear that unless your system is well-ventilated and rarely used, it's going to crap out on you. It occurs to me that Halo 3 may be the death knell for thousands of units that are already on the brink. It's going to be like the scene in Star Wars when the Death Star blows up Alderaan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened." I can't think of a more hilarious time for people's systems to die, and I look forward to reading the furious NeoGAF threads.

BioShock gameplay tidbits

We'll close out the BioShock coverage with a short discussion of some gameplay moments and quirks. I'll try to go easy on the spoilers, but it'll be impossible to avoid them. You may want to tread lightly if you're still waiting to play it yourself. In fact, most of this probably won't even make sense if you haven't played the game.

• I wish I had realized early on just how versatile the research camera is. The game tells you to photograph your enemies in order to unlock damage multipliers and even new powers, but you can also photograph security systems and vending machines. Apparently if you fully research a camera or turret, you can then hack it without having to do the hacking mini-game. As it happens, I liked the mini-game. But still, fully researching the machines would allow you to dedicate all your gene tonics to something other than hacking -- like wrench combat.


• You have three distinct tracks along which you can upgrade with gene tonics: combat, engineering (hacking), and physical. What's neatest is that you can find complementary tonics in each track for whichever your primary path is. So when I decided I wanted to focus on hacking, I was able to use a physical tonic called "Medical Expert," which gave me a boost of health and EVE every time I successfully hacked a machine. It's a great incentive to open up all your tracks even if you're single-minded in the way you want to play. There is one thing I don't get, though. You purchase new slots at a machine called a Gatherer's Garden. Each GG only allows you to buy one of each slot, and then you have to find a new place to buy another one. Wouldn't it grant you greater control over your destiny if you could choose to spend all your ADAM on one track? I'm sure they had a reason for this decision, but I'm not sure I know what it is.


• The "natural camouflage" tonic seemed silly when I first got it, but it turned out to be indispensable. It turns you invisible if you stand still for about a full second. This was great when I tripped security alarms, as I could just run around a corner and stand still, and then none of the security drones could see me (alas, it doesn't work if you turn invisible while you're still in their line of sight). Plus, I saved money on activating the bot shutdown. While invisible, you can still turn and aim your weapon, so natural camo plus the crossbow made for an elegant sniping arrangement.


• I was reading a discussion on a message board about how to kill the Big Daddies. The strategies were endless, most involving some combination of trap bolts, the Electro Bolt plasmid, and fire. People had devised some Rube Goldberg-like ways of taking them down. And it all sounds cool. I just shot grenades at them until they keeled over. After about my second encounter with them, I'd nailed the technique and they no longer gave me much trouble at all. In fact, one of the ways you can upgrade your grenade launcher is to make it so that you take no splash damage from it. Then you can just plug away at close range like it was nothing.


• After I beat the game, I read the list of achievements to see what I had missed. Strangely, I'm sure I did what one of them asked, but never got credit for it (and it's a big spoiler, so I can't get more specific than that). There's also an achievement for fully upgrading all your weapons. I missed that by one measly upgrade. But with 730 total achievement points from BioShock, it's easily the most I've ever gotten. I hope to play again someday, and if I do I think I could pick up some more.


• BioShock is a great game, but like any game it's not perfect. Its problems are mostly with the interface at the various machines. For example, you can invent new items at the U-Invent station, which is great, but the station won't let you know how many of an item you already have in your inventory. You can waste resources making something of which you're already carrying the max. And you can't see what gene tonics you have equipped unless you're at the machine that allows you to swap them. The lack of access to important information can be frustrating at times, but the good part is that you're usually not so far away from a relevant machine that it ends up hurting you.


• BioShock is awesome.

BioShock!

BioShock review is up now. This review focuses almost totally on the story and themes, so later on I'll try to post some more detailed thoughts about the gameplay.

It's too early for "game of the year" proclamations, but it's safe to say that if I had to make the list now this game would be on top.

King of Kong

In the world of competitive video game playing, Billy Mitchell is the 800 pound gorilla. He was the first person to complete all 256 Pac-Man boards. He held unofficial world high scores in Donkey Kong Jr., Centipede, and Burgertime. His greatest achievement, however, was his world record Donkey Kong score of over 800,000. Set in 1982, the official record stood for over 20 years without any serious threat. And Billy Mitchell liked it that way.

In the documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, he's depicted as a man concerned, above all, with his image. Billy Mitchell even looks like a villain. His sleepy blue eyes gaze from under a mane of glossy black hair. His beard is groomed to perfection. A typical outfit is a black dress shirt tucked into black jeans, accented by an American flag necktie. He seems to relish his role as the heavy. The staff of Twin Galaxies, the governing body of gaming high scores, seems fully in awe of him.

Steve Wiebe, when King of Kong begins, doesn't seem to have any idea who Billy Mitchell is. He doesn't seem to care, either. He's shown as a likable, talented guy who's never really been able to put it together. We witness him playing the piano and the drums, see his skillful drawings, and home videos of his once-promising athletic career. His friends and family lower their voices when discussing all the times he's come up short. It's tough to see from the outside, though. Wiebe lives with a wonderful family in a gorgeous house in suburban Washington. But even the house came with a sucker punch: Wiebe lost his job the day he and his wife signed the papers.

Unemployed and aimless, Wiebe sets up a Donkey Kong machine in his garage and gets to work attacking Billy Mitchell's high score. Director Seth Gordon intercuts shots of Steve playing the drums, clips of his old baseball games, and little Jumpman scurrying ever closer up the ladder toward Donkey Kong. The implication is clear: this has all the potential to be another case where Steve Wiebe is almost good enough. Then a funny thing happens.

He breaks the world record.

He doesn't just beat Billy Mitchell's score; he pulverizes it. He races right on through and doesn't stop until he's earned over a million points, some 200,000 higher than the long-standing record. Having finally accomplished something in his life, he sends the tape in to Twin Galaxies to be verified.

The refs won't allow it. They think he used a modified board.

You get the impression that it isn't so much the score that matters to the Twin Galaxies crew -- it's that the challenger isn't one of them. He's an outsider. They can't even pronounce his name right. It's "wee-bee," two syllables, yet even after being corrected most of the refs continue to say the monosyllabic "weeb." It's a passive-aggressive attack that reminded me of the tendency of some right-wing politicians and commentators to refer to the "Democrat party."

Even as Wiebe flies to New Hampshire to break the record in person, the Twin Galaxies refs keep in touch with Billy Mitchell by phone, providing him nearly real-time updates. One of Mitchell's biggest sycophants, a guy named Brian Kuh, seems on the verge of tears as Wiebe closes in on the fabled "kill screen," which would make him the only person besides Mitchell ever to do so on Donkey Kong. Even so, Kuh can't help telling everybody in the arcade to come watch.

Just when you think King of Kong has gone about as far as it can go, the scheming and backstabbing suddenly escalate to an unbelievable degree. The film stops being a quirky look at an American subculture and becomes a baroque good vs. evil story. There's no question that some creative editing makes Billy Mitchell come off like Darth Vader and Steve Wiebe like the second coming of Jesus. We never see Mitchell with his kids, although presumably he has spawned a few. And on Wiebe's rejected Donkey Kong tape, he's interrupted by his crying son who needs his rear end wiped. Does Steve help? No -- he keeps going for the record. That's how you get ahead in this world.

Talk about last minute

Stranglehold delayed a week, making the week of August 27 fractionally less awesome.

But practically doubling September 3's fortunes!

Tom Chick on BioShock

Tom Chick's BioShock review is solid the whole way through, but his closing passage is absolutely killer:

Games like BioShock are what we need. They are what we deserve. This is one of the best examples of where we should go. It's silly to argue whether games are art, which doesn't matter one whit, when you can simply point to BioShock and say: "Games are this."

I couldn't agree more.

Open wide for some soccer

Obviously multiplayer is the draw for something like Mario Strikers Charged, but the people I played with last week certainly didn't seem any more enamored of it than I did.

I am aware that this review makes me sound like an old man yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn.

While you're exploring Rapture

You may emerge from your BioShock cocoon, as I did, to find that next week sees the release of the following games:

• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
  
• Blue Dragon
  
• Stranglehold
  
• Warhawk
  

Any of those would have been a no-brainer to cover at any time during the year. Now? Well, Metroid is. Beyond that, I'm not sure. And it's only getting better from there.

Rock Band nails it

It's official. Rock Band will include a master recording of this song:



That's got to be one of the five best choices they could have made.

I don't usually like to talk about games before the review goes up

If you have a 360, you should get BioShock.

If you don't have a 360, you should get one.

Fun with the freelance police

It's good to have Sam and Max back.

Why I won't download the BioShock demo

All I needed to hear was the invocation of System Shock 2, way back when BioShock was announced, to know that I didn't need to hear anything else. I've been under a self-imposed news blackout since then, and for the most part it's succeeded. I've seen a couple of screenshots, I know what a Big Daddy is, and I skimmed a Gamers with Jobs article about the game. That's it. I still don't know what the plot is, or what the game mechanics are like (well, okay -- I know it's an FPS).

Now that we're only a week away from the actual release, I figure there's no reason to try the demo. How is that different from screenshots or trailers? I'm told it's an "edited" version of the beginning of the game. If BioShock actually has the complex narrative and philosophical overtones that I'm expecting, then the demo won't shed light on any of that. It's a commercial, that's all. No thanks. I can wait.

The Wii doesn't seem like a well-made machine

The Xbox 360 gets all the bad press, but I've encountered a couple of problems with the Wii now that make me wonder if Nintendo's cost-cutting measures didn't go too far. First there's the overheating problem with Connect24. Apparently if you leave it running for a long time -- months, say -- without ever actually powering the system fully, it can overheat and damage some of the hardware. Well, I didn't turn it on from April until July, and then when I did I was getting some graphical artifacting. So there's that. And just now, my B button got stuck in the down position and I'm not sure how to fix it. This is going to render just about everything unplayable.

In the meantime, my 360 works just fine!

Ask a ninja

Q. Does Tenchu Z suck?

A. Yes.

Resident Evil 5 and racism

Okay, I'm going to wade in here. This may end up being a somewhat disjointed post, but I've been following the meme around the blogosphere and the story is the same anywhere it goes. As far as I can tell, the whole thing started with a post by Bonnie Ruberg on VillageVoice.com entitled "Resident Evil 5: White Man Shoots Black Zombies." It's a pretty interesting take -- in particular, Ruberg suggests that the parasites or T-virus of Resident Evil mythology could be playing out here as an allegory to the AIDS situation in Africa. That post was linked to by a blog called "Black Looks," which was then picked up on Kotaku. The Kotaku post currently has 671 comments and is still going strong.

That's the background. What's fascinating to me is the response from commenters. Readers of the Voice, Kotaku, and Black Looks are all united in their firm convictions that Resident Evil 5 is not racist. Most responses tend to fall in one or more of the following categories:

• The enemies in Resident Evil 4 were white, so why wasn't anyone upset about that?


• Lighten up, it's only a game.


• There's no such thing as racism anymore;


• But if there is, it's black people who are racists.


• Women who complain about racism are racists themselves, or need to get laid.


• It's so hard to be white these days.
  

I would back up each of those points with actual quotes, but it's too depressing to keep wading into those swamps. Seriously, just scan the Kotaku thread. I'm not cherry-picking here. The latent racism getting stirred up is really something to behold. Hardly anybody seems to see the contradiction.

Certainly, I didn't come away from the Resident Evil 5 trailer thinking it was racist. That's because I had the benefit of knowing the context. If you had to sum up the entire series in one sentence, a good one would be: "A powerful organization infects an innocent group of people with a virus that turns them into monsters." That's an over-simplification, but it's basically accurate across every Resident Evil game.

In particular, the fifth installment seems to borrow most heavily from Resident Evil 4. At the end of RE4, there's a short series of stills that shows the happy villagers going about their lives until the arrival of Lord Saddler. It is the first time we are meant to feel pity for them. It doesn't really make up for having mowed down about a thousand of them over the course of the game, but it does show that they are victims in their own way. I feel confident in predicting that the premise of RE5 will be much the same, and that before the game is over you'll find that Umbrella Corp. has been victimizing these people because they thought they could get away with it.

This is, of course, another example of video games wanting to have it both ways: you get the adrenaline-fueled thrill of combat and kill a ton of people, but it's okay because you actually saved all the people in the town afterward. RE4 isn't quite so explicit in that regard, but it's true that video games tend to resort to this kind of fascist mindset. Pick your cliché: "might makes right," "burn the village to save it," and so on.

It's the same across way too many games, and publishers keep getting to duck responsibility because they're only video games. It's ironic that people want Roger Ebert to take games as seriously as he takes movies, when they themselves do not take games as seriously as Roger Ebert takes movies. Read Ebert's review of Dirty Harry and try to imagine any video game reviewer on the face of the planet subjecting a game to that level of scrutiny. Did people tell Roger Ebert he was being overly sensitive? That he should relax and just enjoy the movie? No, they gave him a fucking Pulitzer Prize. If you agree that games should be part of the cultural conversation -- and I do -- then you don't get to draw up a list of exemptions every time somebody says something you don't like.

It's easy to see why someone unfamiliar with the Resident Evil canon would be taken aback by the trailer. What you see are mobs of frenzied black people swarming the good-looking, militaristic, and, oh yeah, white protagonist. Take that at face value. The solution, of course, would be to educate people who express concerns about what the series is really all about. It may not totally change their minds, but at least they might see your point of view.

Here's what I don't think works: telling someone that they're the racist, or that they need to lighten up. Or extrapolating one person's opinion to be the shared opinion of every black person in the world. Or saying that talking about race in games is distracting attention from the real issues. Or pretending that there's no such thing as racism. Anyone who's ever spent five minutes on Xbox Live is all too aware that racism in the gaming community is a legitimate issue (it's also a major reason why I spend as little time on XBL as possible).

In fact, this entire ugly episode has made it more clear than ever that games really are a mirror to our culture. A few comments about a game that doesn't come out for two years has sparked an extremely revealing conversation. There's no way of knowing to what degree the commentariat represents the prevailing attitude of gamers in general. Even so, the latent hatred and resentment that's been unleashed is really something to see. Only now it's cloaked in a sense of white victimhood. Racism hasn't really gone anywhere; it's just gotten better at hiding.

One can only hope that the light is what kills it.

Walter Raleigh Championship

The headline to this post is a shout-out to exactly one reader. Anyway, this week's review is of DiRT, a decent enough rally racing game that served to make me realize that I could never play another racing game again and I'd be okay with that. Okay, Burnout sequels excepted.

I am considering whether to weigh in on the Resident Evil 5 brouhaha. I suppose it is time for my semi-annual multi-thousand word rant, right?

The Heavenly Sword demo is weak

Powerful weak. I'm not sure how it could have been an entire gigabyte, because there's nothing to it. A brief, God of War-like button-pushing sequence, and then two, er, God of War-like melee battles. Then it just stops. Total play time is probably three minutes. The combat seemed like pure button mashing, although certainly it's hard to experiment in the brief time the demo gives you. All in all, I don't know why they bothered releasing this. Isn't the point of a demo to get people excited about a game?

Required viewing

The Resident Evil 5 trailer is up at gametrailers.com. I suppose the inevitable strike against it is that the gameplay doesn't look any different from RE4, and even though that's not a bad thing in itself, you always hope for a big leap forward. Then again, it took several years for the original Resident Evil style to get stale (I didn't get tired of it until Zero, which was the last one before RE4). I can certainly take another game in the vein of RE4.

Additionally, I greatly enjoyed the unexpected face punch in this trailer, and I can only hope that I will get to do plenty of face punching once I'm finally playing the game.

In 2009.

Damn it.

Teh best game EVAR

Still Resident Evil 4.

Miyamoto gets it right

In an interview with Wired's Chris Kohler, Shigeru Miyamoto has a lot to say about Nintendo's upcoming projects. The conversation drifted to video games' place in the public consciousness, and I think what Miyamoto had to say was wise:

Up until now, the biggest question in society about video games has been what to do about violent games. But it's almost like society in general considers video games to be something of a nuisance, that they want to toss into the garbage can. And so really what we feel is that rather than answering the question of what to do about violence in video games, we can, through the games that we create, once again make video games a topic of popular discussion and popular culture, then gradually you're going to see society come to understand video games better and understand what they're all about. At that point, once that understanding is there, people will become able to address their concerns about violent video games from a position of understanding rather than a position of being on the outside looking in.

And so I think that Nintendo's role in that is not to answer the question of what to do about violence in video games, but to expand the overall market in an effort to expand people's understanding of video games.

People who don't play games don't interpret them as anything but loud noises. I'm not fully on board with everything Nintendo's done on the Wii so far, but if developers want to stop feeling like concerned parents are out to get them, maybe the solution is just to make better games.

What a horrifying photo

I honestly don't remember seeing a Darkling sawing off a guy's head as I was playing through The Darkness. It would seem to undercut my thesis that the game had a moving, well-told story.

Happy Fourth of July

Let's celebrate by casting off the bonds of another British tyrant.

Coming next week: A surprisingly awesome game!