Andy Laub they call me "The Solution"

Instead of releasing the actual game, Sony instead decided we would like this trailer they made for Gran Turismo 5:

0:12 – That’s a city. It looks… okay.
0:17 – Headlights in a tunnel? Kind of neat, but not something I’d want in a racing game.
0:23 – Why do these cities always look abandoned?
0:34 – Nurburgring. Eh.
0:38 – Car commercial shot.
0:54 – From that previous comment to here, this trailer is awesome.
0:55 – And now I’m bored.
0:55 – Mercedes’ should not be red.
0:58 – That’s better.
1:06 – ACTIVE AERO.
1:12 – Is the front plate really necessary?
1:20 – Stock cars…?
1:29 – Pit crews – that’s cool!
1:36 – That damage is fantastic!
1:40 – Ferraris should be red.
1:55 – They have all these gratuitous glamour shots when really you’re either going to be seeing the back of your car or the steering wheel 100% of the time.
2:25 – Gran Turismo 5: coming… some day?

So in summary:

1. Active aero is cool.
2. Pit crews are cool.
3. More detailed / extreme damage is cool.
4. I don’t care that much about GT5.

The Matrix is a great movie. Somehow, in an age where we thought we’d seen everything, it managed to bring something completely new and innovative to the action/sci-fi genre in terms of both plot and filmography. It’s a film that is wonderful all on its own, which is why there were tremors of confusion when the Wachowskis announced it would be a trilogy.

Similarly, Bioshock is a great game. If you wanted, you could call it innovative simply because it was a first person shooter in 2007 that didn’t have you fighting aliens or Nazis. But beyond that, Bioshock furthered gamers’ assertions that games could indeed be art. The plot, while still dependent on you fighting your way through… things… was refreshing in the context of this beautifully creepy underwater world. And, like The Matrix, Bioshock has that single moment of clarity in which the jarring reality of things completely blows your mind.

Of course, it could also be argued that Bioshock didn’t need a sequel. And I agree; the game is a work of art that begins and resolves an interesting story, and I would’ve been content with that. But 2K didn’t agree, and so Bioshock 2 is upon us. Like many jaded gamers, years of Tony Hawks and Call of Dutys have made it clear that not all sequels are good sequels. And when I first sat down to play this new installment, it was with much skepticism.

(I could go on an entirely different rant here about how reading reviews and previews of games can drastically and irreversibly alter someone’s opinion of them for better or worse, but I will save that. For now.)

Suffice it to say, I had been reading a lot of reviews of Bioshock 2 because I was genuinely looking for an excuse to skip it. Reading reviews is not something I do for games that I know I want to play, for reasons stated above. But the reviews all played the same tune: yes, Bioshock didn’t need a sequel, but here is one, and it’s pretty good, so get over it.

And they’re right. Unlike the rest of The Matrix trilogy, this new Bioshock turns out to be a lot of fun for those of us who enjoyed Rapture the first go-round. While it would’ve been impossible to do anything but put you in the (very heavy) shoes of a new protagonist, the strategy works. You get to experience some things that are only made possible by who you are in this game, and another layer of the Rapture saga is revealed as well.

All in all, it comes down to this: the original game is so highly-regarded partially because there was a certain novelty about it. That the second installment is enjoyable and interesting even now that that novelty has worn off speaks volumes about how ripe the setting and gameplay are for further exploration.

The last time I talked about Mass Effect I ended up off on a tangent about how you need to play through the series from the beginning. Because it’s true. But what I meant to do was compile a list of things that I loved about the game.

As it turns out that, I was too lazy to actually record them as I played (aside from the infrequent Tweet), so instead here is a haphazard-but-not-as-comprehensive-as-I’d-like list of things that are great about the series:

Environment

I’ve spent plenty of time talking about how the environment is as much of a character as anyone else in the Grand Theft Auto series. The same is true for Mass Effect; to the point where it’s at the very least on the same level as GTA. As you explore in either game, you’ll overhear conversations between other characters and be exposed to various forms of media. And in both cases, that media is extremely well-written and enjoyable to listen to, and often deals directly with the plot that you are involved in.

Mass Effect 2 continues the tradition of acquiring side missions by observing your environment, whether that be by hacking a computer terminal, talking to a bystander, or simply by picking up an item that you have to find a use for. A few times the latter resulted in me finishing a side mission that I didn’t even realize was happening, and that kind of simple entertainment can be a welcome diversion from the core story.

Experimentation

I mentioned previously that the game keeps a running tally of the decisions you’ve made throughout the series, which results in some really surprising and well-executed events in ME2 that you’d likely miss completely if you skipped the first game, and it enforces their assertion that the decisions you make may come back to help or hinder you later.

And while it’s great to see those decisions persist throughout the series, it’s likely you’ll want to approach the story in a few different ways, especially given the breadth of things you didn’t experience if you only played through once. Thankfully, the games welcome multiple playthroughs, whether you choose to replay the story with your now-leveled-up character or start fresh. They even go as far as to separate your save files for each character (so no accidentally overwriting Character 1’s file with your progress in Character 2).

Exploration

In a universe as deep as Mass Effect’s, it only makes sense that the player be provided with some sort of guide to it all, hence the codex. Accessible from the pause menu of both games, the codex functions as a portable, built-in encyclopedia. The depth of knowledge and the work that went into creating and compiling this information is simply astounding as it references nearly every race and creature you’ll come across in your travels, providing you with information on biology, demeanor, culture, and other pertinent details. But it doesn’t end there; the codex serves as a reference for everything from space combat to galactic history. In short, the codex is the embodiment of everything there is to love about the series.

I bought Mass Effect a month or so after it was released in late 2007. Even after playing through the roughly 20-hour campaign (estimated), I didn’t give it more than a sentence of attention:

Mass Effect was pretty darn good once I figured out how to play it

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it; it just didn’t register as much more than a tiny blip on my “totally hawesome games” radar. There was some neat stuff that happened, and that’s all I could really say about that.

Suffice it to say, I was wrong.

I decided to embark on another playthrough of the game when I was going through my annual pre-Christmas gaming drought, in anticipation of the soon-to-be-released sequel. I spent significantly more time exploring and talking the second time around. In some games all this would do is add time to your play clock, but in Mass Effect every conversation, every scan, every hacked computer terminal held the potential for a new discovery; a little more insight into the universe Bioware labored to create.

As the first in the series, it wasn’t surprising for a game of ME’s scope to have some teething problems. Many of the side missions were a little too generic; the environments just a little bit sterile. The inventory system was frustrating to deal with. The loading screens were frequent and generic. The elevator rides were… long. But in spite of all this, you could see what the game wanted to be, and you could appreciate it for that.

Now let’s take all of those complaints and throw them away, because they’ve all been remedied in Mass Effect 2. Bioware could’ve continued down the same path. They could’ve used the first game’s mechanicals in their entirety, pasted a new story over the top, and called it good.

But they didn’t do that, and the sequel is better for it. Yes, it’s a little different than the first game. Especially if you just (re)played the first game. But it’s for your own good. You may find it off-putting at first – get over it. If you use that as an excuse not to play it, then you’re just stupid and your face is stupid.

Here’s the thing, though: some sequels are way better than their predecessors. The Uncharted series is a great example of this. Drake’s Fortune was good, but Among Thieves was GOOD. As such, it’s easy to take that knowledge and skip the first game completely. You are doing yourself a massive disservice if you do this with Mass Effect.

Unlike Uncharted, ME’s central focus is your relationships and interactions with other characters. And I mean all characters, not just your squad. I can’t imagine how uninteresting or confusing some of those conversations would be if you didn’t have the context and experiences of the first game. There’s a reason that the first option when starting a game is to import your character from the original: the decisions you made there do affect the ME2 universe, albeit in generally minor ways.

Bioware is trying to tell a cohesive story here, and each game is an important chapter. These add up to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and anyone who doesn’t experience all of those parts as they were meant to be played is missing out.

In retrospect, I’m not sure this is what I meant to write when I sat down, which means there will probably be another Mass Effect post in the near future. Still though. Seriously.

If you were to examine my recent gaming habits, you’d notice that in between my sporadic bouts of Borderlands and my re-play of Mass Effect to prepare for the sequel, the void is filled by an unlikely source: Nintendo. More specifically, Mario. And not New Super Mario Bros., even.

One of the games on my Christmas Manifesto™ was Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story for the Ninetudo DS. It’s your basic RPG: levels, hit points, etc, etc, but one that takes place in the Mario universe (but not the Mario Galaxy). I was somewhat excited for it ever since playing Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, which I look back upon with much fondness as likely being my favorite Gamecube game.

Bowser’s Inside Story doesn’t share the same paper atmosphere as the Paper Mario franchise; it’s actually a direct successor to Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, a game I’ve long since owned for the Game Boy Advance and struggled with, to the point of abandoning it near the end of the game.

Fortunately that problem didn’t persist with the new game. I really enjoyed the characters and the humor this time around. You’ll find yourself alternating between playing as Bowser (super fun) and the Mario duo (not quite as fun), as you attempt to thwart a villain who speaks fluent Engrish. The biggest complaint I had was the extensive explanation that accompanied every new discovery or ability. You have the option to skip it, but then you risk not know what’s going on. After about 30 minutes of the game, 15 minutes of which is text, it was awesome to hear Bowser echo my sentiments: TOO MANY WORDS!.

Actually, that’s not true. The biggest complaint I had is one that I will attach to every modern Nintendo game, and that is gimmickry for gimmickry’s sake. I can live with the touch screen, but blowing into the microphone to engage certain actions (fortunately this is rare) is nothing more than a pain in the ass, and would make me ashamed to play this game in any sort of public setting. The game still remains a ton of fun to play and I enjoyed the vast majority of it, so much so that I decided to revisit Superstar Saga after a hiatus of over 6 years.

It was a little weird to try playing it again; at first I tried loading up my last save, which was at the front gate of the final area, but I quickly found myself outclassed. I cursed my past self for being so unprepared for these sorts of situations and decided it would be best to start from scratch. I’ve adopted a philosophy in playing RPG’s recently that seems to pay off more often than not: fight everybody. Fighting equals experience equals power equals victory. For comparison’s sake, the duo in my saved game was hovering around level 30, while my new game ended with them having reached level 40. That doesn’t sound like a huge difference, but trust me, it was worth the extra effort, especially when the main difference in my playing was confronting enemies that were nearby instead of avoiding them.

All of this Mario RPG-ness has made me hungry for the other games in the series. I’ve already found myself giving Super Paper Mario another chance, and Paper Mario 64 and Super Mario RPG are available on the Wii Virtual Console. As if that’s not enough, I just found out that there’s a third game in the Mario & Luigi series that will be requiring my immediate attention as soon as I can find a used copy of it. So I have to go find a used copy of it.

At the beginning of 2009 and more recently I talked about my efforts to save money and not go crazy buying games. Looking back I would say I did a pretty decent job; I saved myself from a few titles that were definitely not worth buying but still had the opportunity to play through pretty much everything I wanted. Finding a game that you want on sale is an added bonus over just being able to go out and buy it, and practically becomes a game in and of itself. I even managed to mostly abide the “no $60 games” rule, with Forza 3 being an obvious and acceptable exception.

* gift card incentive
** shared purchase

Earlier this year I wrote about how much money my video game habit has been costing me, and how I hoped to be more judicious in my purchasing habits. My goal was to better evaluate potential purchases and determine their worth based on how much entertainment they’d provide. Forza Motorsport 3, for example, is a game where I’m very close to (if not past) the $1/hour mark. On the other end of the spectrum, Modern Warfare 2, while a lot of fun, would’ve cost me somewhere around $6/hour if I had bought it versus renting.

It’s the games in the middle that get you. I knew I could hammer through MW2 well within the 72 hours that it was in my possession, but that’s not always the case. I had been toying with the idea of a GameFly subscription (like Netflix, but for video games), but never made the leap until a recent promotion came along.

The Honeymoon

My initial experience was extremely positive. The first game in my “Q” (ugh) was Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. The game shipped on Monday and I had it on Thursday, just in time for a relatively uncluttered weekend. I plowed through it and had it back in the mail early the following Monday.

The Marriage

Then I waited. GameFly claims that they work with the postal service to scan games as soon as they’re put in the mail. When a game gets scanned, GameFly treats it as a return, and immediately prepares your next game. However, I didn’t experience this. Uncharted didn’t process as a return until Thursday.

In the meantime, I eagerly awaited my opportunity to play The Saboteur. Unfortunately, being a brand-new game, it must have been in short supply, as they skipped it and moved on to the next game on my list: Prototype. When I read the shipping confirmation email, my heart sank.

Which is odd. I was really excited for Prototype when it first came out, and then I gradually lost interest in it as time wore on. By the time it reached my door (this past Monday), I had little interest in actually playing it (admittedly, this is all my own fault) but I persevered.

The Divorce

Whether the game itself is good or not is irrelevant here. But in playing it I’m finding the achilles heel of GameFly membership: you feel forced to play whatever game is in front of you at the expense of doing anything else you may have preferred to do; only by moving through games and returning them as quickly as possible are you getting the most value out of the membership. Even then, you’re handicapped by the shipping speed.

Netflix somehow manages to avoid these issues, at least in my mind, for two reasons:

1. The time spent “experiencing” a movie is not the unknown that it would be with a game.
2. Netflix’s digital distribution methods offer instant gratification.

it would be interesting to see GameFly (or a similar service) explore methods of digital distribution, but I don’t know how it would work. In the meantime, this trial membership has been effective in determining that GameFly just isn’t my thing.

You may have heard some fuss about a new game that came out recently. I think it had something to do with warfare that takes place during modern times, but I’m not quite sure. There are apparently snowmobiles in it?

Indeed, Activision’s Modern Warfare 2 has touched all of our hearts and souls since its release earlier this month. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you wouldn’t know it from their pushing it as “MOST ANTICIPATED GAME EVAR (until the next one)”. And I suppose they’re right – MW2 gives you a lot to be excited about.

For one, it’s a direct sequel to 2007’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Yes, there was another CoD game last year: World at War. No, that one took place in World War 2 and doesn’t fit into this chronology. And it was developed by somebody else.

Wait. Yes, that is confusing. Recall this post, if you will, about my dislike for the two-developer system (specifically one of the two developers) that Activision uses to push CoD games out the door on a yearly basis, quality notwithstanding. In that article I wrote:

What if Infinity Ward stopped making COD games, leaving the franchise to Treyarch, and instead used the technology they’ve already developed to create a new, self-owned franchise with similar content? Presumably it would continue in the modern warfare vein and would play the same.

Interestingly, that’s sort of what’s happening here. I don’t know what the plans are for the seventh installment in the CoD franchise, but presumably it will be a Treyarch effort once again. But in the meantime, notice that the “Call of Duty” label on MW2 was extremely downplayed. Initially they had planned not to include it on the marketing at all, but I suppose it’s helpful in that most people are totally clueless and wouldn’t make the connection. So in a sense, Modern Warfare is very much poised to be its own franchise at this point (or already is, I suppose).

With all of that said, I hadn’t picked up a CoD game since the first Modern Warfare. World at War and its return to the WW2 setting didn’t entice me enough to buy or even rent; only when one of my CoD-addicted friends finally replaced his WaW disc with a shiny new one with the words “Modern Warfare 2″ on it did I ask to borrow the old one to give it a try.

Call of Duty: World at War

In a few words, I found World at War to be very, very good. As is typical of the series, you’ll frequently be switching between two protagonists (in this case an American and a Russian) as they embark on their distinct tours of duty (plan on visiting the Pacific and traveling from Russia to Germany). The characters are likable enough, with excellent voice acting. Your immediate superiors are voiced by Kiefer Sutherland and Gary Oldman, respectively (wow!), as are the narrations between missions.

Speaking of “between missions”… holy shit. Even if you have zero interest in the game whatsoever, you NEED to see these cutscenes. They are simply gorgeous examples of motion graphics:

Seriously, this game has no right to have graphics this nice. I think that’s a compliment. Other than that, it’s pretty much all standard Call of Duty fare. I enjoyed playing through it even thought the missions were not without their frustrations, but I can only handle so much trench warfare before wanting to move on to something else.

Modern Warfare 2

Enter “something else”. With all the ruckus about the newest member of the family, I knew I had to give it a try. I managed to find a lone copy available for rental yesterday and figured I could hammer through it by the end of the weekend. Well, I was right, but change “end of the weekend” to “one sitting” and you’ll find my single-player experience to be comparable to that of anyone else who’s enjoyed the game.

I think we’re almost at that point where the single player campaign is becoming token addition in Call of Duty games. You don’t buy this game to play it alone. Well, you can, but that would be a waste of $60 (this coming from someone who has wasted $60 several times). Single player is good for about a week of entertainment at best, which is why it’s fine rental fodder for folks like me who are adverse to shooting strangers online. And by “shooting strangers online” I mean “getting shot by strangers online”.

And in this case, the campaign is not only short but somewhat disheveled. As I mentioned before, MW2 is a direct sequel to the first game, in that you see the return of some of the original characters. I think this is great, because it’s already a huge divergence from the traditional Call of Duty “slice of life” model where you see a little bit of everything.

I don’t know that they take advantage of this as much as they could, though. As with World at War you’ll be switching between protagonists constantly, each of whom has missions that feel quite different. I understand the reasoning for this mechanically, but it also seemed a little unbalanced. Then again, that’s easy to forget because I spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what was going on.

I think that in writing the “story” for the game, Infinity Ward had a meeting and said “okay, we want to have missions that take place in A, B, and C, with combat that features X, Y, and Z” and then they wrote some scripts that vaguely made that possible. That’s not to say the game isn’t a lot of fun to play; it’s just more disjointed than usual. The fact that MW isn’t tied down by a factual background and has gobs of technology at its disposal means that you can cover a much larger variety of terrain in a much smaller amount of time.

Epilogue

You’ll notice that I didn’t really go into any detail about graphics or sound, but if you’ve played any of the CoD games on the new generation of consoles, you know what to expect. They’re both great, and they remain great year after year.

Even though I’m not interested in what is really the focal point of the games (multiplayer), I’m still interested to see where the series (plural?) heads after this. Treyarch really pulled a 180 with World at War, and Infinity Ward can do pretty much anything they please with a title as vague as “Modern Warfare”.

After what seems like decades, Abe and I finally have a week where we don’t have extracurricular activities eating up every evening. Thanks to a Target gift card and some smooth talking on my part, we decided to spend some of that time with New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

We played through the first world last night, and looking back I think I enjoyed it. The game looks great, and we did a decent job of remaining alive (a definite plus) and so I hope that trend continues. Similar to 2006’s New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS, this game is a spiritual successor Super Mario Bros. 3 from the NES days. A prime choice; I consider SMB3 to be the pinnacle of Mario side-scrollers. So all is great, right? Well… no. While the game in and of itself has a lot of potential, there were also some attributes that really felt detrimental to the whole experience.

The big news in NSMBW is that you can play with up to four people simultaneously – no waiting for your turn; everybody’s on the screen, all the time. Except when they’re not. Unfortunately, it is possible for players to find themselves scrolled right off the screen, which can be overcome but may also result in death if they’re beyond the threshold of what the game decides is “safe”. Fortunately, the deceased player will quickly return in a bubble that you need to pop to get them back into the action (imagine Baby Mario in the Yoshi’s Island series).

Player interaction is another iffy item. For better or worse, your characters cannot all occupy the same space at the same time. This becomes problematic when two overzealous teammates decide to tackle the same obstacle simultaneously and instead end up as obstacles themselves. You can overcome this by constantly trying to call out your plans (”okay, now I’m going to jump on this Koopa”) but that seems like a strange thing to need to do for what should be a relatively casual experience. At the same time, it really does add to the atmosphere of the game and make it more interesting.

The biggest problem with this game, though, is where it is. My opinion is and always will be that the Wii platform is a hinderance to “normal” games. The controllers suck, not only in a physical sense but in an “it takes me 5-10 minutes to even get them to work” sense. By the time I’ve gotten the console to function I’m already beginning a game with a feeling of disappointment. Maybe it’s a repetitive fluke (oxymoron?), but how can Nintendo expect the console to appeal to non-techy casual gaming types when they can’t reliably sync their controllers to their consoles?

And while I realize that motion control is the Wii’s bread and butter at the moment, I think it’s ridiculous that they feel obligated to tack it on to every game just because it’s there. Making the game rely on motion control means that we are stuck with the basic Wiimote turned sideways (ugh, just like Super Paper Mario) instead of being able to use a Gamecube controller, the Wiimote/nunchuk combo, or the classic controller.

And that interface! Still so terrible.

I took a brief hiatus from my Forza 3 marathon on Thursday to pay a final visit to Liberty City with The Ballad of Gay Tony, Rockstar’s latest (and likely last) installment of downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto IV. Given my fondness for all things GTA, it shouldn’t come as much of a shock that I was watching the credits roll by lunchtime Saturday.

Rockstar’s approach to TBoGT doesn’t differ much from the previous installment – once again you’re put in the shoes of what was previously only a supporting character. As I said before, the experience you enjoy the most really depends on which character and lifestyle you are most comfortable with. In this case, that character is Luis Lopez, ex-con turned bodyguard of/business partner to nightclub impresario “Gay” Tony Prince (who bears a remarkable resemblance to Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark).

As a result, the game is centered around Algonquin, Liberty City’s equivalent to Manhattan, and the high-roller atmosphere extends to fast cars, great new music, and a slew of new over-the-top missions. Of course it’s not all fun and games, but I’ll just leave it at that with regards to plot. You’ll run across plenty of characters that you’ve been previously introduced to, including one loose end from the core game that I was glad to see tied.

I have to say, I really liked Luis as a protagonist – while he kept getting thrust into situations that were less than ideal, I never felt that things were completely out of control like I did with Niko or Johnny. One constant across all GTA games is that you can continue to experience the city even after completing the missions. You may find it telling that when presented with that option in TLaD I opted instead to return to the original game. I don’t expect that to be the case this time around.

I bought my Xbox at the end of the product cycle. It was late 2005 and the 360 had just hit the market, but I wasn’t ready to make the leap yet (mistake). The Xbox was intended as a sort of stopgap, and a way to catch the games I had missed out on in the years where my time was occupied first by the Gamecube and later by the PS2.

One of the first games I bought was Halo – a staple for any collection. It was enjoyable enough, and was really one of my first experiences with the modern first person shooter (FPS). I was indifferent to the overall art direction (generic) and level design (repetitive) but I played through it with Abe and it was a fun, co-op way to kill some time.

Halo 2 followed shortly thereafter, but for whatever reason didn’t receive our immediate attention. By the time we started to play through it, it was on the Xbox 360. Console choices aside, Halo 2 was a struggle for us to stay interested in. The frequent switch between characters and storylines was confusing, and the environments weren’t any better than the first game. We spent a fair amount of time just trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. I’m being generous if I say we made it roughly halfway through the game before it got shelved, and that was my last experience with the Halo series aside from some occasional local multiplayer on Halo 3.

So maybe it was the lull in games, or the recent release of Halo 3: ODST that made me want to try to continue the adventure. Two weeks ago I put in Halo 2 once more in hopes that my interest would be rekindled. A couple ugly, repetitive, frustrating levels later, it was becoming clear that this was not going to be the case. With no achievements to keep me motivated, it was roughly a couple of hours before the game found itself shelved once again.

Still lacking for games to play, I ended up borrowing Halo 3. I’ve been told that a) I didn’t miss much by skipping the rest of the second game and b) the third is a much stronger game. Both of these assessments proved to be accurate, for while I still experienced some of the same typical Halo frustrations, I can look back and say that I did enjoy playing the game when all is said and done.

The Good

As the first of the series to appear on the Xbox 360, you’d expect that Halo 3 would be both visually and aurally superior to the previous iterations, and it is, if only in a technical sense. I found the story to be engaging enough that I at least wanted to continue playing through the game, and the gameplay is solid as ever; even the vehicle controls felt much less frustrating than the previous games. There wasn’t nearly as much repetition to the environments which meant that I spent less time getting lost and backtracking and more time enjoying myself, and I also enjoyed that a good portion of the game took place on earth. I also especially liked the sequences where I fought alongside the Arbiter and/or the Covenant Elites – both make solid teammates.

The Bad

The thing is, where Halo was once the king of shooter games thanks to its solid gameplay, it seems like dozens of similar games have since flooded the market, some of which offer things that seem to be a staple in games nowadays. Gears of War and its emphasis on finding cover during battle comes to mind, something that a first person game such as Halo would have a hard time dealing with. The problem is, there are a myriad of situations in Halo 3 where running and gunning is the last thing you should be doing; you need to hunker down and pick off enemies from a safe vantage point, but there’s no mechanic to encourage this sort of behavior.

Aside from that, all the processing power in the world can’t disguise the fact that this is merely an update to the artwork from the original game. Obviously trying to change character designs midstream is a bad idea, so I suppose more of my issue is that I’ve always found Halo’s style to be incredibly generic. I also had trouble occasionally following the story, particularly in one sequence where I felt as though I missed a cutscene.

Fortunately for me (and for Halo 3), I didn’t go into the experience expecting something groundbreaking; I just wanted to shoot guys for awhile. Which brings me to my final critique: it’s hard to shoot guys when you can’t find any ammo.

Video games, at least those that revolve around you controlling a single protagonist (so for the most part, not sports or party games) seem to be fairly fond of depicting your character as an average joe who got sucked into the action. This isn’t universally true, but it’s common enough.

In the best examples, you’ll either feel like the hero’s actions are totally justified and he had no other choice, or at the very least the game is so good you’re able to suspend your disbelief. In terrible examples, you’ll just find yourself frustrated as you try to figure out why this person would ever even let himself get into this situation in the first place. Fortunately, I played a few good examples this year:

Prince of Persia

Yes, it’s just called Prince of Persia now. Again. Ubisoft can do that, because they decided to throw in the towel on the previous generation of PoP games (those which lived their lives on the PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube. I guess they had gotten a little crazy while also managing to get a little stagnant; I wouldn’t know. I only played the first of that series: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. I will say that while it had some frustrating parts, the overall game was just phenomenal.

This new game, on the other hand, is a little different. At the beginning of the game you’re just an average (ripped) prince (or not; I have no idea) looking for your donkey. Then you end up meeting this princess and you have to save the land from corruption and blah blah blah. Yeah, it sounds tiresome already. And it sort of is. Unlike the previous games, this game is significantly less linear. You have to collect a certain amount items before you can unlock abilities to get to more items to unlock more abilities, which gets old quickly.

There are some really fun acrobatic elements, but they end up being repeated so frequently that by the end of the game you just want to be done so you don’t have to play it anymore. But being a prince (or not; I have no idea), you are amazingly strong and acrobatic and also a great fighter. You’re also witty and charming and have completely won over your witty female companion by the end of the game. And all because of a donkey.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

I mentioned Uncharted briefly last year, when I tried the demo from PSN. Something about it just didn’t resonate with me so I ended up skipping it at the time.

Then E3 happened back in June, and all the previews of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves started to surface, and I thought perhaps I should give the original another chance. I found it to be significantly more tolerable the second time around, and picked up a cheap used copy. Basically, you play as Nathan Drake, treasure hunter extraordinaire (maybe?) and descendent of explorer Francis Drake, and you are trying to recover some kind of treasure (as is bound to happen in such an occupation). Also there’s kidnapping and stuff.

Spoiler Alert: towards the end of the game, there are zombies (or something similar). This almost completely ruined it for me. I also couldn’t figure out how all these mercenaries kept showing up in caverns that were supposedly long-lost and unexplored.

Being a treasure hunter extraordinaire (maybe?), you are amazingly strong and acrobatic and also a great fighter. You’re also witty and charming and have completely won over your witty female companion by the end of the game. And all because of El Dorado.

Shadow Complex

I’ll be honest: this post has been sitting in draft status for something like a month. For the other two games, I had a brief sentence of notes covering what I liked and didn’t. For Shadow Complex all I wrote was holy shit. That’s game of the year material right there.

Shadow Complex is an Xbox Live Arcade release from August that just totally blew my mind. The intent was to make a modern day side-scrolling Metroid (basically one big open map, but certain sections are unavailable until you find the abilities you need to access them) and they achieved that goal and more. But I wouldn’t be writing about it if it didn’t fit into the very same template.

In the game you find yourself on a hike with your hot new girlfriend that you picked up at the bar, but things quickly go awry when you stumble on a massive underground base and she goes and gets herself kidnapped. And what choice do you have but to save her? Fortunately, you happen to have some military training under your belt. And by “some”, I mean “a lot”, because you are a force, and you only get more awesome as the game progresses.

Being an awesome military hero man, you are amazingly strong and acrobatic and also a great fighter. You’re also witty and charming and have completely won over rescued your witty female companion by the end of the game. And all because of wanting to get some.

But Wait…

Here’s where it gets ridiculous – all three games, in spite of being handled by three different developers, used the same guy for the voice of the main character. Because they’re all so similar in personality and ability, it’s a little bit of a challenge to keep them all separate. So depending on which game you played first, there’s the imminent danger that that game’s character becomes the one you imagine in the other scenarios.

Still though, go play Shadow Complex. Seriously.

Since its inception, Xbox Live has been hailed as the definitive online experience for gaming consoles. Originally only available as a paid service, it branched off into two tiers with the launch of the Xbox 360. A free Xbox Live Silver account (which every owner should have, at least) lets you browse the online marketplace and try demos. The real money for Microsoft lies in the Gold account, which allows for online play.

I’ve had a Gold account basically since the day I bought my 360, but truth be told, I wasn’t always convinced that it was worth the money I spent to keep it going. I realized that I really didn’t enjoy playing online competitively, because I basically suck at games (relatively speaking). I don’t have the patience to commit a huge span of time to getting good at Call of Duty or Gears of War, because it’s not even fun – it’s just work.

But recently so many of the games I’ve been playing have been offering some pretty attractive online co-op options. Fable 2 and Saints Row 2 both have modes for jumping into a friend’s game and playing through it, the same as you would when you’re alone. Then there are games like Valve’s Left 4 Dead, in which a single-player mode exists but really is not the point of the game at all – I’ll come back to this shortly.

With so many interesting games out there, my other frustration was that I had nobody to play them with. I am pretty shy about just jumping into games (well, any situation, really) with some random strangers, and that is another big factor that has prevented me from just randomly playing online. There was the occasional game with someone on my friendslist, but for the most part we all were emerged in completely different worlds, and they rarely intersected.

Something seemed to click, though, earlier this year. My BFF Jill (srsly) picked up a 360 in the spring, and so we started to play some stuff together. Then I started to become friends with her friends, and suddenly there were eight of us playing Team Fortress 2 and we all actually knew each other and it was amazing.

What’s even better is that Live now has something called parties. You can start a party with another friend, and it basically opens a voice chat session between the two of you. More interestingly, your other friends can look at their friendslist and see that you’re in a party with others, and join in if they’d like. If you’re all playing together in the same game, this doesn’t function much differently than the lobby of the game itself – and in some cases (such as team-based competition) that’s a more practical solution.

Where parties shine, though, is in their ability to unify two people who may not even be playing the same game. Single player games are still my preference, but if I’m working through some levels in Prince of Persia or blowing through some races in Forza, I can open up a party and talk to my friend who’s playing Portal and we can bitch about our respective challenges. Or there was that one time where three of us were trying to see who get through Half Life 2: Episode 1 the quickest.

Epilogue: Left 4 Dead edition

Left 4 Dead is a game about zombies. This in and of itself is not particularly enthralling to me. What makes L4D unique is its near insistence on playing with others in the campaign mode. The game puts you in control of one of four survivors, who are working as a team to escape the zombie hordes. Interestingly, you will always be working as a team of four – the only variable is what percentage of that team is real people versus AI.

As I mentioned above, you can play the game alone, and mechanically it’s very good. But it’s not really any fun. Much better to save the (only) four campaigns for nights when you and a couple of friends are all in the mood for some zombie hunting. Those are the times when the game becomes truly special and suspenseful.

Nothing that happens in L4D comes across as particularly scary – the game only has so many weapons in its arsenal in the form of a few specialized zombie classes. The real action happens when you or one of your allies gets pinned or knocked down, and you have to figure out how you can rescue them without getting taken down yourself. When you’re playing with the computer, you only want to save them because you need the firepower. But when you’re playing with friends, you want to save them because you feel bad – you’re emotionally attached by default, and that’s where the game really succeeds.

I remember the first time I played a Super Nintendo. The game was Super Mario World (was there any other?), and it was a demo machine set up in the local Kmart. During that time, I always relished shopping trips, as I knew that if I was lucky nobody else would be playing and I could spend a few minutes with my favorite plumber.

Imagine then, going back home, and trying to enjoy Super Mario Bros on the original NES. It wasn’t bad by any means – it just wasn’t “special” anymore. Mario World boasted multi-tiered backgrounds and sprites bigger than anything I’d seen before – remember the giant Bullet Bills? It had amazing new environments! It had Yoshi!

What’s interesting, then, is that no 2D platformer came along after Super Mario World that really made it look outdated and stale. The next huge Mario game was Super Mario 64 – and while it’s notable for the fact that it brought a third dimension to the Mushroom Kingdom, comparing it to any Mario game that came before it is basically apples and oranges.

An eternal plus for Mario is that the game was never meant to be photorealistic; so even today the NES and SNES titles manage to keep some freshness. The original SMB is a little flat, sure; but Mario 3 will always be an exceptional game. While the graphics in this day and age could easily be surpassed by my phone, it doesn’t matter, because they were what they were. They were, and always will be, classics.

Where am I going with this?

I just finally got around to playing Indigo Prophecy. It’s not a new title, having seen release on the PS2 and Xbox a few years ago. My curiosity was piqued during a discussion about it last year, and recently reinvigorated by the news on the developer’s follow-up title Heavy Rain.

My point here doesn’t require me to go into too much depth regarding the plot of Indigo Prophecy, so suffice it to say that it was in their best interest to make things look as realistic as they could. That is an admirable and common goal among a good portion of games nowadays. And I suspect had I played the game 3 or 4 years ago when it came out, I would’ve found it perfectly acceptable.

However, I have been playing games almost exclusively on the Xbox 360 for nearly three years now; games that have truly raised the bar in terms of what video games should be. It’s not really a stretch to say that these games have spoiled me with their bright colors and slick graphics – that’s kind of the point.

So from the minute I put in Indigo Prophecy, the deck was stacked against it. It probably didn’t help that I had just finished Prince of Persia, one of the most beautiful games available on the current crop of consoles, the night before. Everything about Indigo Prophecy was blocky, muted, flat… stale.

The thing is, I’m not convinced that these modern 3D games can ever be enjoyed the same way classic 2D games can. Why would I want to play the original Gran Turismo when I know that Gran Turismo 5 is even closer to the game Polyphony Digital really wants to make? I think that when the paradigm of game design shifted away from traditional 2D, sprite-based platforming games towards 3D polygonal mishmash, all of the 2D games that were great at that time (Mario, Metroid, Zelda) were immortalized.

I don’t think we’ll see that sort of phenomenon again for awhile, what with the massive leaps in technology happening so frequently. Look at Grand Theft Auto IV, versus Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, versus Grand Theft Auto III. You’d expect the differences between this and the previous generation to be pronounced, but even the two games on the same console are worlds apart after only 4 years.

This is going to end in one of two scenarios:

1. Games will continue to develop and advance, graphically, until they can’t go any further. We will have games that are truly photorealistic to the point where the only way to improve is to increase the scope of the game and continue to expand the player’s environment.
2. Console games as we know them will phase out due to some dramatic shift in technology. True, immersive 3D, I suppose. A sort of holodeck type of thing? Once this happens, it will basically render the current types of games moot, leaving the last of their kind to become legendary like some of the great SNES games have become.

So basically what I’m saying is that I like new games, and I like old games. It’s the in-between area that fails to light my fire.

I like to save money on stuff. Not that that’s unusual – but between places like Amazon and just general sales on things, I have a hard time convincing myself to shell out a bunch of money if I don’t feel like I’m getting a good deal. Oftentimes this involves a little extra shopping around, but it’s worth it.

But then sometimes, stuff just basically ends up right under your nose.

Anecdote #1

With a Best Buy gift card burning a hole in my pocket, I finally decided to pick up Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the DS. I don’t generally enjoy buying games for the DS as I feel that $35 is an awful lot of money for such a tiny cartridge; but the gift card dampened the impact, if only a tiny bit.

And then they picked the next day to knock $15 off. It’s still on sale – definitely pick it up if you’ve been on the fence. It really is amazing what they’ve been able to accomplish on the DS platform.

Anecdote #2

I’ve long thought that the Keen Newport H2 would be the perfect sandal if they’d just add a cleated option for us bikers – there’s just no way I can justify that kind of money if I can’t use it for biking, as my typical summer footwear rarely breaks the $10 mark.

And then, thanks to BSNYC I discovered the Commuter. At $115, it’s at the higher end of what I’d be willing to pay for such a product, I figured I’d think more about it when (if?) biking-in-sandals weather returns. But that same afternoon, REI sent us a catalog and was all like “we’re having a sale!” (it started today). $85 is still a lot for sandals, but that’s about what I paid for my (well-worn) Shimanos and I expect these to be even more useful when off the bike.

In the past week, two iPhoners friends with iPhones have asked me what apps I’m currently using on my iPhone. And while I’m not writing this down with the pretense that anyone will actually care, I figure it’s a thing appropriate for a blog such as this. Yes, I’ve covered this topic before, but this is a more comprehensive listing that also accounts for my tastes having since changed.

The List

I have my phone divided into four pages, plus the typical quick launch bar at the bottom (Phone/Text/Safari/Mail):

1. Primary Apps (11 + Settings)
2. Secondary Apps (16)
3. Games (8)
4. Web Shortcuts (3)

I’ve decided to include arbitrary ratings for usefulness (how good it is at what it does) and frequency (how often I use it), 5 being the highest.

Recommendations

I’ve already covered Twitteriffic, TWC, and WhitePages Mobile; my reasons for liking them still stand. But here’s a quick rundown of the others:

• CameraBag is a nice little filtering app that makes the photos taken with your phone not look quite so lame. You can either shoot directly from the app itself, or edit photos after the fact. Here’s a quick example: before and after.
• Delivery Status Touch is the best package tracking app I’ve found with support for every delivery service imaginable. As a bonus it’s updatable from the web.
• Aurora Feint: The Beginning is a really fun game, when it works. It used to constantly throw out errors when it couldn’t talk to the server, to the point where you couldn’t even resume a game you were playing. It looks like the original free version had been removed from the store, replaced by Aurora Feint II; perhaps this newer iteration works better.
• Sol Free Solitaire is solitaire, with a few variations. Go play Demon – I’ll see you in a few hours when you realize what time it is.

I like the concept of comments on blogs. While I don’t see too many comments here, I like that the few people that follow my bouts of incoherence have the option for feedback. Of course the occasional spam seeps through, but Akismet is pretty effective in catching that sort of thing.

But I woke up this morning to a comment on a post I wrote months ago about video games, in which the commentor basically just called me biased and said I was a fanboy. While the bias accusation just leaves me stupefied (in terms of bias, that particular article ranked pretty low – you may be more interested in this one or this one or this one) but as a whole I’m not sure how I’m even supposed to react to a comment like this. I could write a real rebuttal or offer a slightly less mature response (the PS3 sucks and so does your face), but both of those would be based on the assumption the commentor is going to show up again, which seems unlikely – they took their shots, why would they come back?

So the only option left is to ignore it, which just irritates me. I just can’t figure out what compels someone to Google “MS NXE vs PS3 XMB” and leave a half-baked comment on the first site they find about how M$ sucks and Sony r000lz. It’s sad, because I love discussing this sort of thing and would be totally willing to have this conversation with a total stranger regardless of bias, yet these are the sort of people who share this hobby.

Oh look – option four is whine about it. I can do that!

It was big news when Rockstar announced that Grand Theft Auto IV would see a simultaneous release for both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Arguably even bigger news was that Microsoft basically showered Rockstar in cash in exchange for the exclusive rights to two episodes of downloadable content.

That was in 2006; Grand Theft Auto IV hit stores in April 2008 with the promise that the first portion of DLC would follow in the fall. And true to form, it was delayed. But finally, last Tuesday, The Lost and Damned arrived and set out to redefine what downloadable content can be.

Instead of continuing your experience as Niko Bellic (protagonist of the core storyline) TLAD puts you in the shoes of biker Johnny Klebitz (of The Lost Motorcycle Club), one of the ancillary characters that you previously crossed paths with. I really like this approach, as the entire cast of GTA IV is ripe for this sort of extrapolation. I was a little hesitant about the choice of a biker as I wasn’t a huge fan of the motorcycle-oriented missions in the original game, but fortunately those fears turned out to be unfounded.

Whether you prefer Niko or Johnny as a “hero” boils down to personal preference; I found both to be likable enough, with a sort of “why does this keep happening to me?” quality about them. As noted above, you’ll end up in a few missions where both characters are involved simultaneously and that may be my favorite aspect of this whole experience – seeing a whole new viewpoint of a scenario that you had previously only witnessed from one angle. Furthermore, relationship between Niko and Johnny versus Niko and the rest of TLMC is quite interesting to follow as they rarely seem to be consistent.

Aside from that the missions are par for course, but enjoyable. I probably spent around ten hours on the story mode, and didn’t find any one level particularly frustrating. Interestingly, Rockstar has reworked the continue system with this expansion, so restarting the mission often puts you at a checkpoint instead of at the beginning, finally.

Liberty City has also received some upgrades in the form a couple new interiors and some new vehicles; most of which are motorcycles. But most notable is the addition of all sorts of new music and dialogue on the radio stations. It’s pretty rad and remarkably satisfying to hear Deep Purple’s Highway Star and Bon Jovi’s Wanted blaring over the exhaust of your bike. Odd though – I can’t help but notice that Rockstar seems to have raided the Rock Band catalog. And while I believe the new vehicles are only available when you’re playing TLAD, the media additions are universal.

So is it worth $20? If you spent countless hours with the original, then yes, no thought required. Buy it and see Liberty City in a whole new light. If you weren’t crazy about the core game, than nothing TLAD brings to the table can remedy that aside from perhaps the continue system. Still, though, it’s not nearly as satisfying or interesting to play if you weren’t already emotionally invested in the characters. It’s not an entirely different game, and it’s not an entirely different story. What it is, is a very strong addition to what was already a very good game.