You have a rendevous with death...

This review for Gears of War 2 comes late because I had the chance to play it co-op throughout, once a week, with a friend. Developed by Epic Games and published by Microsoft exclusively for the X-Box 360, I think it’s fair to say that this was one of the most anticipated games of the year. The first Gears of War set a standard, not only for third person shooters but as a graphics benchmark for consoles in general. Gears of War was in my opinion the most impressive looking game of its time and it remains a fantastic showcase for Epic’s much-licensed Unreal Technology 3 game engine.

With over five million copies of the first Gears sold the anticipation for the sequel was sky high. Did it deliver? If I may cut to the chase I would say it certainly did. Gears of War 2 improves on the original in every way and serves as a textbook on how to deliver a worthy sequel.

The story of Marcus Fenix and company continues as the Locust Horde’s relentless assault on humanity reaches endgame. The cities of Sera colony have sunk into the crust, one after the other, until only the final bastion of Jacinto remains. As a testament to the polished mechanics of the first title, return players will be glad to know that the control scheme is completely intact. It worked fine then and it works even better now! This insures the game feels comfortable right from the first scene. Other then that they did what a sequel should do and that’s advance the core concept in any way they can. The additional enemies, weapons, vehicles and tactical extras added a tremendous amount of variety to the Gears universe, which is proving to be an even more wacky and wild place than previously thought.

It’s not just that the game play is good; in some scenes it’s bloody excellent. Battles taking place in bizarre environments are brutal and unpredictable. Interesting combinations of enemy types and unusual set pieces create a constant challenge with nothing becoming bored or stale. Overall the pacing is quite good. I thought the game started with a bang and ended with some very satisfying battles that put the skills you honed to the test.

I quite liked the story in Gears of War 2 and there were many great scenes, both big and small. Many have said that Dom’s subplot was clumsy and ineffective but I disagree. Without giving anything away I think the story illustrates a hard fact about civilians and conflict that was told in a stark and brutal manner. I also like how this game ended. It was a satisfying conclusion that opened up the possibilities for the inevitable third game.

The online multiplayer segment of the game is substantial but came riddled with issues. Patches have since been dutifully released but some bugs remain. New to the game is a co-operative Horde mode where you team up to form an online quartet and look to survive wave after wave of Locust enemies. It’s a lot of fun and sure to become a stable game mode in the future.

Gears of War 2 promised to be a badass blockbuster and I think Epic was true to its word. I had a ball, I will play it again, and I am really looking forward to seeing how this world and its heroic characters continue to develop in future games. So long as serialized titles come out as great as this, you won’t hear me complain in the least!

Once upon a time in the magical kingdom of Zzzzzzz... Trolls! Must pop troll zits with my pistol... Zzzzzzz...

For a change of pace over the holidays I went through Fable 2, a light-hearted fantasy role-playing game developed by Lionhead Studios and its industry leading founder, Peter Molyneaux. Between the first and second Fable Lionhead was purchased by Microsoft, meaning that Peter was now in the market of making X-Box 360 exclusives. I was especially curious to see if Peter and his team were going to take special advantage of the console like Epic Games has done with Gears of War. Sadly this wasn’t the case.

Before I get into that however let’s give the good stuff its due. In Fable 2 you play a hero born from a powerful bloodline, one that allows you to wield magic. A hero hunting villain is hot to kill you in hopes of ending the line and preventing your kind from stopping his plans for world domination. For the rest of the story you are building yourself up in order to facilitate this final showdown. The quaint land of Albion is a pretty enough place to go for a walk in the forest. You’ll encounter a modest variety of enemies throughout the realm and dispatching them is Fable 2’s best feature. At any given time the player can use a melee weapon, a missile weapon, or a suite of magic spells. Mixing up these attacks as you see fit is what kept me in the game to its completion.

Fable 2 claims to provide variety for your character but I was left nonplussed with the customization available. In theory the things your character does has an effect on their appearance. Good characters begin looking saintly, evil characters demonic. Eat pies and get fat, eat celery and get thin. Use melee weapons to get buff, use magic to get enchanted looking. In practice however characters get funnelled in certain ways. All characters will use the three attack options on a continuous basis, I mean they're there and fun to use so why wouldn't you? This means that each hero is strong looking, tall, and has blue lines of power on their face. My wife played completely differently than I did in almost every way but by game's end our characters could have passed for brother and sister. By that I also mean that she looked a lot like me, a VERY BIG girl with cankles and the quads of a linebacker. Going on the all-celery diet couldn’t halt this genetic predisposition. That my wife couldn’t make a heroic female that looked feminine in the traditional sense, or even a sword-maiden possessing her own slim figure, was in her own words: “disappointing.”

This lack of depth is a theme that can be found throughout the game. Fable 2 has all the options of a role-playing game but there is little below the surface. There are few weapons to match the mere handful of skills and spells to master. What this means is that after just one play through your character can already do everything so there is no point in going through it again. The wardrobe is threadbare, the equipment list equally so and most of it is silly. You can buy property and earn rent money but all this money is good for is buying more houses because everything at the market can be bought for a handful of coins. The world itself is cut up into bite-sized regions that can be entered and exited only in certain places. It’s not an open world in the real sense of the word. The quests you undertake can be amusing but they’re all short, single-chapter affairs and there aren’t many of them. The jobs available are beyond repetitive and most use the same mini-game mechanic as social interaction with people, so both aspects of the game get old real quick. Marriage and child rearing is present but more even tedious than in real life. (I don’t know how they even managed that!)

One aspect of the game I liked was a jump forward of many years. There are opportunities to do something (or not) and when the story jumps your choice has a definite impact on the world. Buildings will have gone up or have come down. This alone could be the basis of a great game but like everything else it was handled in a very basic, limited fashion. You get just a taste of this mechanic. The idea itself, like so many others in Fable 2, seemingly don’t benefit from having earned the developer’s strength of conviction.

Worst of all however are the bugs and other forms of technical imprecision that abounds throughout the game. Your character moves poorly and tends to get caught on objects. The game slowdown and stuttering is brutal during combats. Finding button prompt locations is a chancy, clumsy exercise. The menus lag badly and weren’t given enough thought as to how people were going to use them. The maps (not that you need them much given the simple geography) are not helpful. Finally the co-op feature touted in this title is unplayable because they couldn’t do anything reasonable with the camera. An exclusive game of this nature demands a modicum of polish in order to properly represent its console and Lionhead failed to deliver in this regard.

My wife downloaded the Knothole Island addition and after completing it in a single sitting I’ll warn you that it’s just more of the same. You’re also paying too much for it. If I paid $60.00 for thirty lukewarm hours of Fable 2 gaming then Knothole Island should come to us for about $4.00 but it actually costs about triple that. It’s also way too easy if your character has already completed the main quest. If Lionhead wants to pump this game for more money they should at least make their episodic content a real challenge as chances are it’s going to be played by advanced characters.

That my wife played the game every bit as much as I did was a nice change. We got to talk about the title throughout our play and witness the consequences of each other’s actions. This was especially handy because we got to watch the ending twice, which made us both perfectly certain that it was rubbish and a waste of time seeing as for the last hour of the story you do NOTHING of consequence. She made no bones about why Fable 2 grabbed her attention though. She’s very busy and has her mind on other things right now. She is willing to play a game provided it’s both exceedingly simple and ridiculously easy. She could and does play better but can’t be bothered to expend the energy these evenings past.

She’s quite right, as usual. Fable 2 is indeed simple and easy but on the other hand it isn’t smart or polished enough to come off as charming, merely as struggling. Thin content and shallow depth might be the hallmark of a game geared towards casual play and in truth the stink of that particular fear lay thick on Fable 2 but it’s more than just that.

Lionhead Studios has never been a technical powerhouse but you don’t need to be to make a great game. That said it appears that Molyneux’s Microsoft-owned company is getting outstripped mightily by other game developers, especially its role-playing peers. After playing Fallout 3 and Fable 2 in the same season it feels like the former came from a future generation. It didn’t however, games like Fallout 3 and Mass Effect have become the standard and so the comparison works in the opposite direction. Fable 2 feels old right out of the packaging and is a lacklustre showcase of what the X-Box 360 can do. If you are only going to sink time into one role-playing game this year, Fable 2 isn’t what I would recommend. Better to stay with the times.

IT'S... ALIVE!!!

Activision Blizzard C.E.O. Bobby Kotick came up with an interesting answer to the question: How do you exploit a successful game franchise with yearly titles and have them not turn into watered down crap? Actually it was a question of his making and ‘exploit’ was his term of choice. It wasn’t a move for squeamish gamer purists however, people who might hesitate just because an idea could be considered artistically unsavoury. What he did was take the popular Call of Duty brand and allow two separate developers to work on alternating titles. Each team had two years to make a game and they would be published on concurrent years. The games would get the time they need to ensure a minimum level of quality and yet there would be a new product to push every Christmas. The people who cared about games would be happy and the executive who only cares about money would be happy.

One thing this plan had going for it was Activision-owned Infinity Ward, creator of the original Call of Duty and its sequel. These were the developers that initially captured lightning in a bottle with their tight gun play, intense atmosphere, and dedication to historical facts. All other companies that would make a Call of Duty game, be it for personal computer, console, or cell phone would have an established standard to achieve, to say nothing of their proprietary engine and other essential pieces of game tech.

The catch - and there’s always a catch - is that the other company, called Treyarch Corporation, did not share in equal success. Call of Duty expansions and the number three title in the series were generally considered good but not great. This consensus was exacerbated when Infinity Ward’s next game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare became a smash hit, one of the highest rated shooters of all time, and a multiplayer power house.

It was at this time when enthusiast gamers began expressing their impatience with the Kotick business model. It was clear that the now revered Call of Duty franchise was at its best when in the hands of Infinity Ward and that Treyarch’s attempts were a distraction. When Activision announced that the next title in the series, the unnumbered Call of Duty: World at War, was not only going back to Treyarch but back from the fresh modern setting to the overplayed World War II theatre there was much dismissal and general disdain. Not to worry, we were told. Call of Duty 3 was not indicative of Treyarch’s abilities, they weren’t given enough time to shine and that would not be the case henceforth.

So now, with the kinks of the Kotick plan ironed out what was the result? How does World at War stand on its own and how does it measure up to Modern Warfare, one of last year’s best games?

The first thing I’ll say is World at War is an unsettlingly accurate clone of Modern Warfare. I use the term unsettling because while playing the game feelings of a Frankenstein transplant were evoked, of a brain being moved from one body to another. I’ll credit Treyarch with this: they managed to make a game that doesn’t feel like they made it.

That said however, they did copy an award winning game and so naturally World at War has a lot going for it. The thing is the game is so much like Modern Warfare that if you read that review a year ago you’re pretty much up to speed on this game. (In truth that’s why I took so much time laying out the unusual history of the franchise rather than talk about the game itself.)

But on to it we’ll go: World at War looks and plays nicely, exactly like Modern Warfare did only with a World War II skin. There have been some minor additions to the game engine like limb damage and flame throwing effects. Other than that it’s a by the numbers Call of Duty with a tank level, a plane level, a sniping level, etc. This isn't the first time we players get to attack the Reichstag in a war game but they do a nice job and it is the first time we get to experience the event in High Definition. The horrors of war are revealed to the player dutifully, from torture to air strike survivors to soldiers on fire falling almost gently to their knees before lying down. You can play the single player chapters in co-op mode but in what must have been a design oversight you have to complete the level in single player mode before it unlocks for co-op. This was an annoyance for those of us who wanted to play with friends right off the bat.

The multiplayer component mimics its wildly popular predecessor right down to the levelling up for new weapons and perks. The expansion here was the addition of tank levels, or levels where tanks re-spawn and can be entered to boost firepower. These levels are larger to accommodate the vehicles which results in more sporadic fighting amongst the infantrymen but I found it to be a nice change.

One value added feature deserves true praise and that is the ‘Nazi Zombie’ mini-game. Nazi Zombies you ask? I say why choose? In this mode you (and a buddy or three if you wish) are holed up in a building while wave after wave of Nazi zombies try to get through the windows and into your sweet, succulent brains. You get points for every zombie you kill and these points can be redeemed for weapons hanging on the wall or to open up new areas. This mode has become a gamer night favourite and is a great example of what other kinds of games can be made with the engine. A full game version of this mode with an expansive haunted mansion to explore would be an instant classic!

So yes, World at War is a good game and yet my usual enthusiasm for titles of this calibre is usually more effusive. I’m finding it strange to applaud a developer whose best effort to date, their crowning achievement, was to become the shadow of another team. Am I being too sentimental in thinking that games should have their developer’s personality within, their sense of style embedded somewhere in the code? Or is cloning success the cost-effective wave of the future? Mr. Kotick, who upon Activision’s merger with Blizzard under the auspices of the Vivendi media conglomerate, now runs the largest video game empire on earth. I would guess that he’s the one with the most say in the matter, at least until he discovers another product with more appealing numbers than video games.

Surely there are other industries worthy enough to be exploited? I hear he likes modern art.

A Ten Megaton Triumph! Break out the Fancy Lad snack cakes!

Another year, another attempt to resurrect my neglected blog. I have buried myself in all of the excellent game titles that crop up come year's end to say nothing of the momentous news events of 2009. I've been absorbing all and not letting a drop out, reading rather than writing, playing rather than pontificating. Now I've come up for air and will do my best to provide some reviews...

Video game enthusiasts can be a particularly demanding breed of customer. These days every industry makes use of the Internet to connect with their base to a certain degree but game players were pioneers in this regard and they have taken the outlet further than most. To that end they are not only opinionated but determined to project their views in a public forum. As a result huge groundswells of public sentiment are not uncommon.

There are advantages to this phenomenon. Game developers can receive as much feedback on their work as they are capable of processing. One hopes this constructive criticism assists in creating a better product down the line. There is a dark side to this feedback as well however, when enthusiasts erupt into rabid howls of protestation when one of their sacred cows switches owners and moves into another dairy farm. Such was the dilemma Bethesda Softworks found themselves in when they had the audacity to secure the rights to the formidable Fallout franchise from Interplay Entertainment. Despite the hail of outcry from such highbrow institutions as the fan site ‘No Mutant Allowed’ Bethesda persevered to release Fallout 3.

The story begins with brief, character building scenes of your birth, infancy, childhood, and approach to adulthood. All of this takes place in a hermetically sealed Vault that protects your community from the ravages of a nuclear holocaust that occurred some two hundred years ago. Play truly begins with a tragedy that forces you to leave the Vault and enter the irradiated wasteland where Washington D.C. barely stands. There you will find mutated life forms, pitiless raiders, and the last remnants of human civilization in all their motley factions. You will arm up, pick a direction, and scavenge your way towards adventure!

Those familiar with Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls games will feel at home here. Their signature open world in the first person perspective is on display. To say however that this game is merely ‘Oblivion with guns’ is grossly unfair. It’s obvious that Bethesda has learned much from each game they have made and Fallout 3 in my opinion is their finest effort yet.

There are few games one will spend more time with than a roleplaying game. In Fallout 3’s case it was around sixty hours from beginning to end, making sure to take my time and see what the world offered. I was delighted to discover that nothing got old in this time, nothing felt repetitive. The combat, a combination of real time and turn based style remained satisfying throughout. The many computers to be hacked and locks to be picked presented some well thought out mini-games that broke up the fighting scenes nicely. The conversations with non-player characters along with your dialogue options were not as advanced as what we have seen in similar games such as Mass Effect, but they were to the point and got you back into the action with minimal fuss.

Given all that must be done to create an open world game I was impressed by how expertly all aspects of this title was crafted. This was especially true with the character development system, the statistics that tell you who your character is. The system is better than what Bethesda has used in their Elder Scrolls games, it is not nearly as exploitable and each of the twenty levels the players advance through adds something interesting to the character. This information is conveyed to you with a simple yet stylish menu system that I found pleasant to navigate and manage. The point of all these disparate components in a roleplaying game is to immerse you in your character, to let you know who that person is so that you may better become them while you play. In this regard Fallout 3 did an excellent job. While playing I became my character and acted as I thought she would rather than what I might do. This is perhaps the greatest compliment I can give the game designers and I feel what must be at the heart of a successful roleplaying game.

The second part of that immersing equation is the world itself, is it worth exploring and interacting with? Again Bethesda did fine work in this regard. It was a brilliant idea to have the game take place in Washington D.C. after the bombs fell. Seeing America’s greatest monuments, scarred but still standing is a surprisingly emotional experience. To discover the regal throne of Lincoln, all but the Great Emancipator’s head, is to experience not only the awe of standing before the real thing but also to feel a great injustice at its defacing. I had no reason, or quest if you will, to fight my way into the Capitol Building but I did, as any tourist of the age would. Despite its ruin it still felt sacred. Though my character was heavily armed I still performed the cautious tread of one who walks on hallowed ground. The game abounds in such history and the dread of what may come if humanity’s Final Solution comes in the form of a nuclear holocaust.

If all this sounds too sombre and dreary for your tastes then worry not, for Interplay’s original vision of camp 50’s Americana clutched in the cold war mentality remains. A retrospective on the Duck and Cover era continues to be perversely humourous. Bethesda has made sure to mine the material and provides a light hearted counterpoint to the horrors of the waste. When hiding in the dark, eating mole rat meat and drinking toilet water just to survive, the anecdotes of President John Henry Eden on the radio will always cause you to crack a smile.

I found the various missions or quests throughout the game to be enjoyable and their rewards interesting. Many have been unsatisfied with the game’s ending and in truth Bethesda could have thought it through a little better. This is not uncommon however; ending a game seems to vex developers of all calibers. In games however the final ten minutes does not have the impact it would on a movie. Sixty hours of play over the course of a month is a true journey after all. You do it to get there and if the game is good then you don’t want to end at all.

Bringing the Fallout franchise out of the 90’s and into the new millennium required significant changes to the formula. When Bethesda did this they were the objects of an inordinate amount of disdain. This is regrettable, made even more so by the fact that Fallout 3 is a terrific game. Thankfully the final product seems to have silenced most detractors and even the most nostalgic of players must grudgingly admit that the franchise is in able hands. While not the most polished or refined video game I’ve played this year it is still one of the best and surely the most ambitious. It should not be missed and given the level of overall improvement I’ve seen, I’d wager Bethesda’s next offering will also be a must-play.

Holy Welding Torch of Christ This Game is Awesome!!!

In April of 2007 a man by the name of John Riccitiello began work as the new Chief Operating Officer of Electronic Arts, one of the two largest video game conglomerates on earth. EA had fallen victim to its own massiveness in the years prior. In order to grow it had purchased and then cannibalized smaller, more imaginative game developers, absorbed the talent into their own offices, and centrally ran all operations. What happened as a result is that the people and projects they assimilated became infected with the shortcomings of the company entire: there was too much bureaucracy and too many levels of hierarchy. This took decision making and creativity away from the game development teams. As a result EA earned a rather poor reputation for making nothing but thin sequels, movie tie-ins, and sports games that did little to differentiate themselves from year to year.

One of Mr. Riccitiello’s first tasks was to issue a surprisingly frank mea culpa for the company. The big, bloated, centrally operating model was called a mistake. Instead the company would be divided into ‘city-states’ that would enjoy more autonomy and be able to make its own decisions about the games they were creating. As well, the company turned away from focusing on obtaining licences to make games with other people’s intellectual property and instead create their own fresh ideas. Over the past year and a half video game enthusiasts saw encouraging signs resulting from this shift in leadership structure in games like Army of Two, Battlefield: Bad Company, and Spore. Now with the arrival of Dead Space I think it’s safe to say that the company has truly turned a corner and is once again a best friend of the hardcore gamer.

Dead Space is a story-driven horror shooter that takes place on board a massive mining spaceship that the main character has been sent to repair. The player soon learns that something has gone terribly wrong aboard this star-faring factory and by game’s end the full nature of this evil will be revealed. From start to finish I found this game to be one of the most polished and engrossing video game experiences in memory. Video games are large affairs utilizing dozens of people working with very advanced technology and usually on tight time constraints. There is usually something or other that doesn’t work right for has room for improvement. I honestly found none of this in Dead Space. It is one of the most finely made games I’ve ever played.

I played Dead Space on the PS3, it looked absolutely fantastic and it played the same. The USG Ishimura is a spine-chilling place to visit, just brimming with atmosphere. The environments are subtle and solid, conveying both the super-science required to construct such a thing and the patina of age that convinces you of the ship’s sixty-plus year history. The Ishimura appears somehow both old and new, making every room captivating. Add to this the absolutely superb lighting and sounds and you have a place you dread entering further even while at the same time you cannot wait to see what’s next.

The entire ship is set up as a series of dungeons that you travel back and forth through, using a type of subway system as your main hub. Each of the twelve chapters brings you to one of the ship’s section, some of them twice. Some players might not like the re-using of levels in this way, preferring to be set in one directlion and the player moves constantly forward seeing new things. Being a spaceship I thought it made sense the way it was laid out and seeing how the Ishimura is packed with so many overwhelming set pieces I didn’t mind having to revisit them from time to time. Some of the rooms in Dead Space are straight from a madman’s funhouse and will have you gaping at them in wonder.

Combat in Dead Space takes the average shooter conventions and turns them on its head. The monstrous enemies seem fine with you shooting them in the body, instead you have to take off their limbs to stop them from eating you! Dead Space is dozen hours of gruesome dismemberment and to this end they give you the right tools for the job, cutting lazers and saw blades abound. Other games have had realistic damage models on their enemies but none I know of use the technology to create the core mechanic of the game. It is not only immensely satisfying, it results in your character being as big a monster as your foes are. It’s not enough that your enemies are scary, you have to kill them in ways that scare you too!

Like many games in the survival genre Dead Space has you collecting credits, ammunition, health packs, and other tools that you can store in your inventory. The wealth you discover can be used to purchase weapon upgrades and more powerful suits of armour. This isn’t anything new but it is done very well and creates an excellent inventory management system. True survival fans can play the game without ever buying health or ammo, leaving themselves at the mercy of the random loot drops. This can create a great deal of tension, as fans of games like Resident Evil 4 will attest. There were many times in my play through where I had to favour weapons that I was constantly finding ammo for while others languished. As well, dragging myself through the game at half health with none in reserve made for some nerve-wracking encounters. In a display of smart design ammo and health can be purchased for those who need the help but then the money spent can’t be used for weapon and armour upgrades, which is the true survivalist’s reward.

The story in Dead Space is truly excellent, the characters are believable and the plot is a tightly twisted conspiracy. There are not only plenty of scary thrills and revolting gore but the psychological overtones of some of the plot points are truly disturbing and had me thinking about them days afterward. Once I had completed the game I jumped right back in to see it all again rather than play new games sitting on my shelf. The game allows you to play a second time with all of your upgraded equipment, though you can only do so on the difficulty level you initially chose. You cannot take your medium difficulty character and play on hard, for example. This might irritate some but I appreciate this choice as hard with a fully decked out character isn’t really hard at all. The variety of great looking armours, plus the fact that not every weapon can be even half upgraded with a single completion means this game can be enjoyed many times.

Dead Space is a full-spectrum package and EA has planned to go multi-media with the concept from the get-go. To that end there are comic books and an animated feature already out. Other movies and of course sequel games are apparently in the works. As games get more expensive to create the recouping of costs by maximizing exposure of the property is probably the future. I can’t speak to the quality of those other products but I’ll obviously vouch for the game itself, emphatically.

It seems one of the ongoing themes of this generation of video games is products with great potential married with serious flaws. I think one cause of this is a great many software developers are still learning the new technology. Another cause is the compromise developers are making in trying to make their product more approachable in hopes of selling to a wider audience. Dead Space is remarkable because it has steered clear of that design philosophy. It’s a game without casual compromise, relying on tried, tested and true mechanics from the genre it exemplifies. In avoiding too much new ground it perfected what it was offering and in doing so comes off as a flawless experience. I cannot recommend this game highly enough, it has become one of my all-time favourites.

Half-decent game gets half-assed review and title...

The game front has been a bit slow as of late, this is the calm before the Christmas storm. It gave me the opportunity to finish off the last game on my list of second-rate shooters and that would be Frontlines: Fuel of War for the X-Box 360.

Frontlines was put together by the newly formed Kaos Studios, who were formerly called Trauma and worked on Battlefield titles like Desert Combat. This is what piqued my initial interest in this game as the Battlefield series has always been a well-respected online multiplayer franchise with its own distinct, clear-cut style.

And this indeed is what you get with Frontines: a clean shooter cut from the Battlefield cloth. I found two things working against it however. Its use of Unreal Technology didn’t separate the game from the herd on a visual level and the oversaturated genre that is the post-modern military shooter didn’t help this in this regard either.

As should be expected the story is as limp as the title. Fuel of War? That's just plain fuel. Filling up a tank is no different than any other combustion engine. You're not saying shit with that line. If that's what you went with then what titles were discarded? Gasoline of Battle? Petrol of Skirmish? Strange but it's an ironically apt title. Frontlines lacked individuality or personal style, its own soul, which is a shame because it played competently overall.

In addition to the standard arsenal of weapons Frontlines features drones, or remote controlled attack vehicles. Miniaturized versions of tanks and helicopters mixed up the gunplay and offered a new perspective of the battlefield. Less successful were the many vehicle sections that brought nothing new to the table. The best part of Frontlines was the large maps and multi-point objectives that you had to complete without a lot of direction. You were allowed to attack the problems any way you felt like and take the heat for your decisions. These levels rewarded exploration and a patient approach, which is a far better design model than pushing forward through a script in order to activate and deactivate spawn points.

If you like how Frontlines plays then it’s a good platform for your online multiplayer as well. There is a robust community and they are releasing downloadable content like extra maps. Myself, I’ll probably be crawling back to Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat.

I also downloaded Wipeout HD on the Playstation Network, a futuristic, anti-gravity racing game with an old pedigree. The slickness of its 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second is only matched by the cool techno soundtrack. The Playstation seems to be pulling ahead of the X-Box when it comes to downloadable games. This title, Ratchet & Clank’s Quest for Booty, and the episodic Siren: Blood Curse illustrate a high level of quality, a new game experience rather than a nostalgia trip. By comparison X-Box released Braid, a game with great art but essentially a Mario clone, and Duke Nukem 3D, still a really fun shooter but clearly a product of its times. LIVE is regularly touted as the superior experience but these days I mainly see that as spin.

So far 2007 was a better year for games than 2008 but it’s an unfair comparison. To that end here is a list of games and their release dates that are on the horizon. (I'll be updating and adding to this list as more information becomes available.

Dead Space – October 14
Fable 2 – October 21
Little Big Planet – October 28
Fallout 3 – October 28
Resistance 2 – November 4
Gears of War 2 – November 7
Mirror’s Edge – November 11
Call of Duty: World At War - November 11
Left 4 Dead - November 17

Okay, so now it's nine potential game purchases over the course of a month! This industry, it is recession-proof! All of these games are getting glowing previews and all of those games are coming from developers who know what they are doing. It is therefore a ridiculous amount of content that can totally reverse my personal verdict on 2008. I hope it does.

And now for something completely different... Well not THAT different. I'm still talking about games and being a jerk...

I have been playing Sid Meier’s Civilization: Revolution whenever my lovely wife isn’t playing Civilization: Revolution, so if you really have to go pee right now then don’t bother reading the rest of this. Just go out and buy yourself a copy of Civilization: Revolution, safe with the knowledge that the game has earned my recommendation. No, this site will be gone by the time you return. It will have been erased, a rumour, like so much urine down a…

Holy Christ in Hell this new medication is making me more crazy than usual! I really need to get a proper prescription, maybe from a doctor. Anyway Civilization is an old game. The first was in 1991 and there have since been many versions that refine the game and take advantage of new hardware. This particular iteration has been made especially for the game playing console.


If you haven’t ever played Civilization it goes like this: you are the ruler of a race. You start with one meagre city at the dawn of recorded history. Your people are ignorant and disgusting, they know nothing. You haven’t even invented pottery yet. Pottery! Just how are you bringing water back from the river? Probably with the hollowed-out head of one of your own infants. Your own son, because you were thirsty, how could you? You barbarians make me sick!

From this monkey-like state you will elevate yourself. You will build things like granaries, libraries, and barracks. You will invent things like writing, mathematics, and religion. You will explore the world, finding natural resources, friendly villages, and even ancient artifacts like the Seven Cities of Gold or the Arc of the Covenant. You will create settlers who will found other cities, you will pay for roads to connect your cities, and you will even meet other civilizations making the same climb through the ages as you are. Sure they’re nice at first but then they get pushy and demanding, think Catherine the Great with a coke problem. They’ll demand you hand over Lao Tzu. Old Man Tzu! Wee little Chinese guy, wouldn’t hurt anyone, but they want him. Don’t worry though, that bitch Cathy is the reason you’re inventing catapults and submarines in the first place.

You can play the game warlike or peaceful and chances are you’ll do a bit of both in every session. The game runs through the entire human experience from bronze working to intercontinental ballistic missiles. You win the game by creating and maintaining a civilization that reigns supreme either through military domination, scientific discovery, economic mastery, or cultural pre-eminence.

A question that a devoted Civilization player might ask is: Is this game the same as the Civ. IV I’ve already got on the computer? The answer is no. This is a re-imagining of the core Civ. idea. It has been simplified, plays out on a smaller world, and you can play an entire game in about three hours rather than killing your whole weekend. It’s a great game of Civ. but it’s not in competition with the main product.

The game is such a great departure from all of the grim shooters and horror faire that I usually love. It’s whimsical and casts the whole rise of humanity in a quirky light. It’s a simple game to start but takes time to master the nuances. It’s a beautiful looking game with lots of supplemental information in the menus, be it better playing tips or the actual historical significance of all the game elements from Stonehenge to Charles Babbage. (Who? Ahh! See? This be some educational shit up in this bitch. I be learning yo!)

For the first while you would do well to play against the computer and get your empire building up to snuff on one of the five difficulty levels. You can however play on-line against multiple opponents. Another neat idea is the Game of the Week feature. Everyone from around the world can play on the same pre-generated map and your score will appear on a leaderboard denoting the finest Civilization player on earth!

This super-addictive turn-based strategy game can be found on the X-Box 360, the PS 3, and even the Nintendo DS hand-held. It is in my opinion the best PC-to-console game I’ve ever played and that’s because it’s its own game, a perfect distillation of Sid Meier’s original idea to put the entire human race in the palm of our hands.

How can anything be so right and so wrong at the same time... I mean besides me, of course...

Ahh yes, Metal Gear Solid! We come to it at last! If the blithering of pungent otaku hermits is to be believed this legendary videogame franchise is said to act like a combination of Viagra and powdered rhinoceros horn on the superfluous appendage of the fanboy elite. Crafted over the course of years by the very kensai of console gaming, Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear Solid 4 – Guns of the Patriots is said to be the conclusion and crowning achievement of this twenty year old epic. The game’s protagonist, Solid Snake, nears the end of his life and with his last remaining days he will battle all adversaries, both old and new, for the freedom of the very future itself!

Not bad, eh? So after all that let me just come out and tell you what you want to know right off the bat: Guns of the Patriots is a must-have PS3 title for two reasons. The first is because the latest Metal Gear has some of the greatest things I’ve seen in a videogame. The second is because this game has some of the most ridiculously pathetic things I’ve seen in a videogame. With but a single Blu-Ray disk you get all the heady highs and basement-bottom lows this medium has to offer. I regard Guns as an old high school girlfriend; gorgeous, tight, and thoroughly fucking retarded every time she opened her mouth. The constant hassle of breaking up and making up (read: cut-scenes and load times) are more than ameliorated by the high quality hate-sex (read: game play.)

First, the sex - I mean game play. From the moment the menu screen loads up you know that you are in for a treat! Metal Gear Solid 4 truly is a game that has to be seen to be believed. Graphics-wise whatever measuring stick you want to whip out, this Metal Gear will satisfy. Environments, textures, particle effects - the game excels on all fronts and is one of the finest looking console titles around. The sound, both in music and effects, is right in step with the visuals.

That however is not the great part. The game engine is capable of real time cut-scene quality close-ups that can then swing out seamlessly into the third person view. They prove this by often transitioning directly from cut-scene to combat and the only way you can tell the difference is because your H.U.D. returns to view. With the touch of a button you can shift between the traditional third person, to the newer over-the-shoulder view, to the first person/aiming down the sights perspective at any time. You can play this game in any of those modes and it will serve you well to use all three on the fly in any given scene in order to see exactly what you want to see.

What this amazing multi-view does is make Guns not only the decent stealth game it always was but a truly great shooting game too boot. There are seventy weapons to find or buy and while you can only hold five at a time the other sixty-five can be quickly accessed out of the pause menu and then equipped. You can even buy ammo and special attachments mid-battle. Assault rifle not thrilling you like it use to? Pull out your drum-fed grenade launcher or perhaps one of the Javelin or Stinger missile systems. The sheer volume of weaponry at your fingertips, from tranquiller darts to rail cannons, makes it a Metal Gear for all players and all playing styles.

This variety, the level design, the difficulty settings, plus the tons of secrets to find and special rewards to earn give the single player story more re-playability than most narrative-driven games. Perks like an in-game digital camera and virtual iPod allow you to take pictures while you play and create your own soundtrack with music from the current and all previous Metal Gears. The on-line component – aside from a torturous registration procedure – is surprisingly good once you understand that this is a multiplayer shooter that is not in direct competition with games like Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3. The game’s stealth elements are married very well with the standard on-line modes and encourage you to mix up your techniques. The overall polish, thoughtfulness, and product depth say one thing above all: there was a lot of skill and love put into this game.

The sad irony to be found in Metal Gear Solid 4 is that a title with such excellent game play and features doesn’t require the crutches of complex narrative or elaborate cut-scenes to add value to the product. Alas poor Guns has been not only been saddled with such conventions but brought to its knees under the weight it must bear. In my experience Metal Gear Solid 4 stands alone in this regard: not only is it the most comically horrible action story ever told, it requires HOURS of your patience to tell it.

There are chapters or acts in this title where the game play and the cut-scenes share equal time! This goes far beyond getting up to make a sandwich. True Story: One time my lovely wife was watching me play this game until a cut-scene came up. She then went into the kitchen and started preparing lasagna for our dinner; four layers of meat, tomato sauce, cheese and pasta sheets. She finished this noteworthy task, popped it in the oven and then returned to the living room.

“Are you on the same cut-scene?” She asks me.
“Uh-huh,” I nod, suddenly realising a film or glaze had fogged my eyes.
“Wankers,” she cursed and then went to mix herself another Cosmo.

Wankers indeed. Metal Gear’s storyline is a leviathan of narrative excess, an effort that is too galling and self-indulgent to simply ignore or gloss over as we do with so many of the games we love. Every single melodramatic Japanese anime cliché can be found within from cute animal sidekicks to weapons-laden weddings, emo ninjas to giant robots. Dead people come back to life only to give a monologue and then they die again!

Spoilers, you gasp? Respectfully, I say fuck you sir. This trite nonsense needs to be dragged out into the cleansing sunshine where we can all watch it shrivel and expire. Skipping cut-scenes would normally render my outrage moot but within these vignettes are button prompts that earn you cash and opportunities to move around the area in order to find extra equipment. Suffer through the cut-scenes and you are rewarded in ways other players won’t be. “Watch my movies” the developer is telling you, “and I’ll give you the camera.” In my mind this is the very height of egotism.

I will admit there were a few exciting action sequences and truly touching scenes, rare moments that were smothered by the meandering dialogue and pointless back-story. I have played all of the four main Metal Gear Solid titles and I can appreciate the reams of fan service this game provides. Defensive diehards have proposed that such things are what a “Metal Gear” game is made of, as if this point somehow makes the title beyond critique. This story and the huge swaths of time it takes to tell doesn’t merely besmirch the game play however, it actively works against it. The narrative destroys all manner of pacing. The excitement you feel after finishing a scene is left to dwindle and die once the cut-scenes enter double digit minutes. Having started my second go-through and skipping the cut-scenes I’m happy to report that unfettered the game takes flight. The pacing is restored despite the fact that you will still sit through multiple load screens between chapters.

Writing about this most bi-polar of games has brought out my own extremist reactions and so I thank you, gentle reader, for my own spot of self-indulgence. Again I reiterate my recommendation to put this game in the collection. While playing, I think you will find it a superlative experience and while watching, you will bear witness to something… Well something truly unique anyway. At last we gamers have our Ishtar! We have our Waterworld! It is an entertainment milestone worth mentioning.

Words from people you don't know on games you don't care about...

Jay from videolamer.com approached me with the opportunity to have my writing appear on his website! After reading several articles I thought it would be a good fit. The site is equal parts irreverent and insightful with a good measure of the potty humour that you know I love to roll around in. This review also appears on videolamer and I hope others will follow. If you're are looking for a new and interesting gamer site then I recommend checking out the above link.

On Writing and Video Games...

The importance of video games to human development cannot be overstated. I believe there have been three major inventions that have radically expanded the human species and the reality we continue to create for ourselves. The first would be movable type and the advent of the printed word, the second would be motion pictures, and the latest revolutionary intellectual force would be interactivity. Video games and the internet that many of them run on has irreversibly transformed the human race and set our consciousness on an exciting new course of development.

I marvel at the advancements this medium has displayed in my lifetime. From photo realistic graphics to complex game mechanics to real world physics we are seeing video games mature and match sophistication with the other, older mediums in a relatively short period of time. I feel however that in one particular area video games are stagnating, shockingly and perplexingly so.

Not nearly enough games are telling us stories worth paying attention to.

These personal thoughts have coalesced into this essay over the past few months where I have played some of the most technically impressive games of my life, all the while having to suffer through some terribly ineffective stories. The magnum opus that is Grand Theft Auto IV is really just a thin tale of crime and retribution made even cheaper by how much material it shamelessly lifts from other sources such as The Wire. The latest Metal Gear Solid is even worse; a melodramatic abortion without subtlety or restraint. You may disagree with my two examples and of course that’s fine. To make my point I instead ask you to look over your own collection of games and take note of the many worthwhile titles where the narrative runs from poor to just plain awful. More often than not, story is the weakest part of any game. Resident Evil 4, Gears of War, Army of Two, Dark Sector, Devil May Cry 4, Halo 3, and Condemned 2 are titles I’ve recently played or replayed that easily come to mind. I loved the game play in each of these titles but the story in all of them was very poorly imparted. There were interesting concepts and imaginative scenes but the good writing needed to thread them all together was absent.

Good writing can and does take place, which is why the culture of narrative failure present in the video game industry is all the more mystifying. Epic, far-reaching stories have been effectively told in this medium. As recent examples I thought Mass Effect, Bioshock, and the Half-Life episodes did a fine job, at least fine enough given the overall ineptitude of their peers. Small, contained and compelling stories have also been told. In Portal we have the simple arc of a malfunctioning A.I. who hopes to lure a test subject to their doom only to be outwitted and destroyed… That and cake. Portal exemplifies the fact that it’s not what story you’re telling but how you tell it. How come so many video game developers don’t know how to tell their own stories?

Being an avid game consumer but admittedly looking from the outside – in, I have come to speculate on why effective storytelling seems so vexing to game development. Just as movie writing isn’t the same as book writing, is there some radical, hereto forth yet to be discovered skill-set needed to create the video game equivalent of a page-turner? Has the industry not committed to the writing process as they have to coding or animation? Are video games inherently at cross purposes with story telling and only rare geniuses can occasionally skirt this inevitability? Perhaps each major development house has a different answer to my question but what I can say with absolute certainly is that we, the players, should be taking some of the blame.

We accept these stories, you see. We pay, we play, we praise, and all the while we remain mostly silent on the quality of the narrative. We are silent because we have accepted that poor storytelling is the norm. We tell ourselves that the medium is still in its infancy, or that the luminary artists of literature have not yet embraced games as a career path, or that story is naturally going to take the back seat to a product that allows you to shoot people in the head for hours on end. We make excuses for the developers who in turn fail to consider story as a priority. They are not motivated to evolve.

We should demand they evolve!

If a story goes nowhere, falls flat, is uninteresting, has been told too many times, or is just preposterously stupid then it should be pointed out, emphatically. The enthusiast media’s ranking system leaves much to be desired and has been rightly vilified as of late, yet it is the only system we have and it should be made to take the writing more into account. If a game comes with an idiotic or half-assed story it should be mentioned and a perfect or near perfect score should be out of reach.

Our personal criticisms should always be constructive of course, but they should be vocal enough so that they are taken to heart by the game creators. By the same token if a game tells a fine story it should be encouraged, even if the other aspects of the game are not up to snuff. After all, isn’t turnabout fair play? For too long we have accepted awful writing because the visuals and game play are excellent.

We should be putting the writing up to the same kind of scrutiny we give the screenshots and trailers. Dedicated game players no longer accept poor quality graphics and surprise; the vast majority of games these days look beautiful, I dare say even excessively so. We the players can and have affected the culture of gaming on a wide variety of issues - for both good and ill depending on who you ask. Now we need to begin a new groundswell to bring the writing proficiency in step with the other, more advanced aspects of game design.

Video game industry to exceed 68 Billion dollars by 2012.

Last year the industry made over 40 Billion in revenue, double what it earn just five short years ago. The industry is massive and seems to be growing at an incredible rate.
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If they start selling this thing at Walmart then you'll know I was right all along...

I’m surfacing from yet another blog hiatus. This time is was a vacation away from all family and children; just me alone at the house for two weeks. I KNOW!!! First there was shell shock, then gibbering insanity, then relaxation, then deep relaxation, then underwear-deep relaxation, then pizza. The last time both wife and children visited relations in the old country I partied like a fiend of various varieties and found suitable alternatives to sleep. I remember barbecuing a chicken with a beer in its butt-hole. Why should he be the only one left out at the party? This time around I surrounded myself with the hobbies and home improvement projects I would never get around to otherwise. It seems age has rubbed me into but a nub of what I use to be. I even lack the youthful hellfire to complain.

I finished Grand Theft Auto IV or at least finished the main story. In my case this accounted for around 65% of the game’s total content over a 45 hour period. Since the remaining side missions are sure to be more of the same I’ll take a break and get back to it during a lull in the release schedule. Rockstar’s latest opus was a very nice game overall with decent value. In parts it was suitably exciting and in others was surprisingly therapeutic. My fondest memories are driving in the early morning or sunset with that perfect radio tune kicking in. Liberty City was made for cruising.

It is not the perfect or revolutionary experience proclaimed by the videogame enthusiast media. These people are getting worse, not better at observation and objectivity. Lots of post mortem internet discussions have brought up a litany of critiques; things that honest reviewers could have easily pointed out from the get-go rather than the tongue bath they twirled out. My personal gripe was that the camera control and shooting mechanics are inferior to all of GTA’s third-person peers. Seeing as you’re moving the camera and shooting all the time it definitely detracts from the game. Others have remarked about the lack of interactivity; the city seems in place only to tell the main story. Driving controls have frustrated some. The constant barrage of annoying cell phone calls the character is subjected to is another common complaint. These points have merit but in the end I think the spirit and style of the game exceeds its short-comings. So get a copy, borrow mine, have fun with the good.

I re-played a ton of good games, most in co-op modes with friends. There is a thirst amongst all my friends, some who don’t own consoles, for more cooperative content. Some developers are hearing the message. I played the demo for Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution; an updated console version of this seminal franchise. Most of you have played Civilization; the first versions of this game could be stored on a single floppy and made the rounds in high school. Really it’s just a big monopoly game where you build cities and armies, promote science, earn wealth and survive in the world against opponents trying to do the same. This new version is great fun and really, really cute! It looks appealing, is simple to learn, is suitable for gamers of all ages, and has infinite re-playability. It’s coming out on multiple consoles and I can’t think of anyone who will be disappointed by this game. Sid Meier’s has been making whimsical games forever and it’s nice to see that he still has it.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition has come out. I love it. It’s everything a bunch of geeky books should be. Yes, I am indeed deserving of your pity should you have any to spare.

So this was the obligatory nerd post and I will try for world events and politics later in the week. Thanks to Marc for sending me this article. The cracker-jack FBI investigation in this piece is only eclipsed by the journalistic integrity of the expose. First, hit the link and see the picture…

Can the Democrats and Captain Obama stop this picture from becoming reality?

This article has Al-Qaeda, WMD, the White House in ruins and the FBI getting all over it! There’s only one problem; that picture is art for an upcoming video game called Fallout 3. In it America has suffered a nuclear war that had nothing to do with terrorism or the Middle East. The so-called “Islamic extremists” website posted a picture it found on the internet and this is somehow newsworthy to you and me. I don’t expect government agents or “journalists” to know these things on sight. I was however hoping they would have the fact-finding acumen to prevent this kind of nonsensical embarrassment. After the Iraqi invasion’s own form of fallout it is more chilling than ever to think that our opinions of people on the other side of the world are being potentially swayed by hacks who don’t know what the hell they are talking about.

In other news it seems the Chinese have developed a new ultimate weapon; man of metal or iron – an Iron Man if you will. This strange and certain threat has been seen flying at jet speeds by means of all-powerful boot propulsion and the footage has been witnessed by yours truly on the television. This deadly opponent to democracy wraps himself smugly in red and yellow; the very colours of the Communist Chinese flag! Surely their Maoist mandarin pride got the best of them. I don’t think they thought we would notice. Luckily for us every single solitary toy I’ve either bought or stolen for my children hails from that empire and their lead-painted standard is known to me.

Watch the skies, true believers! It’s not like there’s anything you can do because Iron Man will blast to atoms while his suit disperses his pent-up urine over your crops but watch the skies nonetheless. It’s both the least and most we can do!

(Seriously, how does a guy pee in that thing?)
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Once again I will poo-poo on someone else's hard work like the elitist gamer-nerd douchebag that I am...

I did the ‘midnight madness’ thing again for Grand Theft Auto IV. This time the gamer-wife Mike met up with me and we marvelled at the hundreds long line ups at all the stores that were selling the game, of which there were many. Crazy! I did the same thing for Halo 3 and there was barely anyone in attendance. That said the game went on to break all records. If the huge crowds are any indication then this game is going to dominate like nothing else before it. This week all over the world there have been hundreds of millions of dollars changing hands on account of this game. When the papers start putting up real figures I’ll put them here.

Grand Theft Auto IV is a dense, open world game. It’s so big that after putting a couple hours into it last night I felt as if I was actually progressing in reverse; that I was somehow undoing what I did the night prior. I am pretty lost right now with little idea of what to do. This hasn’t happened since I played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I had to sink over 300 hours into that game before I felt I was done with it. You may not hear from me for a long, long time.

I cannot even begin to review this game. My first impressions are quite positive despite being overwhelmed. Liberty City looks bloody amazing! It has a perfect combination of realism and artistic style. The game is begging you to go for a ride. There are many times when I get the urge to just drop whatever task or mission I’m in, steal a sports car, find a radio station that’s pumping a filthy beat, and just take off with no intended destination. This is an embryonic virtual reality experience and let me tell you this child is going to grow into one hell of a bright kid!

Just prior to this I quickly completed one of the last mediocre shooter titles I was interested in this year and by that I mean Turok. The first Turok: Dinosaur Hunter came out eleven years ago and grew into a franchise of four games. While the first was well received the sequels received increasingly more critical reviews and the series eventually died. Disney bought the rights, created Vancouver-based Propaganda Games to develop a new title, and basically wound up repeating the lacklustre performance of the last go around.

Overall Turok is mired in sub-par design in almost every aspect of the game. It uses the eponymous Unreal Technology to run the game and the developers weren’t able to make it shine as nicely as other third party developers. The environments are dull, rather fake looking, and use a slim palette of colours. The character models and dinosaurs look pretty good but it's nothing new and therefore fails to impress.

They didn’t get the shooting entirely right and in my bible this is the one sin thou shalt not do. A most excellent standard that good shooters adhere to is the ‘aim down the sites’ style of play. Press and hold a button and your weapon is brought close to the eye which in turn magnifies the center of your screen. It approximates taking aim with a real rifle held up to the cheek. It’s very effective and there is no need to change it unless you manage to come up with something equally revolutionary. Turok opted for none of this and the aiming is nothing but a slight magnification of the screen. It’s as if they had trouble rendering the draw distances. In the end you almost never use the aim feature and the limp mechanic in place is thus wasted. As a result the shooting winds up being imprecise and mushy feeling.

The game was marketed as a world of complex A.I. There are enemy soldiers in the game and neutral but easily angered dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were to be a random factor that you could use to take out the soldiers, to lure them into traps and the like. If you messed up they would attack you instead. The end result however is far less interesting than they originally claimed. While there are a few seemingly scripted occurrences of pitting dino versus man you mostly go through the game dispatching a bunch of reptiles, then man, then lizards again, then man. In total there are four different types of carnivorous dinosaurs and some of them get different skins in order to fake variety but it doesn't work. More was needed.

Turok is also guilty of abusing Quick Time Events (QTE) like no other game in memory. Rather than pump round after round of ammunition into the smaller, quick moving dinos it is much easier to approach them with a knife until you get a button prompt. Hit the button and you are treated to a gory cut-scene of Turok stabbing a lizard to death. I thought this was quite cool at first; it mixed up the shooting a bit. After doing it around twenty times however it became really old and even worse, it became what felt like a loophole to exploit. When the game started to throw six or seven Velociraptors at you one merely has to pull out the knife and bounce from one to the next, killing each creature with but the push of a single button. It was way too easy and there wasn’t nearly enough variety.

With all this criticism laid out I will admit that Turok had a few decent moments. In the first half of the game what kept me playing was the stealth aspect. Turok can sneak around quite a bit and kill silently with either the knife or a bow that’s powerful enough to pin people to the wall. I haven’t played a stealthy game in a while so it was pretty fun to switch from the run and gun mindset.

The other interesting thing was later in the game when you have your pick of all the heavy duty weaponry. Each weapon had an alternate firing mode, like having an assault rifle with a grenade launcher mounted beneath. At one point I realised that my guy was carrying a pulse rifle with twelve concussion grenades, a flame thrower with five napalm grenades, my bow with ten exploding arrows, and of course a trio of good old fashion fragmentation grenades for throwing. That is a lot of boom-boom - even by video game standards - and so I spent the next hour exploding my way through several rooms of enemies. Seeing as the physics were decent it actually stepped up the fun in a way the game didn’t advertise.

Towards the end there were a few big fights in some interesting areas that were good enough to carry me towards the end of the game, which was a predictable letdown. After completing the single player story I tried the multiplayer which is absolute lag-ridden garbage. I don’t understand why companies who can barely make a passable single player experience try to jam the much more demanding to develop multiplayer component into the game? They must work for years under delusion and it saddens me. What’s worse is that they have tied a great deal of X-Box Achievements with the multiplayer so I’m pretty sure this is a game that will remain half completed in that regard.

So in the end Turok is exactly what you would expect from a first time company that gets Disney to sign their cheques. Metacritic gives it an aggregate review score of 69% and I guess that sounds about right if even a bit generous. This game is really only for head-cases like me; people that treat the shooter genre as some kind of university thesis and needs to play all of them in a vain hope of further informing their overblown opinion. At the very least I hope the game was a positive learning experience for Propaganda Games. I’m eager to support Canadian game developers with my time and money, even when they’re off to a so-so start.

In New Orleans people are still living in tents under a highway.

Hit the link and hear the spoken word performance of a man who lives with a couple hundred others in tents under a highway. It appears that all levels of American government have abandoned these people. What the fuck is this if not the signs of Western society in decline? Hurricane Katrina hit on August 23, 2005, about two years, eight months ago.

Another overblown review complete with a title that is attempting to be humorous...

The next game to be reviewed from the so-so pile is the long delayed and often re-imagined Dark Sector. This title was developed by Ontario’s own Digital Extremes and put out by D3 Publisher for the X-Box 360 and the PS3. The project began as far back as 2004 and I actually remember it well because its teaser trailer was one of the first to come out for what is now this generation’s hardware. Dark Sector started out in space but by 2006 it got a make-over into a bleak secret agent story that was released just this year.

Four years is way, way too long a development cycle to make a video game. A game of course takes that long only when there are serious problems afoot and it’s been my experience that when the game is finally released those problems are still there. Dark Sector is sadly no exception.

I am still very keen on the premise of Dark Sector. Imagine if you will the fictional Eastern bloc nation of Lasria. This country is cut off from the rest of the world and left to develop advanced weapons technology and experiment with strange biological compounds. Something with regards to the later went wrong, killing or altering most of the poor country’s populous. The story begins with the protagonist; a hard-bitten American assassin, infiltrating the country in order to get to the bottom of things.

Dark Sector makes use of Digital Extreme’s proprietary Evolution Engine and this is the first time we get to use it in play. I thought it did some things rather well such as lighting, particle effects, and explosions. I thought in some places it needs to improve such as enemy movement animations and textures, and in a couple areas, such as human faces, its absolute rubbish. The main character’s head is weirdly shaped, too small, and from the sides his eyes bulge out awfully. It’s not only impossible to empathize with such a grotesque figure; you actually want to have nothing to do with him. Being this is the engine’s very first time out however these issues should be forgiven.

For reasons I don’t want to explain the main character quickly comes into possession of a strange weapon; The Glaive. This multi-bladed boomerang actually saves the game because it works really well, is damn effective, and improves in interesting ways as you go through the story. The glaive is quite the butcher’s tool and the removal of enemy heads and limbs makes for a satisfying bit of shrieking, bloody execution. In this Digital Extremes did such a good job that the game has been banned in a couple countries. For this, at least, I commend the developers.

There are other, more conventional weapons to use such as machine pistols and shotguns. I was pleased to see that these secondary side arms get a fair work out as well. You can actually wield the Glaive in one hand and a small gun in the other and this dual action is pretty slick. The combat in Dark Sector is by far its best feature.

The game boasts a weapon upgrade system so that your firearms can get tricked out to match the increasingly powerful enemies. If you’ve played games like Resident Evil 4 or even the newer Army of Two then you know that this kind of development can add a lot to a game. In Dark Sector however the developers totally missed the mark. The system seems installed as an afterthought; it’s too simple, it’s poorly implemented, and the greater impression winds up being what the upgrade system doesn’t do rather than what it does.

Having a game where the main character sneaks through a spooky Soviet-styled city while making contact with the black market or other colourful characters seems a great setting just brimming with possible stories. It worked wonders for Half-Life 2. Unfortunately Dark Sector’s environment and level design is some of the most boring in memory. The setting itself is sadly nothing but window dressing for a number of courtyards connected by side streets where you fight and fight and fight. The Lasrian city has no life and there is so little to distinguish one area from the next that you can immediately spot when they are reusing an asset that you visited not even an hour ago. As well there are many times when you will find yourself walking down a series of winding hallways with nothing happening. Pure speculation; I suspect this is a trick to let the computer buffer the next real encounter in order to facilitate shorter load times. The trouble is this design decision plays hell with the game’s pacing.

The story itself is scant and it seems to intentionally leave out a great deal as if all will be explained in a sequel but that scores this title no points in the here and now. That said, the boss fights were pretty cool and we don’t get too many of them in a shooter game. Some scenes had their moments and were able to convey emotion and intensity; there are graveyard and other 'haunted' scenes that deliver. For the most part however the game was a fairly flat experience. Finally there is an on-line component to Dark Sector but like so much in this game it’s too light in content to improve one’s opinion of the title.

What disappoints me most about Dark Sector is that you can see a fantastic game lost somewhere in here. If there was more to do in Lasria, if there were more people to meet and some side quests to complete, if the buying, selling, and weapons upgrading component of the game was at least as good as anything it’s trying to ape, then I would have loved this title. In the reviews I’ve read this game was often compared to Gears of War and Resident Evil but it cannot hold a candle to either.

What tipped the scales and made me buy this game at full price was that it comes out of London, Ontario and I felt that if I’m going to throw my money away at least let it be to a home grown cause. Supporting Dark Sector does in fact feel something like a charity and I hope that Digital Extremes realises that if they are going to make a sequel they need to rebuild almost every aspect of this game from bottom to top. I hope they attempt to give it an honest try.

Old video games with their titles changed makes for incredibly obscure humor.

In further attempts to avoid any and all news items I give you this site. If you were not born in my time you will not get most of this humour. If however you are my mother then it's worth checking out if only to be envious of the mad photoshopping skills my generation possesses. We can make anything look like anything else. It's a gift.

Shooting cyborg zombies is great fun but once they start pontificating on foriegn policy we're told it's pretentious...

I have been wasting what time I can burning through a number of second-rate games and this is in fact a public service to you; the gentle reader. I am more than willing to be the canary in the video game mineshaft when it comes to the first person shooter format. It's strange but I much rather play a mediocre shooter than a top notch racing game or dating sim. If I were to guess what it is that brings me back time after time I might say... oh, I don't know... THE SHOOTING.

These are titles that I was looking forward to optaining upon release but when they got reviews in the 6’s and 7’s my priorities naturally changed. Such titles can be usually picked up for half-price within a couple months of release thanks to the numerous copies to be found in the used aisle of your local game store. I’m going to review a few of them this week in hopes of getting back into blog-making form, to tighen up my blog-gina, as it were.

BlackSite: Area 51 was developed and published by various wings of Midway as a multi-platform release that was mostly skewered by the gaming enthusiast media. The game’s developer even went so far as to publicly denounce it by outlining the difficulties faced in the development cycle before leaving the company. Juicy! I was willing to slog through this potentially bad game because I absolutely fell in love with the demo and after finishing it my initial impressions stand. I’m happy to keep this one in the collection.

BlackSite is an alien/robot/zombie shooter (seriously, all three) that I must admit fails to deliver in several aspects. The story and level design are lacklustre in addition to being short in duration. As well the developers were unable to add a co-op element and the multiplayer is forgettable. So why am I not slamming it? Here’s why; it’s a shooter and the shooting is bloody excellent! If you get this one thing right with this kind of game then in my books most other factors will be forgiven. In BlackSite the weapon of choice is this meaty, chugga-chugga M4 carbine and it felt like a much-needed extension of my dick! This was one of the most satisfying weapons I have used in a game and as the ladies will not hesitate to tell you, I aim to satisfy! This one element made the game at least a fun-filled, visceral experience.

This game was something of a throwback; like an old Doom or Quake game. It’s hard to explain but when playing you don’t feel like a soldier with a rifle – as you would in Call of Duty 4 – but more like a mobile weapons platform. It was actually a nice break from some of the slower moving, more realistic titles I’ve been playing lately. You just move through the funhouse at high speed and blast away any zany creatures that happen to pop up. No strategy, no taking cover; just pure, unadulterated run and gun.

Throughout the game you travel with a couple soldiers who you can direct with the most rudimentary of squad commands. Though other games have fleshed this out far better in Blacksite it is nonetheless an effective mechanic. With a click of the button you can ‘paint’ a target and your team-mates will go after it with gusto. I quickly found that as battle was joined it was important to give your squad targets in order to maximise your power. This and an interesting Squad Morale system kept the fights interesting. As well, I have to give BlackSite props for using the Unreal Technology to create some of the most realistic character models I’ve seen to date. Even Bioshock with its herky-jerky character animations could take a tip or two from what Midway did with the same middleware.

BlackSite has its more than a few shortcoming; one of them being it happens to be very critical of the United States and the Iraq War it started. The game’s not-so subtle message was that volunteer soldiers are being betrayed by their government with such measures as extended tours, stop-loss policy, and institutions such as Walter Reed Hospital. I don’t think these concepts are going to sell games this year and perhaps this is because Americans don’t want to hear about that stuff right now. The reviews I read were fairly harsh and dismissive to the topic; they even questioned its place in a game. I feel it’s a topic worth discussing and any venue is better than nothing. Such talk of a nation’s culpability does not however sit well with the citizenry even in the best of times.

I won’t go so far as to say that this game was reviewed unfairly and in truth I would be very surprised to see a sequel of any kind. Overall I felt the good outweighed the bad and I found the highly charged political aspects interesting. Now I've played through on the 360 version and also did a few chapters on the PC and will vouch for them. However I hear the port to the PS3 was not as good. Let the budget bargain bin buyer beware!

The news these past couple weeks has not been doing it for me. It's been either too dumb (Clinton vs. Obama) or too depressing, but I will leave you with this.

In-Meatro is coming!!!

My comments are thus... VAT GROWN MEAT!

The new new face of freedom... Kind of looks like the old face of fascism...

The gamer-wife Mike and I finished Army of Two last week and were pleased overall. Developed and published by Electronic Arts for both the PS3 and the X-Box 360, this game is heavily focused on two-man cooperative play. Utilizing Unreal Technology 3 in the third-person shooter format, the game has you taking the roles of a mercenary duo as they travel the world killing ethnics for cash. Play this game and you get to live the dream!

Beyond a standard game that you can simply play with your buddy; titles like Gears of War or Halo 3 for example, Army of Two has put in a series of special two-man manoeuvres in hopes of enhancing the cooperative spirit between partners. Indeed, some of these abilities are vital to completing the levels and in that way treats co-op as a different genre of game rather than an alternate mode as presented in predominantly single player titles. These special moves tend to work in making the game original and they do so by setting up a precedent that carries through the experience; there are roles to play, you must play those roles when they come up, and these roles will switch at any given moment.

The best way to illustrate this is to describe the Aggro and Stealth game mechanic. If one player is shooting at enemies effectively they will earn the Aggro; meaning their character glows red and becomes the target of choice for the enemy. While this is happening the other character automatically enters Stealth; which means they become transparent and even enemies that are nearby will ignore them. This allows that player to flank the enemy or move through the map to a safe place. Aggro, Stealth, and the lack of either are three states the player will find themselves in and it can change with the placement of but a single bullet. While in Stealth if you take out a couple guys with their back to you then Aggro will be your reward. Your role suddenly changes and you must react effectively, in this case by playing the aggressive role. Your partner’s role also changes the instant yours does and they must now work off a different strategy as well.

This back and forth game mechanic adds new weight to the quickly concocted plans, trash talk, and demands for immediate assistance that creates the bond of camaraderie which makes co-op games so enjoyable amongst friends. In this way Army of Two succeeds; the addition of new rules enhances the co-op experience. The other half of the game; its polish and presentation is mixed bag. Personally I liked it and liked what it said, including the subtext. Others may fairly have a different opinion entirely.

Army of Two is undoubtedly the most American game I’ve played in a while. It assumes that heavily armed Yankees have a place and role in other people’s countries so even when they parachute in uninvited it’s for the greater good. There is much talk of terrorism of course, and arms dealers, and hostage taking, and all the other things that quicken the news media’s pulse. There is also much jocularity amongst the mercenaries while they work; head-slapping, high-fives and air guitar between bouts of destruction. Inappropriate? Perhaps. Fun after three or four beers? Absolutely. Army of Two may not be in good taste but it tastes good.

One place this game literally shines is the weapon upgrade system. With your hard earned wages you can buy and upgrade weapons to a delightful degree. New barrels and grips, extended clips, grenade launchers and more can trick out your gun including a ‘pimping’ of it’s appearance; to plate the whole thing in gold or silver and jazz it up with all manner of trim and filigree. More than making the weapon worthy of a rap video this appearance alteration affects the stats of the weapon. When you tote around a Stinger Missile System that’s been decked out to look like a pirate cannon you of course draw attention to yourself, and therefore Aggro. Mike and I spent much time in the shopping menu, too much time.

Army of Two looks pretty good overall, graphically it gets the job done. The same can be said for level design, story, dialogue, and music. These aspects of the game are passable and it’s the two-man manoeuvres plus the weapon customisation that make it worth trying out. If you and a buddy have the same console then this game is worth you going halves to get a copy. I hope the game does well enough to merit a sequel, I want to see the two-man stuff expand beyond basic training because I think the developers are on onto something.

I’m at least mid-way through a game called Dark Sector so I’ll write about that next. As for news I’m not finding much that’s interesting…

On the paper trail that lead to torture…

This is an in-depth Vanity Fair article on how and why torture became common practice at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. I haven’t finished it, I’m finding the play by play record keeping of the tortured subjects to be quite off-putting.

Iraq Attack – Green Zone is the new End Zone

The Sadrists are still giving the Americans hell, shelling the fortified Green Zone, killing three soldiers and wounding a couple dozen over the weekend. Meanwhile in Basra the militias continue to control the port city, repelling Iraqi forces to the point where around 1,000 newly trained troops fled the field of battle, going AWOL rather than fighting their own kind. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki has been soundly trounced over this and any illusions that remained as to his effectiveness or strength have been shred away.

Presidential hopeful John McCain has been downplaying these outbreaks, stating that Iraq is returning to a state of normalcy. It seems the Republican talking point is to set the stage for America to remain in Iraq indefinitely no matter how much tension their presence creates. Plus, just to be different, they’re going to lie about it the whole way through.

Cause and effect rules all, don’t you think? Operation Iraqi Freedom has a much lower body count then the Viet Nam war for many reasons, not the least of which is the strategy of troops remaining in their fortified bases in order to avoid casualties. Doing that gave the streets to Iraqi gangsters however and guys like Moktada al Sadr was able to increase their influence by taking over governance of the neighbourhoods. Once that control was established his militiamen could then shell Americas’ biggest fortified compound for days and the troops have not yet been able to stop them. It just goes round and round.

There will be no troop reductions. Surprise – surprise!!!

That America needs every troop they can spare in Iraq is nothing newsworthy. This article goes a bit deeper though in outlining the direct and close relationship the President has with the four-star general in charge of Iraq. It circumvents the chain of command, which is strange in itself because that’s heresy in military organizations. It’s weird to read the quotes of a national leader who says things like "I said to the general: 'If you want to slow her down, fine; it's up to you.' " Sounds like the stage is set to pass the buck when the shit hits the fan, if you ask me.

Could I fit anymore clichés in a single sentence?

You may notice that the guy's eye is white as porcelain... So that's not the Bloodshot they're talking about...

I finished Condemned 2: Bloodshot over the weekend. It was late at night and I was alone in the dark. Of course I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Not only was Condemned 2 a damn good game but it was the perfect way to cap off this terribly long, bleak, and depressing winter. If I could complete this title with my sanity intact then I had hope I could get through March without descending into a Jack Nicholson-like episode straight out of The Shining.

Developed by fear aficionados Monolith and published by ye olde tyme Sega of America for both the PS3 and the X-Box 360, Bloodshot seems poised to up the ante on a modest original title that became a sleeper hit. I own and loved the first Condemned: Criminal Origins and have loaned it out twice to friends so that they may attempt to enjoy it. One returned it days later saying there was “no fucking way” they were going to complete it. My second victim wasn’t even able to manage speech in this regard; he just handed it back in, shook his head and literally sputtered something unintelligible.

The mood and atmosphere of Condemned is simple to explain if you’re not familiar with the series. Condemned is a video game attempt to capture the essence of films such as Silence of the Lambs or Seven. You play a detective in a Serial Crimes Unit and you are hunting mass murderers. You serve and protect in a fictitious city that has succumbed to all manor of urban blight and social decay. The crime scenes are all abandoned, derelict, and well… condemned. Within these ghettos and urban ruins psychosis, violence, and death have taken over. While solving crimes you go mad and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

Parents you’ve been warned: Condemned is a relentless and unrepentantly violent hobo killing simulator. The weapons of choice are whatever you can find within the crumbling environments; boards with nails through them, plumbing pipes, axes, hammers, toilet seats, prosthetic arms, gumball machines - if it’s not already clear by now this is one grisly product. It is however gripping, anxiety-filled stuff.

Mixed in with the disturbing bum fights are crime scenes that your character must investigate with special tools a la C.S.I. As gruesome as the head bashing is, the collecting of evidence and solving of crimes is thoughtful, interesting, and a great break from the horrifying action. Of course the crime scenes are the leavings of serial killers and so if you’re put off by close-up photography of a severed head or passing a UV light over a maimed corpse then you will find this aspect of the game just as disturbing as the rest.

So if you didn’t know already this is what these games throw at you and they do a really good job of it too. The first Condemned was rather basic in its controls; we’re talking two buttons that you have to push at the right times for the most part. The difficulty lay not in mastering the controls but in mastering your fear and Condemned can play your emotions like a fiddle. In order to appeal to the experienced gamer the second Condemned title added some more variety and options to the player. The main character, presumably a rookie leg-breaker in the first game is now a force to be reckoned with in the back alley death-match circuit. You don’t just beat a hobo until he stops moving, oh no, that’s for rank amateurs! Now you dispatch them in style by ramming their heads into urinals or television screens. In this way the game becomes more of a martial art or arcade styled game but I don’t think it suffers any because of it. When a game moves from a niche into the mainstream it needs to expand on its premise and Condemned is doing a fair job in that regard.

The crime scene investigation aspects of the game were also expanded and in this they did a masterful job. Once you arrive at a scene your office will ask you a number of questions revolving around the particulars of the incident and you must treat it as a puzzle, unravelling what truly happened to create such a mess of blood and entrails. The game rates you and unlocks better police equipment that you can use throughout the game. The combination of swinging heavy implements and deductive reasoning gives this title some nice variety. It does a good job keeping you off balance and guessing at what comes next.

I liked the cultish conspiracy story that Condemned 2 told and I thought that some of the environments or levels were among the best I’ve ever played. The game had some minor bugs and glitches, things quality assurance and play testing should have caught, but certainly not enough to detract much from the overall effectiveness of the game. As well I hear the on-line extras they added are a waste of time but I don’t play these kinds of games to be communal at all; horror is an intensely singular experience.

So if you like the survival horror genre then I highly recommend this one, it is right now the scariest and goriest franchise out there. Other horror classics like Silent Hill and even Resident Evil couldn’t hold a candle to the scariness of the first and this new one just blows the old competition out of the water.

Here are a few other things I found floating around the Internet lately…

Barack Obama’s speech on the State of Racism in America

I’m putting this up here for posterity. I hope you’ve heard the story of Obama’s pastor preaching some inflammatory remarks and rather than simply disowning the reverend the presidential candidate explained how things came to be this way. We haven’t heard anyone speak like this since Trudeau, Kennedy, or Dr. King and that’s why it’s worth pointing out. His thoughts and experience on race is most honest and insightful. A lesser candidate would have simply thrown their old family friend under the bus but Obama sought to elevate the dialogue instead. This is well worth the read.

Frontline Double Documentary: Bush’s War

All told this is something like four hours of quality viewing. If you’re fine with watching the program in ten minute segments on a small screen then it’s all at the link ready to go. Otherwise try to find the full version on-line. P.B.S. has been creating great documentaries on the Bush Administration and its running of Operation Iraqi Freedom for years now and this one is the whole succinct package. The first two hours are amalgamations of numerous documentaries they’ve made on individual topics or people. The last half contains quite a bit of new material. So far it seems that this is the definitive version of events; of the run-up to war, its initial execution, and a play by play of what all went so terribly wrong. Again well worth one’s time.

A Manned Mission to Mars may have to be a one way trip…

I found this thought provoking and in line with topics I have touched upon in the past. This essay goes over how vastly more feasible it would be to engineer one-way trips to Mars. It’s the getting astronauts back which make the voyage prohibitive and so in the name of human exploration volunteers would be asked if they would be the first to colonize the far away planet. These people would probably not come back and would probably not even survive to their full span of human years. It is a hell of a thing to ask anyone.

The article rightly points out that this wouldn’t be the first time this kind of high risk exploration has been undertaken. There were no guarantees even when crossing weeks of ocean to hopefully reach one of the newly discovered continents and who knew what lay in store for the pioneers. The reality of space travel is so much more daunting than anything we’ve done before and this is what may be necessary to even start. It beggars the question of course: Would you go if asked?

I don’t believe in god but when looking at our solar system I always am always forced to re-evaluate my stance. It’s like the planets are a treasure trail laid out right where we need them. Each one has something we desperately need; water, metals, various combustible gases. If we made it to one it could re-supply us in order to get to the next. If we’re going to get them - and let’s be clear, we NEED them - the sacrifice is going to have to be monumental.