Portal 2

Above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oOHr--AMes

You can find my review of Portal 2, the least necessary Portal 2 review ever published, at thephoenix.com. High praise, naturally, which is why I say it's unnecessary. The critical consensus on this one is unusual, even in an industry where heretics are swiftly and severely punished. Don't let me be the one to dissuade you: Portal 2 is damn good.

Even so, I find myself in the strange position of liking the game a smidgen less than almost everyone else I read and talk to. Not a problem when writing for a more general audience, but on Twitter and in my own inner monologue, I focus more on the few things that separate us, rather than the numerous things that unite us. My complaints are all subjective, for what that's worth.

The biggest: no matter what kind of nutty things Valve included in the sequel -- and you know, if you've completed it, that they included some nutty goddamn stuff -- the novelty factor is still diminished, if not entirely gone. The leap from nothing to Portal 1 was much greater than the leap from Portal 1 to Portal 2, and how could it be otherwise? I felt the same way when I played Portal 2 as I did when I played Guitar Hero II and Left 4 Dead 2. It's probably the better game in every way that should matter, but its predecessor gave me a brand-new experience, and that's invaluable.

Second: The nerd bait was way overdone. Way, way overdone. Even while playing Portal 2, I thought a lot of the jokes were written with merchandising potential in mind, and nothing I've seen since then has changed my mind. The Weighted Companion Cube was a great joke in the first game, but I have a hard time believing anyone at Valve thought of selling a plush version until after gamers told them it was a winner. It's like they were throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck. (They were really pushing the "animal king" thing hard.)

Third, and possibly the dumbest: I believed in the first game. GLaDOS seemed rooted in some kind of truth -- not a literal truth, but an emotional truth. She was the perfect embodiment of automation run amok, whose behavior was dictated by implacable logic. All the jokes and the hyperbole grew from a very real place. This is not the case in the sequel, where the jokes are often just jokes. Further still, the more I listened to Cave Johnson's recordings, the less Aperture Science seemed like the inevitable endpoint of scientific research unmoored to ethics, and the more it seemed like the inevitable endpoint of a brainstorming session with a bunch of smartasses.

The bull sessions may be responsible for my fourth complaint: too much talking! Sometimes I found myself wishing the voiceover of the moment would just shut up so we could get on with things. Valve's writers are too sharp to miss the mark very often, though, and there are some real gems. Something like the "edgeless safety cube" makes a real point about the power of euphemism to obfuscate the truth. (The edgeless safety cube is, of course, a sphere.) That was the sort of thinking that informed every aspect of the first game. Less so this time around.

Last: Having played through both campaigns, I can't think of when I'd pick either of them up again. I could see no reason to play co-op again with the same partner. If I played it with somebody else, I could see myself trying to hurry them through it, and that wouldn't be fun for either of us. On the other hand, any DLC for this game would be a day-one purchase.

There! Glad I got that out of my system. This game is sweet.

Crysis 2: You are here

There's a moment in Crysis 2 when a massive explosion separates you from the Marine unit you've been assisting. The fight continues, but, unusually for a video game, it continues without you. From the the distance you hear gunshots echoing off the skyscrapers, the thumping artillery occluded by steel and concrete. The smoke has drifted into the air above you, and the reflection of the streetlights casts an orange veil over the street. If not for the barely perceptible sounds of battle, you might think you were the last person in New York left alive.

Unreality intrudes. An objective pops up onscreen. REJOIN THE MARINES.* A blue arrow on your HUD leaves no question about where they are. And your surroundings, which are nothing more than a long, narrow street with no doorways, leave no doubt about how to get there. You had no control over the explosion that stranded you here, and you have barely more control over how to return to the action. You need only to hold down the left stick in the right direction.

This is standard videogame stuff. You can bemoan the lack of player agency, especially in a game whose stated goal is to let you choose your tactics for every scenario. You can resist such heavy-handed design, and run around in circles, jump up and down, fire your weapon into the air. You know that you'll hear the same faint sounds of combat for as long as you stand still, and that the battle isn't really happening. The Marines will live or die based upon whether you show up, yes -- but, like Schrodinger's cat, they will be alive and dead, firing at their enemies in perpetuity, until you cross the invisible checkpoint that springs open the box.

Ironically, though, you do have a choice here. You can engage the game as it asks you to do. You can play with urgency. You can run toward the firefight. If you do this -- if you watch how the smoke intensifies the closer you get, and listen to how the gunfire and shouts grow ever louder and more desperate -- then you will find something very strange happening. You will find that you are sprinting through the streets of New York, about to throw yourself in danger, because you know you are the only one who can help.

Crysis 2 has its issues. But for that one moment at least, when I wasn't blowing up helicopters, wasn't skulking around invisibly, wasn't even firing my gun, it grabbed me and said: You are here. And I believed it.

*Or something like that.

Yakuza 4

Above: The crooked police commissioner can wait. I'm buying these ladies some champagne.

My review of Yakuza 4 is up now at thephoenix.com. You could probably tell by listening to the Brainy Gamer podcast: I loved this game. It is so surprising and strange.

Trying to sum it all up in under 600 words was impossible, and even attempting to present a vertical slice still missed a lot. For instance, there's a whole portion of the game set in an underground city populated by the homeless, which has its own economy based on trash. You could become a garbage tycoon down there, if you wanted. You don't have to. But you could.

For all that you can do in Yakuza 4, it's still restrictive in many ways. The reason comparisons to Grand Theft Auto games fall down isn't about ambition, depth, or storytelling mastery. In his book Dave Barry Does Japan, Dave Barry describes seeing a bunch of Tokyo's marginalized citizens hanging out at the park. The members of each group are dressed identically to one another, and perform coordinated dances once it's their turn. That's the approach this game takes to its "go anywhere, do anything" philosophy. In a Grand Theft Auto game, you'd be able to enter the Pachinko parlor and rob it, set it on fire, or jump out the window. In a Yakuza game, you can only play Pachinko. By the rules.

You know what else is missing from this review? Just how much fun it is to play. This has not changed since the first Yakuza game. Your characters are accosted every few blocks by street punks, low-level gangsters, and other assorted miscreants, and you have no choice but to beat the stuffing out of them using whatever you can get your hands on. So you grab whatever is handy -- milk crates, traffic cones, bicycles, even motorcycles -- and smash everyone up good.

All of the characters have a Heat meter that builds up and allows them to unleash even more devastating attacks, which are truly painful to watch. And there's a lot more variety than ever before, thanks to the four protagonists' different fighting styles. The cop will climb up an opponent's body like a monkey up a tree, grab his arm in a bear hug, and snap it. I never stopped wincing.

To dip into the superlatives grab bag, I feel comfortable saying that Yakuza is still the best series you're not playing. There's no better place to start than here!

---

• Buy Yakuza 4 from Amazon

Podcastin'!

I appeared on the latest episode of the Brainy Gamer podcast, along with Brad Gallaway of GameCritics.com and Nels Anderson of Above 49, to talk about what we've been playing lately. You'll find some solid under-the-radar recommendations, one of which I was glad to be able to provide. Hint: It's Yakuza 4. I also took a little more time to slag on LittleBigPlanet 2, which Brad admitted that he hated too, much later in the podcast than he should have.

The super-sized podcast also contains two other GDC-based segments, one featuring cool dudes Patrick Klepek, Matthew Burns, and Chris Dahlen, and one with Sean Duncan of Miami University (himself a cool dude). Give it a listen!

3D or not 3D

No question, 3D was the story of the show at PAX this year. The expo floor was jampacked with 3D displays for games of all types, and one of the longest non-Portal 2 lines was for demonstrations of the Nintendo 3DS. There is a sense of inevitability about 3D. No matter what reservations you may have about the technology -- the glasses, the eyestrain, the dimness -- they do not matter. 3D is coming.

One of the first things I saw on the show floor was an enormous display running a demo of Crysis 2. I wore the glasses for about 30 seconds and had to take them off. It's inaccurate to call the sensation I was feeling a headache. It was as though the signal from my eyes to my brain was doing barrel rolls. There was undeniably something impressive about looking into the game screen, but the physical discomfort was hard to take. Maybe prolonged exposure to the display would alleviate the symptoms. It's hard to imagine taking the time to break through the wall.

After I stood in line for about half an hour to play Resident Evil on the 3DS, I came away thinking that Nintendo has, once again, figured out something that its competitors still don't understand. The 3DS, at least in the couple of minutes I played it, does not hurt your eyes. The display doesn't flicker. The depth of field also isn't overwhelming -- no more of a graphical accoutrement than bloom lighting. And this is, I think, a good thing. It is easy to pick up a 3DS and play it, something that is not true about any other 3D technology that I've seen.

Oddly, my favorite use of the technology was during a viewing of the new Mortal Kombat -- a 2D game (which looks sweet even on a traditional display). Because the fighters moved along a line, they were in focus even when I was without glasses. Only the background was blurry. With glasses on, the fighters looked no different -- maybe a little heftier -- but the arenas were given a sense of depth, and when extra-powerful attacks broke the plane of the screen toward me, it felt earned instead of gimmicky.

Recently I've been playing Killzone 3. My review is coming this week, but I found myself wondering, the whole time, what might have been added to the experience if I'd been playing in 3D. Like its predecessor, it's a decent shooter that suffers from a lack of imagination. I can't imagine that playing in 3D would have changed what I didn't like about it. It still would have been full of long, bland shooting arenas. The mech sequences still would have been loud and disorienting, probably moreso. Yet, based on my other experiences with 3D, I think that the new perspective would have dominated my entire experience. I wouldn't have even thought about the fundamental game, but the technology. Unlike with the 3Ds, it would have been the main course and not a seasoning. And I'm not sure what good that would have been.

Is this the future? Sacrificing innovation in gameplay for an expensive technological upgrade? Or is that just the story of video games, same as it ever was?

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.

Bionic Commando Rearmed 2

Above: He's back... and he's grown a middle-manager's mustache.

My review of Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 is up at thephoenix.com. I liked it. Not having much experience with previous Bionic Commando games, even the NES version, I didn't go into this one with any expectations of how it should be. Whether or not that would have changed my opinion of the game, I can't say, but the debate about whether or not Rad Spencer should be able to jump is, at least, one that I have no stake in.

I liked this game's approach to difficulty. It was hard -- besides the instant falls to your death and the overwhelming boss fights, this is a game in which you can swing 90% of your way through the level, miss one grappling point, and plummet back to the start. But here's the key: none of this stuff erases any of the progress you've made before. You can always re-try levels you've beaten in order to find powerups that'll make your life easier. And even the game over screen just kicks you back out to the map, rather than letting you restart from a checkpoint.

When people complain about a trend toward easier games, this is the part that always confuses me. I don't think games are necessarily any easier these days. I've been dying plenty in Dead Space 2, for example. You just don't lose all your progress every time you die.

That said, some of those tricky parts are very tricky. The boss fights felt very much of the old school. Typically, they followed this pattern:

• Attempt 1: Immediate death
• Attempt 2: Almost immediate death
• Attempt 3: Possible weakness spotted, death
• Attempt 4: Strategy formulated, minor damage inflicted, death
• Attempts 5-9: Failed attempts to execute strategy, death
  
• Attempt 10: Victory!

And that's pretty satisfying, as long as you always feel like you're making your way forward. There's that tension between not knowing what to do, and knowing what to do but not having mastered the mechanics of doing it.

So there's that. I never felt transported or uplifted by playing this game, but I enjoyed it, and that's good enough for me.

Postscript: The Phoenix's legendary managing editor Clif Garboden died last week. Clif was a lifer. He was at the paper his whole career. Most of my interactions with Clif were in the Phoenix's smoking room, where he would enter, light up, hit filter after three powerful puffs, and then vanish, but not before making some acid remark about the state of the world. Clif terrified me.

Clif was also a true believer in the power of the alternative press. He never lost his sense of humor or his sense of outrage. He never stopped believing in holding the powerful to account. Often, when I read disparaging comments on my reviews at the Phoenix's website, it strikes me that the commenters don't seem to understand what publication they're reading. If you want to know what the paper is all about, Clif's personal recollection, published on the Phoenix's 40th anniversary, will give you a good idea.

Well, that and "Screw You, America," the op-ed that Clif published on November 12, 2004.

LittleBigPlanet 2

My review of LittleBigPlanet 2 is up at thephoenix.com. Flame away!

When I complained on Twitter about how lacking in imagination I found the suggested user levels to be, Joystiq's Ben Gilbert quickly recommended a few levels for me to try. They weren't terrible, but I had the same experience with them that I had with almost all of the rest: an initial burst of "Oh, cool!" followed by an extended comedown.

One was a roller coaster level that looked kind of neat, but didn't require me to do anything except hold down the R1 button. Another was a cute concept, with a pet Sackboy in a typical suburban house, but it had almost nothing in the way of interesting gameplay, and for some reason ended with Sackboy hopping in an ersatz UFO and shooting lasers. None would have been remarkable if they had come from a professional developer.

Oh, also, doing the "text search" for the names of those levels did not bring up those levels even close to the top of the search results. So there was that.

I don't deny that there is value in creation. To the extent that LittleBigPlanet 2 has merit, it is that: most games ask you to follow along with the creators' vision, and this one asks you to be the creator. I get that. You might not be able to tell from the review I filed, but it's true.

But just because you created something doesn't mean that it's worthy of adulation from the masses. People spend $60 on a video game that was made by professionals, and even most of those aren't actually any good. Why are we doing backflips about a game that lets users make pale imitations of other games? That was almost all I saw in this LBP2. Let's run down the list:

• A Vietnam-era first-person shooter in which the iron sights shot about an inch and a half to the right of where the crosshair was.
• A Batman film where, among other crimes against the English language, Batman saw the Batsignal and said "Look's like im in need!" In need of a copyeditor, maybe.
• A Donkey Kong clone in which it was impossible to jump over a barrel.
• A Super Mario Bros clone in which it was impossible to jump over a pit.
• A Wipeout clone in which there were no hovercraft.
• An inFamous clone in which there was one building to climb.
• A "Fun House" level in which the word "Buffoonery" was repeatedly written on the walls, in case you didn't get it.

And on, and on, and on. I genuinely do hope that some LBP2 players go on to bigger and better things. They could hardly go on to anything else.

I play demos: Bulletstorm

Above: Kids, tell your parents: "Buy me Bulletstorm, or go to hell!"

Next I downloaded the Bulletstorm demo. Count me among those who are pre-emptively embarrassed about this game. I’m already plenty embarrassed at the way its marketing team has been leading the games press around on a leash for the past several months. All this isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy a prurient good time as much as the next guy.

What I don’t understand about the Bulletstorm hype is the notion that killing people stylishly is a new concept. Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden have built empires on it. Bayonetta was one of last year’s best games, and that was the whole idea. Bulletstorm shares even more in common with MadWorld and The Club, both games from the past couple of years that I had mixed feelings about, but which employed basically the same formula: it’s not enough to kill people, you have to flaunt it.

The problem that both of those games had was that they got repetitive fast. MadWorld had, in the end, only a few different types of kills. Most were impalations. The Club seemed to want you to do a forward roll every time you killed anyone. In either case, the stylistic requirement seemed at odds with survival. Usually, as a player you refine your technique to find the most efficient way past your obstacles. These games, Bulletstorm included, ask you do to the opposite. They want you to find more and more elaborate methods to dispatch your enemies, while still finishing the level as quickly as possible. It’s a balancing act. If done well, you could see how it might soar.

I’m not sure if Bulletstorm soars. It looks great, and it controls well, and at this point I’m willing to roll with the humor. But after a couple of playthroughs I’m already repeating myself. You have a few different abilities in this game. Besides your guns (three available in the demo, each with an alt-fire mode), you have a kick move, and a leash, which I imagine is supposed to be the money shot. With the leash, you can grab enemies and pull them toward you, or hold the button down to launch them into the air.

Pretty neat idea, and it works – but how much you can actually do with it, I’m not so sure. I kept finding myself pulling people in with the leash, kicking them, and then shooting them. Not because it was the most stylish move, but because it was the most effective way to get them to stop shooting back. Obviously I was not pulling off the balancing act.

There are plenty of environmental options, too, which all seem telegraphed. Some are clearly setpieces, such as when you throw a switch that drops a huge rail car down the tracks, crushing several foes.* Others are smaller but similarly designer-directed. One of the first things you see in the demo is a highlighted piece of the ceiling with a prompt to use your leash. You do, and it dumps a bunch of debris on a guy. That’s cool and all, but I didn’t feel like a badass as much as I felt like a rat that was pressing a button to receive a food pellet.

I could believe that the Bulletstorm demo is playing its cards close to its chest. Crazy weapons and varied environments could help it to pull off the combination of zaniness and mayhem that it’s going for, and I’m always a sucker for the kinds of massive boss battles that play in the video at the demo’s beginning. But I’m worried. Getting extra points for shooting a guy in the ass is fun the first time. The tenth time? Not so much. I think I’ve already reached my quota.

*Note, I have no idea if it actually was a rail car, and it doesn't matter, because it was really just some huge thing for crushin’.

I play demos: Dead Space 2

Above: You've come a long way, demon space baby.

January was a dead month, even by January standards. I haven’t filed a review since publishing Lost in Shadow on Joystiq at the beginning of the month, and even though right now I’m playing LittleBigPlanet 2 for a review, spoiler alert, I find it hard to play that game for more than an hour without getting frustrated and wanting to move on to something else.

For the most part, I haven’t minded having these few weeks off from playing. A hiatus can refocus the mind. But after awhile, those old familiar urges creep back, and I find myself wanting to play something -- anything.

I’ve laid out my philosophically confused position on demos before. It’s not something I feel strongly about, but I try to avoid them when I can. They’re advertisements, not really games, and if I know I’ll end up reviewing something then I like to go in cold if I can help it. On the other hand, theoretically everything you’d see in a demo will be in the final game, and, if done well, a demo can be a worthy standalone product, like a good movie trailer. So given my lack of conviction on the issue, and my fiending for something new to play, I downloaded a couple of new demos: Dead Space 2 and Bulletstorm.

Dead Space 2 is a game I was looking forward to, but when circumstances kept me from being able to review it, I filed it under the “wait until it’s cheaper” category, which is never a bad idea for any game. Maybe I should be more excited. I liked Dead Space when I played it, and found that my opinion of it improved with time, even though I never revisited it. Then, I loved Dead Space: Extraction, the prequel that came out for the Wii (the inclusion of an HD version of Extraction on the PS3 edition of Dead Space 2 is reason enough to pick it up). I should have been a prime customer.

There’s something to be said for a game with such a polished presentation. People these days are so enamored of low-fi indie games that it’s almost become gauche to appreciate a game with good graphics and responsive controls. Which is not to say that Dead Space 2 avoids all of the problems of today’s AAA shooters – one look at the control scheme almost gave me heart palpitations. Then again, I am old, and eat a diet high in fat, so maybe it was something else.

The demo does not begin with a bang. Isaac walks through four identical rooms before anything happens, and when something does happen, it’s the same attack of the Necromorphs that was replayed endlessly in the first game. They jump out of cryogenic chambers, and ventilation shafts, and who knows where else. All I can say for sure is that there always seemed to be one behind me. This was enough to convince me that Dead Space 2 may not be likely to change its ways, and that it is satisfied enough that withering, high-tension action scenes are sufficient to be called horror.

Next, you encounter an environmental puzzle in which you use telekinesis to pull clearly marked clamps down from the ceiling. Hardly a brain buster, this felt a little rote and obligatory. I could almost hear someone in charge saying, “Y’know, we just had a big action scene, so we should probably put a puzzle here.” That’s not meant to be a damning criticism, just an observation. And it was followed by a zero-gravity sequence that I found heartening – Isaac is fully controllable in these scenes this time around. I didn’t think the zero-g scenes in the first game lived up to their potential, so I’m encouraged that they may do so this time.

Then, I walked into a church and was attacked by a bunch of screeching alien baby people. Not what I expected. I think that’s the first time I’ve been able to say that about a Dead Space game. This part of the Dead Space 2 demo accomplished a couple of the things that the first game never did. For one thing, it was an interesting environment. I liked the Ishimura as a functional space vessel, but I was never as enamored of it as some people were. It’s nice to see that the sequel branches out a little. As for the screeching space babies, they’d probably get old if the game relies on them too much, but they made for a nice change of pace.

So, good job, Dead Space 2 demo: You have kept my interest. But I’ll still probably wait for a sale.

Next: Bulletstorm!

The weapons of Hot Pursuit

Above: Roadblocked.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit shares a little of its DNA in common with games like Mario Kart and Wipeout. It's less fantastic than those games, but at heart it's a combat racing game, just as they are. Playing through career mode requires you to unlock all of the weapons available to you, so at first you may think that Hot Pursuit, like Burnout before it, is more about trading paint and using your car as a battering ram than about blasting your foes with high-powered armaments.

This turns out to be only partly true.

There are two essential things to understand about the weapons of Hot Pursuit:

1. They take skill to use.
2. They can't be replenished.

Those two facts make all the difference. Unlike Mario Kart, Hot Pursuit doesn't provide an on-ramp for unskilled racers by gifting them devastating weapons the further behind they fall. Unlike Wipeout, there are no uber-powerful weapons against which there is no defense. And unlike both of those games, the weapons you have at the start of the race are all you will get. There is no magical box, floating above the racecourse, that will re-stock your ammo for you.

So you have to be careful, you have to be skillful, and you have to be tactical. It is all too easy to blow through your weapons by mile 5 of a 14-mile race. Running on empty makes for tense moments, but it doesn't usually lead to victory. You need to deploy your weapons carefully. Each one has strengths and weaknesses. Each can be used to counter another driver's weapons. Each can be countered by another driver's weapons. Each can be confounded by agile driving.

As you progress, you'll gain a slightly different loadout for events in which you are the racer and events in which you are the cop. Either way, you'll find that you unlock the weapons fairly early, and then acquire more powerful versions of each. Getting them is easy; figuring out how to use them is hard.

Both cops and racers can use spike strips, which drop on the ground to slow down or wreck somebody behind you. Spike strips are the easiest weapon to use, especially late in the game when they are upgraded to the point that they can cover a wide swath of the road, and you drop two strips in one shot. Spike strips aren't very powerful, but they're great for slowing down somebody who is trying to ram you, or lock on with an EMP.

Cops and racers can also both use EMPs, bursts of energy that temporarily disable their targets. EMPs take some time to charge up, and need to be locked on in order to work. The EMP is the most "gamey" of the weapons available -- a lot like the Electrovolt in Wipeout. Activate it, and a white box will appear on your screen that you must keep centered on an opponent. You need to keep your target in view for several seconds (lock-on time reduces with each upgrade). Not terribly powerful on its own, the EMP is best used in conjunction with something else, like a road block, a sharp turn, or a well-timed collision.

Things diverge from there. Racers have a jammer, which shuts down all of the cops' tech, including their weapons and their on-screen maps. It's a great way to evade an EMP. Racers also have a turbo boost, which accelerates them to ludicrous speed for several seconds.

Cops can call in a road block, which is set up some distance down the course. As the road block power is upgraded, the road blocks gain more and sturdier vehicles, which can cause a racer to slow down or crash, but every road block has a weak point that racers can easily penetrate. The last tool in the cop's belt is the helicopter, which tracks down racers and drops spike strips in front of them. Forget its effectiveness: nothing beats barreling down a road at 180 mph, hitting a button, and seeing a chopper blast overhead with its searchlight blazing up the road.

All of the weapons collectively bring to mind a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Say you're a racer and a cop has an EMP lock on you. You could try to lose him through pure driving skill. You could use your jammer. You could hit the turbo and try to get out of range. Each of these comes with a cost. If your fancy driving doesn't work, or even if it does, you might cost yourself first place. If you use your jammer, you're still in sight and susceptible to crashes and other weapons. If you hit the turbo, you'd better hope there's a straightaway up ahead and not a series of S-curves.

This kind of mental calculation happens dozens of times in every race, all while you're navigating hairpin turns at top speed. You're trying to follow the route, keep an eye on your HUD for hazards, avoid oncoming traffic, and check your rearview for anybody speeding up behind you, all while trying to game-theory your way through your arsenal in the scant seconds you have to do something, dammit! It's enough to short-circuit your brain.

For all this, your car's chassis is still your greatest weapon. It's the one that'll last the whole race, provided you don't wreck, which is no gimme. Driving well is also a better alternative than using your weapons, but it's so much harder than pressing a button to instantly escape. No matter the weapon -- spike strip, EMP, road block -- you can dodge it without reaching into your bag of tricks. Even the racer's turbo power is only as useful as your ability to steer while using it.

If you aim to wreck another car, there's no subsitute for a good, old-fashioned ramming. Most of your weapons merely chip away at your foes' health. You either need to scavenge a takedown, or focus relentlessly on one opponent for your weapons to do much good. But if you can get behind them, hit the boost, and plow into their rear fender, you'll take big chunks off their health bar. It's the only way to go -- until they drop a spike strip, that is.

There have been lots of combat racing games before this one, which is why I started this post by comparing Hot Pursuit to two well-known ones. But none have ever been as deep in their execution.* Never in this game will you find yourself fumbling along, waiting to get bailed out by a lucky drop. Never will you fire your weapons willy-nilly instead of concentrating on the race.

Hot Pursuit has earned accolades for its mind-blowing races and the addictive Autolog feature, but who expected its combat system to be this exacting, even subtle? Forget Mario Kart -- maybe Street Fighter is the better comparison.

*Bold claim unsupported by evidence in post.

Mass Effect 2 debrief

Before I say anything else about Mass Effect 2, I'll say this: I played the whole thing. I can't say the same about many games, especially those that nobody is paying me to play. All told, it took just under 30 hours. I explored every star system I could get to. I completed every mission I found. Whatever criticisms I am about to make, that counts for something.

After all of it, I'm still not sure what to make of the game. None of my complaints about ME2's interface ever subsided. Quite the contrary, I kept discovering more of them. Some of the choices that BioWare makes, while not terribly significant on their own, defy logic. Consider: To upgrade your equipment, you need to mine planets for natural resources. This takes the form of a fairly boring mini-game.

That picture is from the PC version, but it looks the same on the 360 version. I'd like you to take note of the graphs on the right side of the screen. The one on the top shows the prevalence of each type of mineral as detected by your crosshair, which you can see on the surface of the planet to the left. As you move that target around, you'll see spikes and dips in the measurements.

You can tell, relatively, that you're likely to find a certain element when there's a spike. But you have no idea how much. There are no numbers assigned to each step on that scale. Further, the Y-axis is represented in a quasi-3D way, seeming to lean into the screen and away from the player. The vertical segments shrink as the chart gets higher, which may indicate a logarithmic scale, but probably not. Lastly, the graduations fade into nothingness instead of reaching a hard upper limit. It does not make sense.

At least that scale doesn't really need to make sense. All you need to know is that when there's a spike above Palladium, you fire off a probe. Boom -- you've got Palladium. The designers have exchanged usability for flashiness, sure, but it doesn't really harm the experience. Your goal is to mine for resources, and you can do that.

Such is not the case with the green bars underneath it. Those indicate, or are supposed to indicate, the quantity of each element that you already have. The quantities are represented as bar graphs -- they start empty, and fill up with a solid green color as you acquire more of each resource.

It may be hard to tell unless you click on the image above, but take a look at those bars and the numbers beneath them. The bars for Iridium, Platinum, and Palladium are all full, and yet their actual quantities vary: 35149, 41613, and 42602. respectively. Furthermore, the leftmost resource bar appears at least half-full, yet the count is only 14660. What's going on here?

After playing the whole game, I can safely say that the answer to that question is: who the hell knows. All of the bars fill up by the time you get about 25000 of each resource, but there is not actually a limit to how much you can collect. By the later stages of the game, I was rolling deep with about 150000 of everything. The bar graphs had long since ceased to be useful.

There I go again -- I intended to write a post about my fairly positive top-level impressions of Mass Effect 2, and ended up dissecting a minor point. It's not that the game rose or fell on the basis of the mining mini-game, it's that the minimal information that the mining mini-game needed to communicate to the player was totally garbled.

I thought it was perfect when, at the end of the credits, I was presented with another choice. I could either continue the game I'd been playing, and finish exploring the galaxy and completing sidequests, or import my powered-up Shepard into a fresh playthrough. Pretty basic, right? But when I saw the button prompts, I was only about 70% sure which was which. There was "(A) Continue" and "(B) Main Menu."

In other words, only one of the button functions I was presented corresponded to the options I'd been given. The other one bore no relation to what I might have been trying to do. The description of my choices had not included the main menu. I had no idea what might result from my inputs, thanks to the confusing, contradictory, and incomplete information on the screen.

And that was Mass Effect 2 in a nutshell.

Lost in Shadow

Above: Cool shadow, bro

My review of Lost in Shadow is up at Joystiq. I'm trying to remember the last time my reaction to a game followed a similar trajectory to this one. Generally, after a couple of hours, my mind is 90% made up and the rest is a matter of details. Sometimes, games get better after you become more familiar with them, and that can take a long time. In this case, I felt like Lost in Shadow was flirting with greatness at the start, then settled into a trough of acceptable mediocrity, before, eventually, I wanted the damn thing over with.

The things that are good about Lost in Shadow never get better after they're introduced, while the things that are bad about it keep piling up. You can put up with rudimentary combat for a time, awful hit detection and all, but by hour 10, and your second sword upgrade, you ought at least to be able to make contact with your foes more than half the time. And there's very little variety in the enemy type, which wouldn't be a problem if the combat were more fun, but it gets to the point where you return to an area to find all the enemies have respawned and you can't help but sigh.

I'm a sucker for games that look pretty -- that may not have the most graphical horsepower under the hood, but that have interesting and inspired art direction -- and Lost in Shadow does. It definitely cribs from the Ico playbook, but I'll take that over another space-marine corridor shooter any day. And its beauty isn't skin-deep. Forcing your mind to understand the connection between the three-dimensional objects in the foreground, and the two-dimensional shadow in the background, is challenging and novel.

It's because this game started out so strongly that I ended up so disappointed. I really can't recommend Lost in Shadow, especially not at the retail price, but I'm not sorry I played it. An interesting failure can be the most valuable kind of game.

And, hey, it was better than Limbo.

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Buy Lost in Shadow from Amazon (affiliate link)

Winter games preview

Above: My most-anticipated winter game, pretty much by default.

During all the excitement of shoveling snow for three straight days last week, I plum forgot that my winter games preview was going up at thephoenix.com.

Weak slate this year, even as these things go, but it was a fun piece to write for precisely that reason. I have no special insight into any of the games that are coming out, and I'm tired of always giving everything the benefit of the doubt in previews, so instead I decided to go negative. Massively negative. Every entry explores the ways in which the games could fail, even for games I am legitimately looking forward to.

Looks like it worked, since the one commenter on the piece so far called me a massive tool. But I was hurt that he called what I do "mainstream videogame journalism." Only one of those words is accurate.

Happy new year, everyone!

Year in Review: The best games of 2010

Above: Not even a game of the year nod can make Ethan Mars smile.

We're wrapping up our recap of the year that was. Today: the best games of 2010.

We've saved the best for last. You can click through to the feature on thephoenix.com to read all the blurbs. Here's my list of the 10 best games of 2010.

1. Heavy Rain
2. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
3. BioShock 2
4. Rock Band 3
5. Red Dead Redemption
6. Dance Central
7. DeathSpank
8. Halo: Reach
9. Bayonetta
10. Final Fantasy XIII

That about wraps it up for 2010. As always, thank you so much for reading. Have a merry Christmas and a happy new year. We'll meet right back here in 2011.

Year in Review: The worst games of 2010

Above: "It's just me getting killed by a giant spider for an hour and a half. It cost 80 million krone."

All this week, we'll be recapping the year that was. Today: The worst games of the year.

As I keep darkly alluding, I found this to be a challenging year in a lot of ways.* Nowhere was this more apparent than with all the supposedly great games I struggled to play. Every year there's crap, and everybody agrees it's crap, but this year, more than any I can recall, there was crap that people kept telling me was an ice-cream sundae.

In chronological order of when I played them, here are the games I liked the least in 2010:

Army of Two: The 40th Day: I was sad to see this game go in the wrong direction, because I thought the first Army of Two showed a lot of promise. But the sequel ditched the humor, kept the monotonous duck-and-cover shooting, and added a terrible checkpoint system to boot. Nothing was worse than laboriously customizing your weapons, dying in the next firefight, and finding that you had to do it all over again. Ugh.

No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle: This is where we're talking about disappointing sequels, right? I loved No More Heroes so much, and I thought the sequel wasn't fit for the tissue box next to Travis Touchdown's easy chair. I can't even talk about it. It makes me sad.

Aliens vs. Predator: Never wrote about this one. In fact, I'd forgotten I played it until I saw it on somebody else's worst-of list. Whoever that was, damn you for reminding me of this awful game.

God of War III: Mechanically, God of War III was sound, but it was the moment when Kratos stopped being cool. Dude needs to get over it. He's like the guy who shows up at his 20th high school reunion wearing the same leather jacket he wore in the twelfth grade. It's embarrassing at this point.

Splinter Cell: Conviction: I get what Ubi was trying to do here. It just didn't work. Even if the aggro-stealth concept had worked, we'd still have had to deal with Fisher's motormouthed antagonists. Who the hell signed off on them?

Crackdown 2: We are drowning in awful sequels right now. Pinpointing the failure of Crackdown 2 is difficult, because in every way that matters, it is exactly the same game as its predecessor. Except the first game is still one of my favorites of this generation, and the second one is... not.

Limbo: Man, I don't even know. To me, this seemed like just another too-difficult indie platformer with delusions of grandeur.

Mafia II: Not without its charms, I still wonder what sane person would keep playing through this game's terrible action scenes unless somebody was paying them. It still wasn't enough for me!

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: This, not Limbo, is the game where I feel the most like I missed something. I read too many positive things from too many people I respect to discount it as simply a crappy game. But that's what it felt like to me: lousy camera, bad controls, dumb story. I can't get past these things.

Medal of Honor: If there was a more generic, mediocre shooter out there in 2010, I didn't play it.

Tomorrow: The best games of 2010.

*I'm just trying to seem dark and mysterious, for the ladies.

Year in Review: Honorable mentions

All this week, we'll be recapping the year that was. Today: 2010 honorable mentions.

Rough as this year was, there were still plenty of games that I played and enjoyed, even if they didn't end up making my list of the best games of the year. In chronological order of when I played them:

Battlefield: Bad Company 2: I don't think I ever wrote about this game. I am generally tired of military-themed shooters, but I dug the big maps and the vehicles, and I want to apologize to the dozens of teammates I inadvertently murdered whenever I was driving.

Alan Wake: A terrific-looking shooter with a decent gameplay gimmick and a nice sense of pacing. If only this bestselling author hadn't been such a terrible writer.

Super Mario Galaxy 2: Even if I find myself reaching the "it's not you, it's me" stage with a lot of these Nintendo games, the quality is undeniable. You still can't screw with Super Mario.

Hydro Thunder Hurricane: A super-fun throwback arcade racer for Xbox Live Arcade. I really, really liked this game. It almost made my top 10 for the year.

Metroid: Other M: Uneven, especially where the storytelling was concerned, but Other M was a fun and fast-paced update to the Metroid universe. I just wish it hadn't gotten better after it ended!

NBA Jam: I almost forgot it existed, but I had fun with this game while it lasted. God, is that the most mild praise you can imagine, or what?

Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem!: My first review for Joystiq was also my biggest surprise of the year. This game's reach doesn't exceed its grasp; it accomplishes everything it sets out to do.

Donkey Kong Country Returns: Rock-solid 2d platforming marred only by -- what else? -- shoehorned waggle control. Apparently there's a classic controller mode available, which probably would have helped to know when I was playing it.

Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom: Another surprise. I predict that, a year from now, one of two things will happen: either you'll be able to get this game for five bucks from every bargain bin in the country, or you'll have to get it for a hundred on eBay. Both outcomes seem equally likely.

Mass Effect 2: All right, you bastards. You win. I like Mass Effect 2. Sure, I still find the moment-to-moment play excruciating, just trying to accomplish the simplest tasks, and the plot isn't that good. I've pretty much lost track of the whole thing at this point. The non-stop recitation of alien races and planets is stupefying. And, come on: The Illusive Man? Seriously? WTF kind of lazy storytelling is that? He smokes so mysteriously! And where the hell is he? Is there a bathroom on his solar observation deck?

But, on the other hand, my renegade FemShep is awesome. I like her dark humor and her clear-eyed take on things. She doesn't do the things I would do in her position, but neither do I feel like the game is forcing my hand. I'm trying to get inside this character's head. There are times when it seems like this is exactly what a roleplaying game is supposed to be.

Now let's never speak of this again.

Some Games I Wish I Had Played: Split/Second, Blur, Metro 2033, Joe Danger, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Pac Man CE DX

Can't win 'em all.

Tomorrow: the worst games of 2010.

Year in Review: Year-end superlatives

Above: A winner is you, everyone.

All this week, we'll be recapping the year that was. Today: year-end superlatives.

Welcome Trend: Critical Non-Consensus

With the annual "Year in Swooning" quiz, I'm trying to point out how carried away game sites often get when it comes to the flavor of the week. But there is some progress in this regard. This year, I felt like there actually was legitimate, respectful disagreement about some of the highest-profile games, both indie and major-label.

Consider:

• Deadly Premonition, a game with a Metacritic score of 69, nevertheless becomes a cult hit, thanks to word of mouth and the work of impassioned critics.
• Heavy Rain, a game with a Metacritic score of 87, nevertheless is savaged mercilessly in Boston's second-biggest newspaper.
• Some idiot calls Limbo "the worst sort of art-for-art's-sake garbage."
• Even Seth Schiesel doesn't like something.

I think it's a sign that gamers are feeling more self-confident that we don't have to band together all the time. This is a good thing!

PR Knuckleheads of the Year: Gabe and Tycho

Count me among those who thought the original comic was not only hilarious, but took aim at a worthy target. But the followup was a disaster. When some readers objected, Gabe and Tycho could have taken the criticisms in the spirit they were intended. A simple apology would have done nicely. At the very least, acknowledge the complaints respectfully and move on. Hell, ignoring them would have been better than what actually happened.

Instead, Gabe and Tycho doubled down with a comic that not only mischaracterized the complaints, but essentially said that the people who were offended are stupid. And then followed that up by selling Dickwolves merch.

All this was uncharacteristic for two guys who are so generous and inclusive, both with PAX and with Child's Play. These are the guys who banned booth babes from PAX, with the blessing of a majority of their readership. So I certainly don't doubt their motives. To their minds, a joke is a joke, but a bunch of their readers disagreed and I think they they did real damage to their brand by assuming a defensive posture instead of listening. To this day I don't think anything approaching an apology has come out, not for the first comic or for the followup.

For myself, I don't think they would have needed to apologize for the original strip, but they could have dealt with it in a better way than becoming the latest and most ironic exemplars of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Dickwad Theory.

Game Blog of the Year: Gamer Melodico

Barely one year into it, Kirk Hamilton and company have already made a big impact with Gamer Melodico. They did it all: good-natured jabs at obnoxious game design; satire; finding inventive ways to comment on topical subjects; round-table discussions that make you feel like you're sitting in a coffee shop with the writers.

All of it's done with a good attitude, a healthy sense of humor, and keen minds. I can't sum up the site any better than they did themselves: "Gamer Melodico is a blog about games, written by friendly people who like to play."

(And, what the hell, an honorable mention for Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits. Paddon's not on-target all the time, but, in the words of Han Solo, "I must have hit real close to the mark to get her all riled up like this, huh kid?")

Developers of the Year: Ex-LucasArts dudes

No big-budget studio jumped out at me this year. Rockstar San Diego did great work with Red Dead Redemption. Retro Studios successfully rebooted Donkey Kong Country. Quantic Dream accomplished most of its very ambitious goals with Heavy Rain. 2K Marin not only stunned me by releasing a worthy followup to BioShock, but by all accounts the "Minerva's Den" DLC was even better (unfortunately, I didn't play it).

But I have to give a shout-out here to two people that I am always rooting for, who found their voices this year with downloadable games. Ron Gilbert, via Hothead Games, brought us the hilarious DeathSpank, which was followed almost immediately by a surprise sequel. And Tim Shafer's DoubleFine Productions rebounded after the disappointing Brutal Legend to release Costume Quest, a funny and light downloadable game that's gotten plaudits from a lot of people whose opinions I value. 2010 was a good year for both of these guys, and they're two of the best we've got.

Publisher of the Year: Nintendo

Even though I still struggle a bit with a lot of the newer Nintendo games, it's hard to argue that Nintendo isn't the big-name publisher that is consistently putting out the highest-quality products. On the Wii, Super Mario Galaxy and Donkey Kong Country Returns were both worthy of their names, and Metroid: Other M was respectable. On the DS, a little game called Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem! was my biggest surprise of the year. Maybe sales of the Wii are flagging, but year in and year out, Nintendo never disappoints on the software side.

Game Console of the Year: Xbox 360

We've long since reached the point at which everybody has made up their minds on this generation of game consoles. Five years into it, the Wii's star has started to fall a bit, the PlayStation 3 has never gotten on track, and the Xbox 360 has almost defaulted to the head of the pack, massive hardware failure rates notwithstanding.

So why choose the Xbox 360 as the game console of the year? For one thing, the only hardware this year that even approached the level of buzzworthy was Kinect. The jury's still out, but it's got a lot of potential. It was the Xbox that once again had the lion's share of big exclusives, both in retail and download. And, price hike or not, Xbox Live continues to be the best online gaming option around. That's why I bought my second Xbox 360 this year.

That, and my first one red-ringed after almost five years. It was like the death of the last living World War 1 veteran.

Tomorrow: Honorable mentions.

Year in Review: The best of the blog

Above: Actually the best of Insult Swordfighting.

All this week, we'll be recapping the year that was. First up: the best of Insult Swordfighting, 2010.

It's been a strange year. My output was lower than usual. I spent a couple of months without playing anything at all. When I did play games, I often felt uninspired, or even gloomy. Without making things weird between us, I'll just say that a lot happened this year, personally and professionally, that made me question the role of video games in my life. But it's all good. As we head into 2011, I'm excited about the way things are going, and I'm looking forward to playing and writing a lot more.

Without further ado, here are some of the better Insult Swordfighting posts you may have missed from 2010:

January: Bayonetta. How is it possible for one game to be so awesome, yet so embarrassing?

February: I returned from the disabled list. If you're wondering, I have made nearly a full recovery. The doctor and my occupational therapist both told me that it's extremely rare for people to heal so well from this type of injury.

March: I made the first of many impassioned defenses of Heavy Rain. And I spent way too much time writing about PAX East. Speaking of which, I still haven't gotten my pass for the next one.

April: I was about to vanish from blogging for awhile. One reason was Peggle.

May: N/A

June: What's with the collectibles in Alan Wake? Plus, my banned review of Splinter Cell: Conviction finally saw daylight.

July: I think a lot of people thought I was trying to stick it to Ebert, but actually this post was about how much I disliked Limbo, and the critical conversation surrounding it.

August: Seriously, I didn't like Limbo.

September: Why did Metroid: Other M wait until after the closing credits to get good?

October: 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die is released, becomes a runaway bestseller, and revenue from its sales through my Amazon Associates account makes me an instant millionaire.

November: "The Year in Swooning" is always fun.

December: My vendetta against BioWare knows no bounds. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I stayed up until 4:30 AM on Sunday playing Mass Effect 2.)

Tomorrow: Year-end superlatives.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Above: It's the man, bringing you down.

Autolog recommends that you read my review of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit at thephoenix.com. If you follow me on Twitter (why don't you follow me on Twitter?), then you know that I love this game with a passion bordering on obsession. I found myself thinking about it as I went to sleep at night, and when I got up in the morning. When I load the title screen, my heart starts beating a little faster. This is shameful, but it's the truth.

In the limited space I have for reviews, I prefer to focus on one or two major points rather than trying to cover everything. In this case, it seemed most important to talk about how flippin' awesome the hot pursuits are, so that's the majority of the review. I didn't even mention the social features, despite how prominently they feature in the game's marketing, and even though I'm about to discuss them now, the bottom line is that the social features are a nice extra and not a game-changer.

For Autolog is, at heart, just a leaderboard. In that sense it's no different from the high score list on a Pac-Man machine 30 years ago. If no one else has played an event, you hop right to the top. If they have, your incentive is to beat them. Occasionally, you return to the game to find that you have been displaced. Your friends' scores update automatically, which, again, is not new or unique to Hot Pursuit.

Where the Autolog departs from tradition is in the ease of use. You might finish a race and return to the menu to be interrupted by a breaking news update that someone has just beaten your score. With one button press, you can immediately load that event and set to work getting your revenge. More than once, this feature resulted in an asynchronous multiplayer game between me and some of my friends who were online. We could have raced each other head to head; instead, we were trading lap times in what felt like a 21st-century update of playing chess by mail.

That's intended as a compliment.

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• Buy Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (PS3) from Amazon
• Buy Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (Xbox 360) from Amazon
• Buy Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (PC) from Amazon