An Entertaining Grime

Rice Trafficking

2010-06-13T18:05:00.000-07:00

Author’s Note:

I recently began to go through Sebastian Junger’s (The Perfect Storm, Fire, War) writing. I started with War. By the book’s conclusion, I was a die-hard Junger fan. His life is one that I would like to emulate in the future. His essay collection Fire gives Junger’s history through a timeline of assignments, and a thread about who he is develops. What struck me is that he didn’t start writing for a living until he was in his thirties. So I’ve got time, and I’m at peace with the fact that I am not a professional writer. A professional writer would have a book manuscript about his trip to Haiti had it been half as eventful as mine. I’ve only written two stories.

I’ll come back to Haiti later. But my passions and creativity are focused on other adventures. Because really, you need to DO THINGS to have subject matter.

But there’s one more story that I cannot leave untold, because it was the most extraordinary experience of my life. I am too unskilled to properly tell this story right now, but I am compelled to try.

Facing unavoidable failure, I decided to save my reader time and tell it with an economy of words.

Will Eslinger

June 13, 2010

It’s my third day in Haiti. I’m on an old school bus with a group of twenty five Americans and Haitians. We’re leaving Port Au Prince early in the day to deliver twenty bags of rice to a church in the mountains. It has been 53 days since a 7.0 earthquake hit the city. That was why we were here, but it had little to do with today’s mission. A pastor needs rice. We are going to take it to him.

Someone tells us that it’s about a two and a half hour trip up to the church, the road is relatively smooth, and the breeze is nice. The bus’s windows haven’t been closed in years and I feel like I’m being assaulted with a smell. It’s the smells of a city without infrastructure. Sanitation has suffered. Piles of trash and rubble form the only skyline in site. The mountains we are driving towards can be made out faintly through a morning haze.

We’ve gotten stuck in traffic. We’re on a road that intersects a sun drenched street market. I see knickknacks, street foods, rum, sweets, pink cigarettes and fruit arranged on the ground. Behind the goods I can see a line of dilapidated aluminum buildings. I’m looking at a microcosm of Haitian society going about its business. There are pot holes here filled with mud and big enough to bathe a pig. Every pothole I see is the same. Men are walking past with wheelbarrows full of pig intestines and carcasses.

The traffic has broken, I think that we were stuck for an hour.

We’re out of the city and moving into the mountains. There is one-lane to the first bit of the road, it’s paved though. This road curves like mad, but so far our driver has averted disaster with almost constant blasts from his horn. The incessant noise is driving me insane. But I know it’s necessary. The road has one lane, barely.

Everyone has realized that the two and a half hour estimate was very unrealistic. It has been two and a half hours, and the road is still curving, the horn is still blowing, and the ruts in the road are sending vibrations up through the paper-thin sheets into my tailbone, to my spinal column and into my brain.

It’s mid-day, and are temporarily on the other side of hunger and irritation. We stopped for tangerines and coconut candy. I’m really enjoying the sugar rush.

I don't have these people's permission to post these pictures. If you're reading this my old friends, please don't sue me.

We are standing on the high end of a ridge where the road stopped our bus with deep ruts and steep turns. We’ve been here for an hour. Some of the other guy, no, there’s a girl down there now, people, are making make fools out of themselves chasing a goat.

Our translator is back, oddly straddled on the same dirt bike he left in when we arrived. He looks thirsty, dusty and tired.

Now we’re being told to pile back onto the bus. We’re going back to Port Au Prince.

Apparently the Haitians brought donkeys for the rice.

Setting the World On Fire: Far Cry 2 Takes Me To Africa

2009-02-10T17:54:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, things click in a game. The mood is right, the tone is set perfectly. The story takes itself seriously. Sometimes these things click, and you realize that you’re playing something that was intended for adults. With its broad, sweeping themes of objectivism, Bioshock, made the made-for-adults statement loud and clear from the very opening scene. Portal did so with the sophistication of its humor. The fact that those games are actually adult impresses me enough. But what really impresses me is when a game can take something that any other title would treat with juvenility, and make it seem mature. Such was my eureka moment with Far Cry 2, the open-world First Person Shooter/African Safari released in early November of 2008.

I was creeping through a ramshackle hut with a rusty AK-47 in my pixilated hands, waiting to get the drop on a pair of mercenaries guarding a bride. While sitting there I overheard their conversation. One of the men was trying to get the other to film himself copulating, and then place it on the internet for a profit. Now, this scene should, by all accounts have been immature and laughable. But instead, it helped to humanize the game’s enemies. It showed that their existence extended beyond the various, bloody encounters that I was to have with them over the course of the game. That, and the fact that this was an overheard conversation that wasn’t beaten over my head, banged the drum heavily for the title’s merits as a truly adult-themed game. And thankfully, the rest of the experience delivered on that promise.

Far Cry 2 is the most hard-core game (outside of Fallout 3 mods) that I have played in a long time. Weapons degrade, you have malaria and you have to medicate, your health doesn’t recharge all the way without first aid kits and to fast travel, you have to go to bus stations. You’re given this lush, hostile world and simply set free. Your hand is never held; you’re given this lush, hostile world and simply told to kill a man: “The Jackal”, a maniacal arms dealer channeling Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. How to do this is up to you. Your character is a soldier of fortune, so you assume that soldiering for fortune is your best bet.

The missions that you’re given as a mercenary are honestly not anything ground-breaking, there are two factions fighting in this world. You go to the main town, take a mission from one or the other, and then go kill somebody. There are no set pieces in this world; all of these missions are procedural, which means that they can, at times, be… boring. They are very similar to the Assassination missions in GTA IV; they’re fun for a little while, but eventually become monotonous and formulaic. There are only so many times that I can drive to point A, then kill random bad guy #127 before my patience is tried. But I found that playing the game over a couple of weeks helped to remove the seeming monotony for the mission structure, freeing me to bask in the glow of what Far Cry 2 does accomplish.

Far Cry 2 excels in setting atmosphere, and treating you like an adult.

The world of far Cry 2’s African nation is stunning, the lighting glows through trees and tall grass, animals meander throughout the plains and the variety in geographic features is as wide-ranging as any game I’ve this year. Dust and sand hang waft through the desert’s air, the jungles brim with the sounds of mosquitoes and other invisible fauna, and the towns practically induce sweating with their sun-baked clay and faded… everything. The attention to detail in these environments is meticulous and awe-inspiring, even if what it portrays isn’t particularly lovely.

Africa is called the “Dark Continent” for a reason. The west has pillaged and raped the land for hundreds of years, then left it to swill about in its own filth. Splinter Cell: Double Agent let you play in the area for a little bit, but the story of Sam Fisher’s adventure in the Congo had less to do with the area than the plot that led him there. Far Cry 2 shows an immense maturity in that it embraces the issues of third-world Africa in its plot. Gun runners, mercenaries, refugees and gang-armies litter the land. Most everyone is out for blood and the few who aren’t are so inundated with evil that their quest to be good seems almost futile.

The game’s plot is somewhat minimal. What is there is good and mature, but that isn’t really wher eth storytelling of far Cry 2 shines. It shines among the vestiges of ruined lives scattered about the world. The abandoned bus stops, rail yards, bars, stores, and homes, that scream “there was life here, but no one cared enough to protect it!” And in another true stroke of respect for its audiences maturity, Far Cry 2 doesn’t place you in the shoes of the region’s savior. You’re just one man, a man whose greed motivates him more than any sort of perverted sense of honor that he may hold.

It’s an evil world, and you’re just another evil part of it.

Game of the Year

2009-01-08T10:11:00.000-08:00

Will Eslinger’s Pick: Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360

I’ve been to the Washington Monument more times than I can count and every time that I ride the elevator to the top and gaze over the expanse of the nation’s capital I find myself amazed.

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t terribly amazed by the first few hours of Fallout 3, sure. The game was technically proficient, but it just didn’t have the kind of magic that I needed to hook myself in. But then I made a familiar trip, I walked across the Washington Mall (a dried up husk of trenches and concertina wire) and rode up a familiar golden elevator and looked out on that familiar, sweeping expanse. And would you believe it? I was amazed.

Creativity abounds in Bethesda’s version of DC, where densely populated communes and survivalist hovels provide both eye-candy for the creativity-minded and excellent, quirky characters and conversations for those more interested in the plot that’s developing among the ruins of DC. From an aircraft carrier that’s been modified into a fortress for the last sane, cultured people in the city, to a town built around, and inhabited by worshipers of, an unexploded atomic bomb (the slightly overhyped “Megaton”), the developers have created these patches of sheer creativity and continuity of design that captured my imagination and sense of exploration from just a few hours in, and kept my attention until I was in hour 20-something.

As much as I loved the communes, the pockets of life in the barrens, there was something vaguely romantic about the wasteland that surrounded them. With sweeping winds and meticulously crafted paths throughout, I found the times that I spent wandering through the desert that was once DC were some of the most cathartic and relaxing experiences I had in the game. The allure of the wastes is helped along by the game’s graphics engine, which stuns when rendering environments and monsters, and deserves a great deal of credit for the sheer amount of data that it has to crunch. The task rendering the wastes is even more impressive when the consistency of the world is full grasped, when a landmine placed in hour two, ends of blowing your foot off in hour twenty two.

I could write for paragraphs about the elation and frustration inherent in the V.A.T.S. combat system, and argue with myself ad nauseum over whether or not Bethesda should have scrapped the real-time combat system altogether (short answer: yes, they should have). But such typing would be a waste of mine and your time. In fact, nothing that I have mentioned so far really captures the allure that enabled Fallout 3 to hold me in its grasps for so many hours.

The reason that I so loved Fallout 3 is that everyone in the wasteland is looking for something.

I was looking for something, the NPC’s were looking for something, and everyone else who bought this game looked for something in their own way. Be it riches, fame, infamy, or attainment of complete bad ass status, Fallout 3 encourages players to find their passion in the world that they have created, and then enables them to actually pursue that choice. The game allows its players to enter its world with their own preconceived notions, and rather than try and discourage their plans, the game embraces them as if they were scripted into the code from the beginning.

The true testament of this game’s ability to make me feel, to make me long for something, and to make me want to go out and get it came as I watched the final cut-scene and saw what an absolute prick I had been throughout the wasteland. I enslaved innocents, I slaughtered a peaceful cult, hell, I think I even kicked a few puppies. But as I watched how I made my mark on this completely fictional world, I felt pangs of sadness and regret as I thought back to how I could have done things completely differently.

And so I reloaded a past save, and set about changing the Wasteland for the better.

And yeah, the world is still pretty damn amazing.

Benjamin’s Pick: Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360

As you step out of the dank darkness of your previous home, the sun blinds you for a moment, contracting your pupils in the muted sunlight. Washington D.C. unfolds before you, a decrepit city filled with blown out ruins. The Washington Monument stands battered and bruised across the foggy sky line, and in looking at it you realize, you probably should have stayed inside. After having this thought, the game’s subtle music kicks in, and you remember the game’s opening line: “War. War never changes.” Looking at the destruction in front of you, you ponder the quote philosophically, and after taking your first steps beyond the Vault door, a band of Raiders appears out of nowhere, making war for nothing more than the clothes on your back.

This is the opening to my game of the year, Fallout 3. Upon exiting the Vault, you are overwhelmed by the scope of your task, and after entering the fresh air of the nuclear apocalypse before you, you somehow know that you’re in for a real treat. And while the beginning of the game is something of a slow burn, as it very calmly introduces you into the world, there comes a time when you realize that this is a game that transcends all others.

My moment of clarity about this game came while doing the Tenpenny Tower quest. It’s one of the first overly complex side quests I came across in the game, and as I worked my way through it, the different ways to attack the quest overwhelmed me. Each choice I made had impactful ramifications, and while I stared at my screen weighing my options toward the end of the quest, I realized that this game was able to grab me on an emotional level, making me seriously think about my choices. That’s powerful stuff, especially to a long time gamer like myself. Like Bioshock before, this game had completely sucked me into its world. From there, I knew I couldn’t ever turn away from this game, and since that quest, each subsequent quest has simply glued my eyeballs to my TV.

Fallout 3 has devoured my soul. Maybe it’s the setting, maybe it’s the combat, or maybe, I’m finally in a place where I don’t mind dropping a ton of hours into a game. As of this writing, I’m Level 19 and 40 hours in, and I don’t see myself stopping too soon. For once, I feel like my character has grown a ton. I am a force of nature in the game. The design choices in the game are exquisite, and I feel like the pacing is really great both in the story and the way that quests unfold. Yes, the game has flaws, but as an overall experience, I am engaged, enthralled, and completely obsessed.

Despite having a giant stack of games for my 360 and the prospect of having even more added to it during the holiday season, Fallout 3 still seduces me and spins lovingly in my 360. And it will be there for a long, long time.

Humphrey’s Pick: Metal Gear Solid 4 for the Xbox 360

Game of the Year is something I'm immediately going to a little biased on, just to air that out. I only own a PS3 (and a little handheld equipment) and that's all I feel I need to own honestly - there's just that much product coming from not only Sony now, but the 360 as well and I can barely keep up with the console I own. That said though, I played the #$%@ out of what I did own, buying a dozen games and completing the rough majority of them. And despite the quantity, and quality of them mind you, my GOTY could immediately be narrowed down to just two titles: Metal Gear Solid 4 and Fallout 3.

And here's where that little bias is going to come in again (I guess I'm a hypocrite as well, because if anyone knows me from my AICN content, I almost never play favorites) - I like Fallout 3. Love it really. The setting is amazing, so full of potential yet hauntingly lonely at the same time. The way you get to piece just what went down in the world via all the sets you visit, or all the people you talk to, or even just happening upon an isolated radio tower is a great drive to explore all before you - and let’s not forget all the hidden weapons and little cookies around like some pimp ass Power Armor in the middle of a nuclear launch site, or a crashed UFO hidden up in the top edge of the map. As much as I played... no, lived that game for damn near seven weeks, I just couldn't pick it in the end. Despite the addictive nature of finding new territory, and exploring the map, and meeting all these colorful characters the overall story was pretty bland, and the combat that you spend half the game competing in was just bland. If it weren't for the V.A.T.S system that let you just blow through it, and do so with a big gorey mess of bits and pieces of Super Mutant or Raider alike across the Wastes, I'd say I couldn't believe that something so generic as this combat system graced such an otherwise stellar game.

And, let's be honest here, as much as I dug the little things about exploring the Wastes, it just didn't hold a candle to the culmination of over a decade's worth of storyline and character development of one of my favorite gaming series of all time, Metal Gear Solid 4.

The epic end of a legend's story, complete with all the goofy in jokes, high quality sneaking and straight up destroying gameplay you could want in a game, and an arsenal that you could arm all the crowd of a Soccer game with and take over a small country. It was poetic at times, hopeless at others, and downright epic overall. Yes, I know, you spend as much time watching as you do playing, but it's a price you pay for possibly the best storyline to grace the video game industry in all its lifespan. And when the action does kick in, it's just so fantastic. The rattle of gunfire in the background as you dodge entrenches armies to get to your objective, the "jump" factor of having a Gecko land right next to your position, and then another assemblage of spectacular boss fights in a series that isn't exactly hurting in that category. And not only is it challenging on even the default difficulty setting, but there's just so many approaches you can take to getting towards your objective, all culminating in one of the most satisfactory endings in gaming history, but making for a highly re-playable experience thanks to the challenge level and the "New Game Plus" that lets you keep all your equipment through all respective play-throughs. Not only was this a perfect ending to a pretty much perfect series, but it was the only game I was willing to say was worth a perfect ten in a year littered with so many "soooo close" 9's and 9.5's.

Runner Up Games of the Year

2009-01-05T14:01:00.000-08:00

Will's Pick: Metal Gear Solid 4 for the Playstation 3

When I first played Metal Gear Solid 4, I did so in 20 hours. Those were hours without sleep and without contact with the outside world. They were hours interspersed with two breaks to eat, although there could have been three. I think that there is a possibility that I posted on Revision3’s forums just to release some of the pent-up amazement bubbling up inside me, but then again, I’m not really sure. Those 20 hours were euphoric and I recollect them in a haze that is, I kid you not, tinted with gold. Those 20 hours were my equivalent to the opium dreams that coerced Samuel Coleridge to first pen the story of Kubla Khan and his stately pleasure dome.

Those hours were magical, and had they been the only ones that I spent with Metal Gear Solid 4, then there is no doubt in my mind that the game would have been my game of the year. But alas, I played through Hideo Kojima’s swan song two times since. This is why you see it here.

My history as a gamer is intertwined with the Metal Gear series. So to say that I had a vested interest in the final fight of the (prematurely) aging Solid Snake is to understate the matter immensely. I needed to know what became of these characters whose serpentine tales so engaged me for these many years. And for the most part, that part of me, that need, was satiated. I really did enjoy the story of Metal Gear Solid 4; it was absolutely everything that I could have really wanted it to be. Every single dangling plot thread from the series’ 20 year history was tied up within the game’s arc. Every question that I had was answered, and every character had his/her own fitting end.

The problem though, is that Metal Gear Solid 4 is a game that, for every immensely satisfying step forward, took an equally expansive step backwards.

The Metal Gear Solid games have always been a tad bit archaic in the control department, but with four, Kojima and company actually crafted a game with controls that could stand toe to toe with any of the best third person games of the year. Yet with this new method of control, came little to no increase in the AI of the game’s enemies.

Every single improvement that the game brings to the table is joined by an equally puzzling vestige from its past. The game’s deep, almost Shakespearean, story is moving in its scale, but is constantly held down by Hideo Kojima’s almost perverse need to litter his masterpiece with scatological humor and absurdities. Similarly, the game’s cut scenes are well acted, well directed and gorgeous, but no one in them can shut the hell up. I truly believe that Mr. Kojima has simply never heard of editing, or that sometimes less is more.

But que sera sera, Metal Gear Solid 4 is, despite its flaws, a truly great game. What is truly a shame is that it had the chance to be something so much more.

Benjamin's Pick: Gears of War 2 for the Xbox 360

In the movie This is Spinal Tap, one of my favorite moments is when the band discusses their amps and how hard they have to rock through those amps. Unlike other bands, which can only rock at 10, Spinal Tap is able to rock at the illusive 11^th dial. They rock that hard.

I only mention this because it pertains to my “Almost Game of the Year Game of the Year.” It was one of those games that just took everything that had come before, and turned the knob up to 11. It was a game that was bigger, louder, and better than the previous one. It was, of course, Gears of War 2.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this game somewhere in my picks for 2008. The problem with picking Gears of War 2 for anything specific is that it doesn’t really offer much new, which is one of its weaknesses. It really is a gussied up version of its former self. So while I had an amazing time playing this game, I just didn’t feel right picking it as my Game of the Year.

What stands out in this game is the ways that they made it bigger, badder, and louder. The fights in this game are INSANITY. Enemies come from everywhere. Grenades fly from every direction, bullets rip apart your cover, and missiles and mortars scream through the air. The firefights in this game bring intensity to the 3^rd person shooter that has never been done before. The set pieces and levels are huge, offering great expanses of caverns, massive Horde architecture, or a dilapidated city that’s about to plunge into the Earth. These huge levels are rendered by one of the most beautiful graphics engines out there. This game is simply stunning, and every second you’re walking through the game, your eye balls are in a euphoric state. It just doesn’t get much better than this.

What Gears of War 2 offers to this whole thing is a shining example of how do a sequel right. The Gears of War 2 team took everything that was good about the first one and found ways to improve on it. The graphics are better, the story is more involved (but still pretty dumb), the action is crazy intense, and the set pieces are so much bigger. They also took time to really change up some of the parts of the game, whether its through an improved tank mission or through mixing up part of a level. This is an evolution for this series, and despite not bringing much new into the fold, it’s still one hell of a gaming experience.

Action Adventure of the Year

2009-01-03T18:45:00.000-08:00

Will Eslinger's Pick: Gears of War 2 for the Xbox 360

Gears of War 2 is a game about making you feel like a grade-A, genuine bad ass. That’s its motif.

This realization struck me about an hour in, when a fellow squad of “Gears” (like “G.I.” in the GOW universe) comes over the radio squawking for help. They’re under attack by an enemy mortar crew, and it just so happens that I have a flank on said crew, so I hauled tail towards the enemy position, and ripped them apart from their side with one of their own mounted weapons.

It’s this confluence of gameplay that made Gears of War 2 stand out to me, the variety and the way that it contributes to the catharsis that the game’s story tells me I should at times feel. Marcus Fenix, your character, is a dyed in the wool bad ass, and yet the first Gears of War, didn’t ever make me feel that way. Every firefight was an exercise in plodding along from piece of cover to piece of cover, picking off enemies one by one. How this was supposed to make me feel like a god of the battlefield, I really don’t know. But in Gears 2, Epic has crafted such fluid continuity with the environment that you can’t help but feel as though your character is some electronic embodiment of death itself.

The game’s newfound scale is somehow twisted into this motif. I don’t know how, but it was. Rather than seeming insignificant in the face of hordes of locusts running around like ants, massive airborne assaults, and the sinking of entire cities by seismic weapons of mass destruction. I never felt dwarfed. Ever firefight that I won, every locust that I killed, seemed to have a tangible effect on the bigger picture. Ever mortar crew I took out was then too dead to rain hell down on other “Gears”, every blood-mount that I disemboweled couldn’t rip its teeth into the flesh of a refugee, and every nemacyst I took out of the sky was one less threat to the helicopter crews that flew overhead.

Gears of War 2 is simply a clinic in game design. Not one little bit of the game’s entire length comes across as superfluous or less fun than any other part, it’s a game where fun reigns supreme, where no moment is the same as the next. It’s a game that can give you a quasi on-rails segment one minute, a pitched firefight the next, a WWI-esque battle of entrenchment after that, and then a stealth level a moment later. The game excels at presenting you with fun things to do, and never lets off the throttle for its entire length.

No other game this year really embodied the word “Action” to the extent that Gears of War 2 did. Lead Designer Cliff Bleszinski promised his audience a game that was “bigger, better and more bad ass” and his ambition was realized. Hell, he made that promise his motif.

Benjamin Lovati's Pick: Dead Space for the Xbox 360

Delivering a story without use of cut scenes or text driven application is one of the more exciting trends in gaming. This was a trend started with Half-Life, whose entire story was delivered through character interactions and environmental immersion. Last year’s mega smash Bioshock was my favorite game of the year and is now the pinnacle to which I hold all story driven action games. This year, a little known EA title called Dead Space, reached for, and nearly grabbed, that crown.

One of Dead Space’s major strengths was that it was designed to completely immerse you into the world. With no HUD, all of your health is displayed by a glowing bar on your back and ammo displays are on the weapons themselves. The story is told through video, audio, and text logs that are found throughout the derelict ship that you roam. I was enthralled with the story, and even more so, the ship itself, which came to life with each new section of the ship. Like Rapture, the USG Ishimura feels like it was lived in, and it’s this feeling that drives you to find out just what ruined the lives of these people. The missions and ending to the game are excellent as my Keanu Reeves “Whoa.” escaped my lips several times before the final boss battle.

While the feel of the game was derived from Bioshock, the action was taken straight from the Resident Evil 4 infrastructure. And personally, I thought this was a smart choice. Look, Resident Evil 4 changed the way that survival horror combat is done, and I appreciate that the developers gave fans a mechanic that they are familiar with. Of course, combat in Dead Space has its own distinctive flair. The weapon design is top notch, and each one requires a certain strategy to use it effectively. The ability to walk with your weapon drawn definitely adds tension and makes the combat feel tighter. Never once did I feel like I had died cheaply in the game.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention parts of the physics engine in this game, particularly when it comes to the Zero Gravity. This is an amazing effect in the game, and the way that characters and enemies animate in these environments is absolutely superb. I clap my hands in joy at the animation and physics teams because it was one of those deft touches that kept me coming back for more.

Lastly, I want to talk about the real star of the show, and that is the audio. There is this constant sense of doom that the music and sounds create as you roam the ship. The thud of your metal boots on the metal walkways reminds how alone you are on the ship, and the ever present growls and screams of death keep you poised for anything.

Dead Space is easily one of the best Action/Adventure games from this year, and any fan of the genre should definitely pick it up.

First Person Shooters of the Year

2009-01-02T15:21:00.000-08:00

Will Eslinger's Pick: Crysis Warhead for the PC

Let’s get this out of the way…

Crysis Warhead is the most gorgeous looking game that I have ever played. This is a game that absolutely burns through pixels, renders every environment down to the smallest crab, and manages to draw miles and miles of in-game terrain.

There, are we good? Have I satiated the prerequisite of talking about Crysis’s graphics? I hope so, because to dwell on them any further would be a disservice to Crysis Warhead, a game that is so much more than the sheen of its graphics.

Crysis Warhead serves as a side-story to its predecessor, which is to say that it continues the plot of the three-way war between the U.S., North Korea, and Aliens that takes place on a conveniently picturesque tropical island. I wouldn’t say that the plot is really a draw for the game, but as a fan of military sci-fi, it’s not too bad, and it does an excellent job of establishing a game world where people get to wreck shit with impunity and the help of a nano suit.

The nano suit is the key to Crysis Warhead’s quality. Where most first person shooters seem content to ape Halo’s grenade, gun, melee combo, Crysis surpasses expectation with adding four suit-based skills to the aforementioned three. The nano suit you start the game out with has four different settings, stealth, armor, speed, and strength. The settings are pretty self explanatory, but they offer an enormous amount of potential for some next-level emergent gameplay thanks to how easy it is to switch between skills on the fly. Stealth into the heart of an enemy base, turn on strength to shuck a grenade into a machinegun pit, enables shields to fight off the hornet’s nest of enemies that you’ve stirred up, and then go into speed mode to close the gap on the few remaining enemies and them to hell with your shotgun.

What makes this playground approach work is that there really isn’t any scripting of note in the game. There are some very key story events that are witnessed in the first-person, but as far as gameplay goes, the developers aren’t motivated to wow players with spectacular explosions pre-set into the game’s framework. Rather, they simply supply the world, the enemies and then step back and let you go to town.

But the explosions still happen, oh how they happen. The high tech-specs for Crysis allow the developers to create a physics system that lets you literally destroy a building (not a canned animation either, you’re actually destroying stuff, piece by piece) one second, flip a jeep off the mountain and watch it bounce, then explode the next second, and then chuck an enemy 50 feet into a tree still another second. The possibilities are really limitless, and where the original Crysis made the mistake of replacing your cunning North Korean enemies with brain-dead aliens about halfway through the game, taking away most of the “playground” feel that it had going for it, Crysis Warhead wisely keeps “meat-bags” (read: human) front and center a much bigger portion of the game.

I feel that I should offer up the caveat that this game requires a much more powerful PC than most people have use for, and so I can understand why this pick may seem almost… elitist. But I promise that that was not my intention, I simply went with my gut on this one, and my gut told me that Crysis Warhead is the best First Person Shooter that I have played all year.

Benjamin Lovati's Pick: Battlefield Bad Company for the Xbox 360

After a year dominated by games like Call of Duty 4 and Bioshock, 2008 felt like it took an FPS nap. As a hardcore FPS player, I’m hard pressed to think of a memorable FPS. In fact, I can’t really think of a standout game that advanced the genre and brought something fresh to the gaming landscape. So, it was kind of hard for me to pick a game of the year for this category, but when I sat down and thought about it, I realized that there was one FPS that stood above the rest. That game was Battlefield: Bad Company.

I’ll admit that I’m a little bit late to the Xbox Live game. In fact, I just activated it this summer. After messing around with Gears of War and Halo 3, I was looking for something that would really provide an awesome online experience. After trying out, Unreal Tournament 3, I bought Battlefield and was immediately sucked in.

With Battlefield, the real meat of the game is found in the multiplayer, but this entry really made an attempt at putting a story behind the conflict. While the story didn’t really come with any sort of emotional punch, it was fun and had a great sense of humor. It was not a genre changing game, but it was a big step for the series, which is important considering how many shooters never change.

Everyone always tells me that Call of Duty is where the multiplayer honey is at, but as someone who’s played both, I can honestly say I had more fun playing Battlefield online. The thing with Call of Duty is that the community didn’t speak to me. I don’t want to sit and listen to someone call me a faggot for an hour, nor do I need people mocking my noob status (oh, the stories I could tell). I just don’t want to play a game online where people are using it as a compensation for other things lacking in their lives.

In Battlefield, I found the community to be much more rewarding to work with. For the most part, people really worked together to get an objectives done. One of the nicer design choices was that you could score points a wide variety of ways, so even if you weren’t killing everyone on the map, you could still earn points (and levels) by doing class specific tasks. The class system was balanced, and the maps were a ton of fun to play. I also loved the destructibility of the environments. It changes the dynamics of a game completely when you know the wall you’re standing behind could be destroyed at any second, or you can create your own path into a building by taking out a wall.

If anything, you should check out Battlefield’s multiplayer. It’s a different feel from the Call of Duty’s of the world, but that isn’t a bad thing. You should find the experience to a whole lot of fun and very rewarding.

Open World Gaming: Or how GTA IV Owned a Genre

2009-01-01T14:25:00.000-08:00

2008 has been the year of the open world. Farcry 2, Mercenaries 2, Fallout 3, Saint’s Row 2, and Grand Theft Auto IV built themselves around the open-world and games like Fable II and Prince of Persia incorporated the aesthetic into their otherwise straight-forward narratives. The trend isn’t new, ever since Grand Theft Auto 3, developers have been throwing in arbitrary choice into their titles to boost sales with the “Open-World!” bullet-point on the back of their box. I enjoy open-world games, I enjoy having choice and consequence to my actions, and while very few of these “open-world” games really offer that kind of experiences, the ones that do deserve recognition.

And so we have here, for your enjoyment, three perspectives on what was, by far, the most rewarding entry into purely-open-world genre of 2008: Grand Theft Auto IV.

Will Eslinger’s Perspective:

The story of Nico Bellic is the story of the modern American immigrant, at least the story as Rockstar North sees it.

The story is one of failure. The story is one of reaching, of always aiming for a goal and always falling short. Nico’s story is a parabola of tragedy. He steps off of the Eastern European tanker that was his home for months, plants his feet on American soil, and then launches himself into the stratospheres of power in Liberty City. He has money, he has cars, he has fancy apartments and he has the fear of everyone whom he has ever met.

He almost, almost has love, the thing that he wants most but cannot ever seem to achieve. He is someone who wants to be liked by everyone around him, needs to be liked by everyone around him, but his tragedy is that the very thing that makes him valuable to these people whose affection he desires is that which makes him no more than a tool in their eyes.

And in an unintentional meshing of form and content to rival Braid’s intentional interlocking, the gameplay itself parallels this failure.

The gameplay of the Grand Theft Auto series has always been its weakest point, from the two dimensions of the Playstation iterations to the blocky polygons of the Grand Theft Auto 3 series that Josh so loved, the actual playing of the series has been somewhat lacking. The worlds were realized, and the plots were appropriately subversive and… foul. But at some point in time, listening to Guns ‘N Roses while trying desperately to get shots off at incoming S.W.A.T. teams, just stopped being fun, my enjoyment of the myriad of good that the series offered was just too encumbered by what the series failed to give me, something that was easy to play.

But with IV, Rockstar finally got right what made their opuses games. Never once as Nico Bellic did I ever find myself ripping out hair follicles because of frustration from being unable to do what I wanted to do within the game world. The lock-on targeting just works, the cover system just works, and the vehicle controls just work. By making their gameplay solid, Rockstar has been freed to develop their world and plot into something that can stand on its own without the distractions that pulled them down in the past. If only their design was as solid.

Nico Bellic’s story exists entirely within the game’s cut-scenes and radio-play-esque driving dialog. It starts, and ends with Dan Houser’s team of writers, the game’s designers don’t get a say. I say this, because there is a supreme lack of cohesion between what the plot offers and what the game offers. Where the writing presents the view of a man torn apart by the violence that he is forced to perpetrate to actually realize his American dream, the game itself doesn’t allow the player to be similarly torn. Every single combat encounter is mammoth and bloody, there is no sense of the intimacy and horrors that come through when the gameplay cuts out and the acting begins.

That is a failure, but as I said before, reaching and not quite realizing the goal is the game’s theme. In this way, Grand Theft Auto IV becomes something even more, it becomes art. Something that can be appreciated not only for what it accomplishes, but for what it almost achieves. And that, that is something that’s really quite incredible for our fledgling medium.

Ben Lovati’s Perspective:

I can remember the first sandbox game I ever played. It was a world filled with possibilities. It was a world caked in drugs, sex, and violence. It was a world that caused me to miss two weeks of classes in college. This world, of course, is the world of Liberty City. In the year 2008, I was fortunate enough to play around in Liberty City again, and it is with great pride that I dub Grand Theft Auto IV the king of 2008 open world gaming.

I’m sure this pick comes as no surprise. There weren’t many contenders this year, and frankly, it’s hard to top the king of open world games. But I need to have a moment of honesty with you: I was not looking forward to this game. Call me a hater if you will, but after so many GTAs and its clones, I was burnt out on them. I mean, how much better could this be than San Andreas?

When the reviews hit the presses, I knew I had to check the game out, and while I think the game was HIGHLY overrated (another essay, another time), I was really happy to see that the game surpassed every expectation I ever held for it.

The story in the game is what first hooked me as it took a mature and well rounded approach to telling a gangster story. Niko was an engaging and likable character, and cast of friends he’s surrounded with were just as fun to learn about. The story also had branching choices that changed the characters you interacted with and the story paths available to you. Now, this didn’t make me want to play it over and over again, but it was definitely a nice touch to the series.

The game world itself was a character of its own. It lived and breathed and when you walked its streets and terrorized its citizens, you felt that you were a part of the game world. Like any good open world game, there were a TON of things that you could do in this game. You could waste hours just goofing around at the different hot spots around town or spend your time causing havoc to its citizens.

The missions in the game were also varied and fun to play. This was helped by the improved (but far from perfect) aiming system that the game implemented. It’s amazing how much more fun an assassination mission can be when you can actually shoot. There were some missions that actually included NPC characters helping you out, which dragged me into the world even more.

I could go on, but simply put, Grand Theft Auto IV is an open world game you need to experience. It has definitely raised the bar for these types of games and set a new industry standard as to just how good these games can be.

Josh Flanagan’s Perspective:

I did it. I finished. I finally accomplished....well, nothing really.

I am not what one would refer to as a gamer. My yearly output is the playing of possibly 2, and as many as 3 games. I have an xbox 360 which gets used now and then, for short stints, but the hours long campaigns of my younger days have given way to busyness and a wife who wants the TV back (rightly so). So I get my shots in here and there (get it?), and play from time to time to unwind. I am not that excited by new releases of games, and I only follow what games are coming out at the most cursory level.

Yet there is Grand Theft Auto, a franchise to which I am beholden. While I should probably be turned off by the base absurdity of the whole thing, and the utter lack of almost any decent human morality, I have to say, they've all been a lot of fun, and for a guy who never plays games all the way through, I've finished Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, San Andreas, and now GTA IV. It took me a half a year to do it, but I did it.

The newest version was somewhat of a let-down, if I'm being honest. It is gorgeous and plays well, and is an achievement of game design, the world being more interactive and interesting than ever, but it's missing something. The first couple were imbued with a personality, due largely in part to a really interesting cast of voice actors. Ray Liotta, James Woods, William Fichtner (A favorite of mine), and Jenna Jameson all leant their talents, among others, to make a game like we'd never seen.

The soundtrack of the game featured all sorts of music that was both funny, and retro, and surprisingly enjoyable, with all these songs I remembered, but hadn't thought about in years. It was like a really violent, anti-social Pixar movie.

But this new version, while technically superior in every way, lacked that. The voice actors were good, but there was almost no one recognizable, and the soundtrack was expansive and vast, but really lacking the catchy interesting vibe that makes up the best kinds of movie soundtracks, like a Quentin Tarrantino movie.

The acting was good, and the story was relatively interesting, but it was missing that bit of soul. It was as if they'd spent so much time on the technical, and getting their version of New York just right (which they did!) but they left out the part of the former games which made them so endearing.

Did I have a good time playing it? Yes, I did, and by the end, I was nearly as enthralled as ever, as I got nearer to the end. But all through it, I just kept feeling like something was missing, and I think it was its heart.

Role Playing Game of the Year

2008-12-31T14:00:00.000-08:00

Will Eslinger's Pick: Fable II for the Xbox 360

I am the barefoot brawler of Albion. I am a swashbuckling adventurer with full beard, unkempt hair and steel weapons on my back. I am lithe and I fight like I dance. I am faithful; my love belongs to only two women, Sally the Traveler, and my daughter. I work as a blacksmith when I must and travel when I can; my life is an adventure weaved with magic and monsters. My life is a fable.

Somewhere along the road from tabletop RPGs to Final Fantasy X the zeitgeist of the role-playing game was one that seemed to have forgotten what the name of their genre actually means. Role-playing faded away and stat managing slipped into vogue. As far as I’m concerned, that’s not the kind of game that I have ever, or will ever want to play. If I want a constricted plot with little choice, then I’ll play my comfort-genre shooters thank you very much. So if an RPG is to grab me it needs to offer me something that actually stimulates me. It needs to give me choice; it needs to let me play a role.

Fable II is the only game that released this year that made me feel as though I actually inhabited a character whose existence was shaped by my choices. Fallout 3 was a sublime game, but throughout its duration I never felt as if my Vault-Dweller was my own, or that he had a real personality. I never had such feelings in Fable II; the game lives and dies on the choices and roles that it offers, thankfully they are both many.

Fable II’s main storyline is short and fairly linear. It does offer some choice, but it is mostly of the binary, good/evil, eat the baby/save the baby variety. But that lack of choice is actually fine by me, what it allows the developers to weave is a fairly picturesque adventure of fun swashbuckling combat and a myriad of genuinely funny characters. The main quest is fun, but it is not really were the merit of the game comes through, that occurs on the periphery, where the choices flow like mead.

In Fable II there is a dating game, there are gambling games, there is a real-estate management game and there is a home-keeping game. And absolutely every single one of these games is completely optional. I chose to be a paragon of good with a single family and a willingness to help whomever asks for aid. I could have just as easily been a being of pure evil, but I didn’t. And even though both choices were equally incentivized, I felt that the ones that I made were truly my own, and that they had shaped my avatar into someone fully in line with my personal morality.

Other games may offer such choice, but no other game this year made me feel so much like the arbiter of that choice, and that said choices really mattered and shaped my world.

Benjamin Lovati's Pick: Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360

I’ll be up front: I typically hate RPGs. It’s very rare that one ever crosses my radar and even rarer when they end up spinning in my system. But in the last two years or so, a few have been able to grab me. Last year, Mass Effect spun its cycle in my console and my heart. This year’s choice, for me, is pretty obvious, and so with confidence, I dub Fallout 3 my RPG of the Year.

Fallout 3 is an RPG that was designed for me. It’s a modern, desolate wasteland populated with interesting characters and completely open-ended gameplay, and to top it off, you can use guns. Lots of them. I’ve made no bones about my FPS obsession, and Fallout 3 plays right into that.

What I love about this game is that the choices you make have an impactful effect on the game world. Some gamers have complained about this, shouting to the high hills how it limits the game to players. But they fail to see that this is precisely what makes this such a special game. It is impactful change that games like these have lacked in the past, and the fact that I can actually play through the game a second time and get a completely different experience is important to me.

The character interactions in the game are also really amazing, and I found from a very early point in the game that I really cared about some of the characters that I met. When faced with the choice to blow up Megaton, I took serious time in considering which direction I would go because by that point I had made some “friends” in the game world. It’s rare that a game can suck you in like that or make the decisions you have to face all the more daunting.

The combat in the game is solid. It’s hard for me to saying “amazing” because, well, there’s definite room for improvement. The FPS play is mildly mediocre, which is fine when coupled with the V.A.T.S. system. I really do like V.A.T.S. as it allows you to aim precisely and gives you the percentage you will hit your target. V.A.T.S. isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s one of the more engaging combat systems I’ve tooled around with in an RPG.

Let’s not forget that the game is beautiful and expansive. The sheer scale of the entire game makes it easy to see how you can lose 100 hours playing the game. The design is smart as well because you can walk in any direction from anywhere and find something new to explore quickly. I haven’t experienced any of the graphical glitches that others have mentioned, but I can’t slight a minor hiccup here and there when considering how complex the coding for a game this size.

So, take it from me, the guy who hates RPGs, that this game is simply a must have for any RPG fan.

Multiplayer Game of the Year

2008-12-26T09:39:00.000-08:00

A little change in the schedule, yesterday I was swamped with work and was not able to post the next addition of out GOTY awards, I'm really sorry for that. Also, today I'm going to go ahead and post the multiplayer award (which I'm doing solo) and push the RPG write-up until tomorrow.

You spawn on a rooftop, or maybe on a small farm. You spawn as a ruffled businessman, a slacking college student, a Vietnam veteran, or a tattooed biker. You reach for a weapon, a pump-action shotgun or an UZI, you stuff your pockets with ammunition, with medicine and Molotov cocktails. You hear a scratchy voice through your headset, from a 20-something slacker in New Mexico munching on Doritos and sitting in his basement “ok guys, let’s stay together”.

You stay together.

You enter a street, or maybe a field. You see a horde of zombies sprinting towards you. You see flesh rotting and waving wildly in the wind, you see the clothes that evince the lives they had before they turned.

You shoot madly. You fire off 10 rounds, 50 rounds, a hundred rounds, or more. You hit the wrong button on your controller and you toggle off your flashlight. You are swarmed, a lithe zombie pounces at you, misses, claws at you, shreds your side. You empty your clip into his body, then his corpse. You reload, and you see a twisting prehensile tongue wrap itself around the neck of another survivor. You search vainly for the tongue’s source; you become distracted by three zombies running at your back. You try to free your compatriot again; you shine your flashlight on a crouching undead, she has the looks of a small girl, the tears and wails of the same.

You realize that she doesn’t like the light just as she pounces on you and rips out your entrails. You see that your friends lay disemboweled as you bleed out on the street, in the cornfield. You realize, as your vision turns blurry, that some greater being has determined your fate today, Valve’s consummate “AI director”. You think back to the ebbs and flows of the horde, how you were never completely in control, never completely out. You smile, think how clever this artificial intelligence has been with you this time.

You die.

You are a hunter, you are lissome and quick, you’re a boomer, you’re fat and bilious, you’re a smoker with a long tongue tucked away down your undead throat, or maybe you’re a tank, a rotting mass of dead flesh and muscle meant to eviscerate all in your path.

You coordinate. You sawn nearby your hapless prey and wait for them to show weakness. You wait for the old man to glow read with low health and then you drag him away from his party. You watch as a boomer spits bile on him, attraction an ungodly mass of infected to tear him limb from limb, or maybe you watch a hunter pounce and do the same. You die easily but you return to the fight before you notice that you are missing out on the fun.

You, three friends, and Valve’s AI, you coordinate, scheme; you harry the survivors through a gauntlet of rotting corpses and cars, maybe even one of cornstalks. You laugh; you revel in your mischief. You smile with every bite you get in; with every hit point you take away from the opposing team.

You do all this, and then you realize something.

You haven’t played a more fun multiplayer game this year.

Racing Games of the Year

2008-12-26T09:38:00.002-08:00

I'm really not a racing game guy, if you have read out Top-5 lists you've seen that the top two games of 2008 that I wished I had played but didn't were of that genre. I always promise myself that I'm going to pick the big ones up but never do. So, needless to say, I'm abstaining from this particular category. But... my shoes are being filled by the esteemed Conor Kilpatrick of iFanboy.com.

Ben Lovati's Pick: GRID for the Xbox 360

The inner workings and mechanics of cars escape me. When you speak to me of horse power, I imagine tiny ponies running around in my engine. So, it should come as no surprise to any of you that my tastes in racing games tend to skew to the arcade racer. Why is it then that I’m making GRID my 2008 racing game of the year?

Let me get this out of the way up front: I love the Burnout series. Burnout Paradise was a solid entry into the series, but I hated the open world structure of the game, the map was worthless, the different boosting cars sucked, and Crash Mode was gone. And while I appreciate all of the DLC that Criterion has provided for it, I just can’t say that I like the direction the series is going. Sure, it was fun, but as a long time Burnout fan, the game felt a little broken.

But this is about GRID, right? I remember reading next to nothing about GRID, and when the demo came out, a co-worker of mine recommended I check it out. It was then and there, in the glow of my HDTV, that my jaw hit the floor. This was a simulation based racer that was made for me.

What GRID does so wonderfully is that it provides that realistic racing experience without bogging you down in the details. Gran Turismo fans may get hot and bothered with changing the widgets in a car, but that completely kills the game for me. I just want to race, and GRID provided that for me. The game is structured so that your main focus in on winning the races, getting other racers to join your team and making your sponsors happy. And with the races broken up by regions, you’re able to play the game in your style. Each region provides a different experience, and as would be expected the physics and handling of the cars changes appropriately. The cars just feel good to drive, and the actual damage to your car just draws you into the race more and more. It requires a different tactic than other simulation racers because running into stuff is a big deal.

Of course, the smart racer will dabble in each of the different regions because that’s how you build your world recognition, earn more money, and gain more sponsors, but the game leaves the choices open to you. One of my more favorite modes was “Driver Offers” where a racing company from each region would ask you to drive for them. After picking the race, the game takes care of everything, getting you into a race in less than five minutes. It’s a great option for those people that don’t have the time to drop hours and hours into their racing games.

GRID is a racing game that has the feel of a simulation but arcade sensibilities. It is gorgeous looking title, and it’s the best racer of 2008.

Conor Kilpatrick's Pick: Mario Kart for the Nintendo Wii

Mario Kart Wii is a metaphor for life. It is brightly colored and unpredictable. It is equal parts fun and exhilarating. How successful you are is oftentimes decided by factors well out of your control.

And sometimes it doesn’t matter how much talent you have, you still need a whole lot of luck.

Mario Kart Wii is of course the updated version of the classic game for the Super Nintendo, Super Mario Kart, a game that just about everyone I knew avidly played in the 1990s. It was ridiculously fun and frustrating… and wholly addicting.

The new version, released early in 2008, is all you would expect from a Nintendo system 16 years more advanced. The graphics are better, the game play more intricate and the features have increased. But the old axiom remains in play here, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Super Mario Kart was a near perfect game when it debuted in 1992, so while this new version is enhanced, it’s still pretty much the same game. It even features many of the same race tracks (if you can call them tracks) from the original, which was a nice bit of nostalgia.

Another nice bit of nostalgia? Remembering how gloriously frustrating Mario Kart can be. As with most things that live happily in the past, they are looked back at through a rose colored filter. When I thought back on my time playing Super Mario Kart, it was mostly memories of me and a bunch of friends sitting around my living room and laughing our heads off. It took me about two laps in my first race in Mario Kart Wii to remember that very often in between laughing fits we wanted to throw our controllers across the room.

Of course, it’s that frustration that makes the game so fun. It’s unpredictable. You can have a half a lap lead on the field and get knocked back to the pack by a flying shell or a stray banana peel or a lightning bolt from the heavens. The most stressful part of the game is when you are driving in first place knowing that everyone is gunning for you and you could get popped by a red shell (or heat-seekers, I like to call them) at any moment. There is no lead that is comfortable in Mario Kart Wii.

The big feature with Mario Kart Wii is, of course, the steering wheel. The whole draw with the Wii in general is the idea that you can play games with as much physicality as possible to emulate the action on the screen. When I heard that they were releasing Mario Kart Wii with steering wheels I knew right then and there that I was going to buy it. And that’s pretty amazing considering I bought two games all year.

When the game was released there were all kinds of articles and reviews written about how playing Mario Kart Wii with the steering wheel wasn’t as precise as just playing with the Wiimote itself. Okay, great. I can shave a half a second off my time if I don’t use the steering wheel. Way to completely miss the point of not only Mario Kart but the Wii itself.

Here’s the thing, if you come over to my place to play Mario Kart Wii you have to use the steering wheel. Or you don’t get to play.

Short Session Gaming

2008-12-26T09:38:00.001-08:00

I love short session games, I really do. And this year was a great one for the genre (or is it a category? ah semantics!) with releases like Geometry Wars 2, Space Invaders Extreme, and a whole slew of others. My pick for this category is a little bit unexpected, and Ben's has me wishing that I hadn't sold my DS. So good reads all around.

Will Eslinger's Pick: Little Big Planet for the Playstation 3

I’ve been thinking a lot about Charles Darwin lately, mostly, this is the result of David Quammen’s excellent biography of the reluctant genius, but my thinking has also sprung from the fact that I find the man to be immensely interesting. He didn’t like to travel, yet to make his fame sailed halfway around the world with Charles II’s bastard. He had the most revolutionary scientific theory of all time spinning around in his head, and yet he postponed sharing it with the world for eight years so that he could study barnacles, quite possibly the most boring creatures on the planet (they’re sessile, meaning that they are “permanently attached” to something for most of their lives). He was the most sought-after expert in biology of his time, and yet he preferred being alone to the fame of his theory. But what most interests me about Charles Darwin is a key question about his life; what gave him more pleasure, Discovering a new species, or coming up with his grand theory?

After playing Media Molecule’s PS3-exclusive Little Big Planet, I think that I know.

This year we’ve been treated to a glut of meticulously developed worlds. Gears of War 2’s Sera, Fallout 3’s Capitol Wasteland, the USG Ishimura of Dead Space, and countless others that I lack the space to mention. As varied and as amazing as these worlds are, they all have one (possible) flaw in common: they take a long time to devour. These levels are the theories of natural selection of my analogy; they take a long time and a lot of work to appreciate. You have to really devote yourself to exploring what they have to offer, looking into the nooks and crannies of each, searching for flaws and smiling when you find none. These games are incredibly satisfying in their own way… but their worlds offer little in the way of immediate satisfaction.

Little Big Planet is the finch of my analogy; it stands for all of the little species that Charles Darwin found on the Galapagos and Tierra del Fuego, it stands for the immediate joy of fully grasping a discovery as you first lay eyes on it.

What Little Big Planet’s developers at Media Molecule accomplished is astounding, they have constructed a (relatively) easy-to-use tool set, complete with a physics system, props, variable lighting, and a robust sound editor that has effectively democratized videogame development. No longer is the realm of game creation limited to those few with the ability to code, or with the connections to secure a position in design or writing for a videogame. 2008 has ushered in an era where anyone with a scrap of creativity can dip their toes into making something truly creative for others to mess around with.

Each and every time that I log on to the Little Big Planet servers, I have a stupid grin on my face because I’m so excited to see what new levels have been created, levels in which I get to fully comprehend a new and exciting world in a matter of minutes, rather than the aforementioned hours that it takes to take in most of the games of the Christmas season.

I thank you Media Molecule, for giving me a Galapagos to trudge around in.

And I thank you, the Little Big Planet community for giving me finches to find.

Ben Lovati's Pick: Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the Nintendo DS

Having access to Xbox Live this year, I was lucky to play quite a few arcade games that were designed for both short and extended play. While games like Bionic Commando: Rearmed and Geometry Wars 2 captured my gaming heart, there was one title that stood above the rest as a great short session game, and surprisingly, this game was not on Xbox Live. Mysterious, no?

And I guess that’s the whole point because my Short Session Game of the Year is Professor Layton and the Curious Village.

Professor Layton is a celebrity of sorts in Japan. His games are wildly popular there as their quirky sensibilities and investigative gameplay seem to suck players in. This is the first entry in the series for the states, and it’s an excellent addition to anyone’s DS library.

The game involves a mystery that surrounds a small town. Professor Layton and his sidekick, Luke, are summoned to the town to help them figure out just what is going on. It seems, though, that the townspeople are obsessed with puzzles, and so the mystery’s clues are revealed to you as you solve the townspeople’s puzzles. The game just oozes charm from the hilarious character designs to the varied locales you visit in the town. It’s easy enough to explore the town and each character has their own unique quirks. You get the sense that there’s something wrong and weird about the whole town, which really grabs you and makes you look forward to interacting with the villagers because you never know what weirdness will come around next. The game also features beautifully animated cut scenes, which bring the characters to life.

The game also has a slick design. Once unlocked, all of the puzzles can be played again, and if you really get stumped, you can simply skip the puzzle and solve it later. There are parts of the game that require you to solve a certain amount of puzzles before you move on, but this is circumvented by the sheer variety of puzzles. This means that you don’t have to solve everything to enjoy every aspect of the game. The game also features a save anytime, anywhere mechanic, which is great for short bursts of gaming.

This game took me a good long while to beat, and the charm of the game kept me invested all the way through. This is a game that you can take your time with, but you and even invest hours of time if you wanted to. It’s one of my favorite games for the DS, and I don’t think any of you would be disappointed.

Top Fives of the Year

2008-12-26T07:00:00.000-08:00

This is Will Eslinger, editor of the Entertaining Grime blog, and I would like to thank you all for joining us for what is sure to be a great meditation on the year in gaming. Last year's round up turned out really well despite a few snags along the way, and I had such a great time working with Juan (of the late Cinema Fantastique blog) that I decided that we'd do the whole thing again this year.

However, there have been some changes since last year's proceedings.

First off, you'll notice that Juan isn't my main co-writer this year, that task is being taken up by the talented Benjamin Lovati (who also happens to have scripted a game -the XNA title Bad Atom- of his very own!) whose writing you will be familiar with from his numerous comic book reviews at iFanboy.com. However, Juan wasn't to be left out of the proceedings altogether, and he did us all a huge favor by contributing some writing that you will be able to enjoy a bit later in the week. Conor Kilpatrick and Josh Flanagan of iFanboy.com also drop by with an article apiece. I feel as if all of the contributors helped to give the whole endeavor much more variety than it possessed last year.

Which brings us to the second change with this year's end of the year bonanza, rather than post the much longer, more sprawling write-ups of last year, I have decided that this time, we would try and keep the reviews around 500 words. The reason for this is twofold, first, I feel as if the shorter pieces are far more conducive to internet browsing, and second, I didn't want these contributions to completely dominate the writer's time, and the 500 word count seems to require just the right amount of time to put together.

Before we kick things off, I thought that I would give you all a schedule of the proceedings.

Day One: Top-Five Lists

Day Two: Short Session Games

Day Three: Racing Games (featuring Conor Kilpatrick of iFanboy.com!)

Day Four: Role Playing Games

Day Five: Action/Adventure Games

Day Six: First Person Shooters

Day Seven: Open World Games (featuring Josh Flanagan of iFanboy.com!)

Day Eight: Runner-up Game of the Year

Day Nine: Game of the Year (featuring Juan Marquez!)

Will Eslinger's Lists:

Top 5 Pieces of Game Writing:

1. The King of Azeroth by Julian Dibbell

2. Little Big Planet meditation by the Michael Abbott

3. The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls by Jason Fagone of Esquire

4. Why We Need More Torture in Games by Clive Thomson

5. The Grammar of Fun by Tom Bissell

Top-5 Graphics

1. Metal Gear Solid 4

2. Crysis Warhead

3. Little Big Planet

4. Prince of Persia

5. Grand Theft Auto IV

Top-5 Stories

1. Metal Gear Solid 4

2. Grand Theft Auto IV

3. Brothers in Arms: Hells Highway

4. Fallout 3

5. Dead Space

Top-5 Characters

1. Old Snake (Metal Gear Solid 4)

2. Corporal "Red" Hartstock (Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway)

3. Nico Bellic (Grand Theft Auto IV)

4. Fawkes (Fallout 3)

5. The Survivors (Left 4 Dead)

5 Games That I Wish That I Played But Didn't

1. Burnout Paradise

2. Pure

3. Wario Land: Shake It!

4. Civilization: Revolution

5. Ninja Gaiden 2

5 Most Surprising Events in Gaming

1. EA's Reinvention

With shockingly risky games like Mirror's Edge and hard-core crowd pleasers like Dead Space, 2008 saw the creative rebirth of Electronic Arts. It's just a shame that their sales didn't reflect their newfound devotion to quality.

2. Midway Games Sold for $100,000

The whole $100,000 price tag is a bit of a misnomer, considering the actual price ended up in the millions (thanks to Midway's debt). But what makes this story so surprising is that somebody actually bought Midway. Seriously, Mortal Kombat does not a good company make.

3. Nintendo Announces DSi

I guess that I shouldn't be too surprised; the Game Boy Advance went through three iterations, but still, when your machine is outselling its next closest competition by a mile, I just don't understand why there is any reason to undergo the R&D required to create an entirely new SKU.

4. Shawn Elliott and the Birth of Games Criticism

Who would have thought that it would take the industry's most talented journalist' departure from the field to actually jump start true gaming criticism?

5. Retailers and Publishers Begin the Build Up to War.

Retailers love used games, Publishers hate them. One of the two will have to budge sooner or later, but until then, this battle is just heating up.

Ben Lovati's Lists:

Top 5 Graphics

Gears of War 2
Dead Space
Grand Theft Auto IV
GRID
Burnout Paradise

Top 5 Stories

Dead Space
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Grand Theft Auto IV
Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Fallout 3

Top 5 Characters

Niko Bellic from GTA IV
Roman Bellic from GTA IV
Private George Gordon Haggard Jr., a.k.a "Haggard" from Battlefield: Bad Company
Brucie from GTA IV
Wadsworth from Fallout 3

Top 5 Worst Games

Iron Man
Turning Point: Fall of Liberty
Facebreaker
Alone in the Dark
Turok

Top 5(ish) Games You Wished You Played But Didn't…

Metal Gear Solid 4
Little Big Planet
Fable 2
Far Cry 2
Boom Blox
Mirror's Edge
Call of Duty: World at War
Every title that came out after October…

Top 5 Most Surprising Events in Gaming

EA suddenly releases new, compelling IPs (Dead Space and Mirror's Edge)
Ensemble Studio closes because Microsoft doesn't like to make money
Activision drops Ghostbusters, Brutal Legend, and other great titles
De Blob releases, proving that more than just Nintendo can make great Wii games
The DSi, or How Nintendo Will Create a Generation of Suckers

Excellent Writing

2008-12-02T13:45:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd point you guys in the direction of the single best piece of games journalism to be written in 2008. It's from Wired Magazine and tells the story of how Brock Pierce went from staring in Disney movies, to exile and bankruptcy and then to the head of a multimillion dollar company that dealt in MMORPG currency.

A truly fascinating, epic, and tragic story.

Gears of War 2: Now Playable!

2008-11-29T11:10:00.000-08:00

Epic has patched Gears of War 2

While I haven't gotten to play with the revamped matchmaking, I'm hopeful that this sorts out the chinks in the game's otherwise excellent armor.

Tom Clancy Was Right

2008-11-27T20:16:00.000-08:00

This is the kind of shit that Rainbow Six was established to deal with.

Oh wait, Rainbow Six is a fictional organization thought up by Tom Clancy, oops my bad.

As much as one could say that Tom Clancy’s world is a bit… bleak, what with all of the nuclear and chemical attacks on U.S. soil, war with Japan, China and Saudi Arabia and all other manner of rather dangerous occurrences messing up the average Joe’s life, on days like today, it seems almost utopian to me.

For those of you who don't know, team Rainbow is the result of consummate bad asses John Clark and Ding Chavez getting U.N. sanctioning to put together a team of other consummate bad asses from all across the globe to work together and kick all kinds of ass. The team had members for the Navy S.E.A.L.S., Army Operation Detachment Delta, FBI Hostage Rescue Team, United Kingdom 22 S.A.S. and all manner of other sneaky and deadly organizations. Team Rainbow didn’t exist to fulfill any sort of need in a certain country’s agenda, they were formed to be the best possibly at what they were tasked to do, and what they were tasked to do was fight terrorism.

India isn’t equipped to face the terrorist invasion that they’re facing in Mumbai, they could certainly bomb the place to oblivion (their Air Force is excellent) and kill every terrorist in the area with ease, but that would also kill all of their civilians as well, not a good proposition.

What India needs is a substantial counter-terrorist force that is trained to face this type of situation, unfortunately, training and equipping a large component of special operators is about as expensive as doing the same with a squadron of F-16 pilots, and seems (on the surface) to be a bad use of funds, and so now, they’ve found themselves with their pants down, forced to use traditional commandos (trained for raids on enemy camps, not on hotels) to free their civilians.

I would bet you $100 that nearly every special operator in America is watching the news right now and wringing their hands, this is the operation of a lifetime for them, and yet they’re forced to watch from half a world away as hundreds of people die at the hands of terrorists that they’ve trained for years to kill. And while it would be the right move to make, there is no way that India would let U.S. (or British) troopers onto their soil, this is their problem, and they’ll deal with it.

And get far too many innocents are dying in the process.

I can’t help but think that maybe a multinational counter-terrorist organization in the vein of Rainbow would be let into Mumbai to deal with the situation, but unfortunately, no such agency exists...

Except in the Clancy-verse, and so more people are inevitably going to die.

Eric Trautmen Interview

2008-11-24T17:06:00.000-08:00

Eric Trautmen first caught my attention when he helped Greg Rucka with the last few arcs of his Checkmate series. Since then, Eric has gained a good deal of fanboy support for his work on DC's espionage title, and has certainly left me wanting to read more from him in the future.

In hopes of getting to ask Eric some questions before he skyrocketed to the highest heights of comic-creator fame, I shot him a few questions and he was kind enough to sit down and reply.

Without further ado, I'll let the interview speack for itself.

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My favorite arc of the entire Checkmate run was the Mademoiselle Marie story that immediately followed the Fall of the Wall arc. At this point, your name was a regular in the book's credits and so I'd like to ask you about what I think was the best scene in that arc, and by extension in that series. It's a two-page spread depicting various Mademoiselle Marie's throughout history. How did that page come about?

Greg had the idea for doing various scenes of "Maries through the ages." That specific sequence is one he wrote, but I think the notion of the crypt and the ceremony itself wherein Tautin is inducted into the ranks of Maries past might have been derived from some harebrained notion I tossed into the mix during one of our frequent story calls.

During the writing process, I know Greg asked me occasionally to help him track down references on the Maquis and stuff, but I'm pretty sure that two-page spread was pure Rucka.

Was there a good deal of research involved for the Marie back-story? If so, what were your sources?

I know Greg researched it pretty thoroughly, and I dug up online sources to help with some of the World War II stuff. Beyond that, I'm not sure where Greg pulled it from.

Was the Marie character one that you and Greg were able to flesh out mostly on your own?

We really never got much in the way of resistance from our editor, Joan Hilty, on really anything we wanted to do. As long as we weren't blatantly going out of our way to contradict the existing Marie "lore," we were free to come up with all sorts of material.

Continuing the last question, Sgt. Rock and The Unknown Soldier, probably my two favorite DC characters (at least from their concept) are featured on missions with a Marie. I was just curious if you've read any of the old Rock and Unknown Soldier stories, and what your thoughts on them are.

Heh. Of course I have! I'm the guy who brought back the G.I. Robot!

I LOVE the old DC war comics. Enemy Ace is a favorite, as was Sgt. Rock. One of the first comics I remember reading was an old 1970s era "Brave & The Bold" which featured the Golden Age Batman and the Unknown Soldier. I don't remember the specifics of the issue (beyond some kind of Nazi infiltrator doing something dastardly at the Lincoln Memorial) but what I do recall, I recall fondly.

I feel like the best kept secret of the DC publishing catalogue of the past year was the The Question: Five Books of Blood trade, which contained, along with the awesome miniseries by Greg Rucka and various artists, this vast dossier putatively composed by Renee Montoya. From what I can gather, you did most of the design work for the faux documents included within.

How much work did the project turn out to be?

Not as much as you might think, but WAY more than we intended. Is that a helpful answer, or what?

How much extra research did you have to do for the DCU brands? (were you the first to come up with a DCU AIM client?)

Really not a lot. Pulled most of that out of my own head. It just seemed reasonable.

I did have to track down the Ferris logo to do the airline ticket; that's probably the most "research" I had to do. Most of the research I did was visual: what does a police report look like, what does a toe-tag look like, etc.

Were you clued in on the details of Final Crisis for incorporating the "Darkseid's Bitch" aspects of the meta-story?

In very, very, very vague terms, yes. Mostly we knew that "Grant's doing something big, and it involves the New Gods, and Apokolips." Little else (though I suspect Greg knew a great deal more than I did--and do, or likely ever will--about the project).

We knew some of the ways that the Crime Bible specifically tied into Apokolips, and the DSB thing -- ably abetted by VicSage.com guru Eric Newsom -- actually grew organically out of that.

You and Brandon Jerwa collaborated on a short story for the second volume of Image's Popgun Anthology. How was that collaboration compared to the one you had with Rucka?

For one, I'm taller than Brandon. :)

It's actually pretty similar; Greg and I tend to spend a lot of time bouncing ideas around, and getting excited about esoteric little nuggets that will probably end up never seeing the light of day. Brandon and I tend to have that same kind of enthusiasm; both have been very, very fertile collaborations.

Could you talk a little bit about that comic for the readers, give a basic summary.

Sure. PopGun is an anthology book--something like 400 pages--filled with short works by all kinds of established creators and folks you might not have heard of.

Our contribution (along with artists David Messina and Mirco Pierfedirici) was called "Wide Awake: Beyond the Wall of Sleep". It's a supernatural/adventure tale, which introduces Amanda Carter, a young girl who is tormented by horrible nightmares of monsters and apocalypse.

She also has learned, at very young age that she has an unusual gift--bringing unfinished business (aka MONSTERS) from her dreams into the waking world.

And, she believes, a demonic entity called The Messenger is attempting to get her to dream the end of the world, in order to make it real...

Anyone interested can find the whole 9-pager online at Comic Book Resources, and a "director's commentary" version on Brandon Jerwa's "Anything Goes" column on Comics Waiting Room.

(And if you enjoy it, Brandon and I are currently hard at work on on original graphic novel for DC/Vertigo, which I can't wait to be able to talk about.)

So far, you and Greg have made Cinnamon the Cowgirl and Snapper Carr into complete bad-asses. Is there any character that you can't make awesome by turning them into a Checkmate agent?

Brother Power, The Geek.

But he's awesome in his own way.

And to be fair: Keith Giffen established that Snapper was a Checkmate agent in his "52 Aftermath: Four Horsemen" series, and Jen Van Meter brought the Cinnamon awesomeness in "Cinnamon: El Ciclo" some years back. Credit where credit's due. :)

Final Crisis: Resist really seems to be the book that actually gives the heroes some hope of success with the activation of the O.M.A.C.s, was that plot point something that Grant Morrison had written into his overall plot but just couldn't fit into the main book?

I'm not sure where the OMAC thing came from. I never spoke to Grant during the writing of Resist -- Greg and Grant (and Eddie Berganza, and Dan DiDio, and undoubtedly a cast of thousands) had chewed it all over prior to my being brought on board. My job was to sort of absorb what I'd been told, and try not to have blood come shooting out of my ears as I realized the full and terrifying scope of Grant's effort.

Final Crisis #3 had some really great scenes with the six "Watchtowers" all across the world. Why did you and Greg focus on the Antarctica base when there were other pockets of "resistance"?

Partially to cut down on instances of continuity overkill (it's tough to coordinate it all, frankly), but mostly because we were going for that isolated, "five guys in a lifeboat" sort of feel. And, well, Mr. Rucka has had some small success setting stories in Antarctica...

(Though, I have to say, I'm disappointed no one has teased us for the Justice League: Antarctica joke yet.)

Did any of Greg's insane levels of research for the Whiteout series come into play as you guys crafted a story set on the icy continent?

I'm sure it did. I sorta deferred all that stuff to him--he's the expert. I tended to be the guy playing with the Gideon-II/Thinker stuff, and coming up with Darkseid's creepy "garden" project.

What comics are you reading right now? What has you excited about the medium?

My wife and I own a comics shop -- Olympic Cards and Comics in Lacey, WA -- so I try to at least glance at whatever is coming in every week (though I'm SO far behind in my comics writing, it's pathetic.)

I dig Invincible, Walking Dead, any of the Hellboy and BPRD stuff; Dark Horse is doing great stuff with the Robert E. Howard titles -- Kull, Conan, Solomon Kane. I'm a pulp junkie, so I'm almost genetically predisposed to enjoy that stuff.

I'm enjoying Final Crisis, of course.

Probably my favorite book of the last year was the Garth Ennis/Howard Chaykin "War is Hell" title, and of course, I read "The Boys" religiously.

I've been really intrigued by the Marvel literary adaptations -- The Stand, in particular, is really, really good. Oh, and the Euro comics they've been doing under the Soleil imprint. "Universal War One" knocked my socks off.

What about games/movies/prose, Is there anything that you've played/watched/read recently that you really enjoyed?

Kung Fu Panda?

I don't get out to the movies much.

I stared reading "Old Man's War" by John Scalzi, and that's been entertaining as hell. Mostly, I read nonfiction for research purposes. I rarely get a chance to read fiction just for the pure fun of it.

I did get a chance to peruse a draft of Greg Rucka's next Attitcus Kodiak novel, "Walking Dead," and enjoyed that immensely.

And finally, is there anything that you can say about your upcoming Vertigo project?

Yes. I can say that I'm not allowed to say anything yet. Also, not being able to say anything yet is causing me physical pain.

When you think that we'll find out about it?

If I don't stop typing here and get back to finishing up act I by tomorrow, I'll be able to announce that DC fired my ass. :P

No idea, sorry.

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Thanks to Eric for sitting down and answering my inane questions! Be sure to watch Newsarama or whatever your news site of choice is for information on his upcoming projects... And then buy them!

Little Big Planet Liveblog

2008-10-29T17:28:00.001-07:00

Dead Space: A ready-made Bioshock.

2008-10-27T19:18:00.000-07:00

I really love Bioshock 2... er, I mean Dead Space. I really love Dead Space.

The setting of Dead Space, the USG Ishimura, is easily the most well-designed game world since Ken Levine's 2k Boston took us to Rapture. The ship feels so lived in so worked in, that it's incredibly easy to buy the world that the game is trying to sell me. Vending machines, posters, (readable) magazine articles, work stations, and scattered personal belongings make the sales pitch for the game's world. Then the cohesive art design between Ishimura and the equipment seals the deal to the world's aesthetic immersion. The sale is also aided by the fact that every AI seems to be constrained by the same rules of this world that I am. The "monster-closet" system of magically appearing enemies is technically here, but the designers of Dead Space have alleviated the awkwardness of this design choice a great deal by including a system of air shafts that the enemies crawl around in. So yeah, they jump out at you from no-where, but they can do that within the game's fiction, so their appearance doesn't take you out of the world.

Dead Space uses the same style of in-game cutscenes as made popular by Half Life, you're never taken out of your character, everything that happens in this world you witness through his eyes. And whenever you encounter a non-playable character in the game, you'll notice that they're living in the same world as you and your enemies. They don't magically disappear from a scene, if they have to make an exit; they do so through an elevator, or by walking away. The developers just don't cheat in this department; shortcuts are spurned in favor of honest to goodness continuity of universe. The story that these "cut scenes" tell is another of the game's biggest draws. What initially comes across as a kind of grab-bag of sci-fi horror is woven into a rather sophisticated tale of religious fanaticism, shadowy cults and government conspiracies before the credits roll. And while the universe is fleshed out quite a bit by the excellent comic and movie, I didn't really get the sense that without watching/reading them I would have been lost, which is in itself a real feat.

The Resident Evil series has always used limitation of movement to increase the tension of its games. In Resident Evil 4, those limitations were greatly lifted, but still they remained, yes, your character could move in three-dimensions, but no, he couldn't shoot while doing that moving. For good or for bad, those gameplay feature weren't simply the result of lazy programmers, they were legitimate choices made to increase the tension of the games. This has been a constant thorn in the side of horror/action games. To do effective horror, the threat must stay hidden, must be a creature of imagination whose only set traits are those hinted at by a director/designer. This can be done in a strait up "horror" game, where combat isn't really as much a feature as freaking you out. However in an action/horror hybrid, you need to see something so you can shoot at it, and so designers can't let you imagine your foe, they have to let you see it, then blow it away.

Thankfully, Dead Space doesn't create its tension with obstinate methods of control. Rather, what the game's developers have done is use modern controls, graphics and sound, paired with more classic elements of gaming like limited health and supplies to craft a truly tense, if not "horrific" experience. The game controls like Resident Evil 4 in every way except the movement, which has been broadened to include the ability to strafe with a weapon drawn. The control scheme uses the over-the-shoulder camera that's all the rage these days, and so, while it's not anything new, the control scheme is exceptionally polished. It's obvious that the developers took a long and hard look at what makes this perspective work. Playing the game just feels right, every time I traced my laser sight across a target and pulled the trigger I felt such a visceral and tactile feedback, that I never felt like there was a controller in my hands, even after just a short time of playing. From a purely gameplay-focused perspective, Dead Space is really perfect. The balance of weapons, scarcity of ammunition, and the two powers your character has (kinesis and a targeted time-free) all comes together so well that you're forced to come up with creative and emergent ways to play just to make it through with plasmoids charges left in your weapon. The fact that you can upgrade these powers and weapons adds an ever greater level of depth to the experience, while, admittedly drawing more comparisons to Bioshock.

I love Dead Space's world, I love how Dead Space plays, but the only problem is that I don't really like what you get to do in Dead Space. What made Bioshock so compelling was the way the narrative worked together with the level design and mission structure to make the whole experience feel both natural, and extremely varied. Yes, you did a good number of different things in Rapture, but they all made sense in pushing you on towards your confrontation with Atlas ("Would you kindly…"). Dead Space can't claim to have that quality because you don't do a good number of things in Dead Space.

Really, you just do one thing; you fix stuff that's broken on the Ishimura. Sometimes you fix stuff in outer space, sometimes you fix stuff in zero gravity, sometimes you fix stuff while creepy monsters try to kill you, and sometimes you fix stuff while all of the above is going on. The repetition of objectives is baffling if you really think about it, and should have completely broken the game. But it didn't. I never really minded that I was just fixing stuff because my duties as an ad-hoc super were really just the MacGuffin's that moved me through the Ishimura. And as I said earlier, the actual fighting and movement within the game is so good that I couldn't really have care less.

Gaming Grows Up

2008-10-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

Which of these will be more awesome?

The Evil Empire... of Gaming

2008-10-16T18:34:00.000-07:00

I'm standing over my Xbox 360 with a jewel case in my left hand and a pocket knife in my right. My battle is fierce and my battle is long. My knife gouges and slices at the shrink-wrap. My fingers tear and tatter the safety stickers along the top and bottom of the case. Then suddenly, the tide turns, I have VICTORY! My game is in hand, and then it sits in the disc drawer. I return to my recliner, press A on my controller to close the disc tray and I sit back, adjust my eyes, and begin to see a stream of logos flicker before me.

"Wait…" I ask myself after a few seconds of sitting.

"Was there an 'E' in that logo?"

"Why… yes, there was."

"Was that an 'A' beside it?"

"Well I'll be… yes, that was indeed an 'A'."

The realization hits me like a hammer. I, one of the most hardcore games that you will ever know, am excited… no, elated beyond belief, that I'm about to play a game from Electronic Arts. How did his ever happen?

In the past ten years, EA has built up a reputation for being the most soul-sucking and corporate videogame company in existence. Every year they would churn out their big money makers like Madden and NCAA, then use the millions they brought in to purchase license after license to quash what paltry competition other companies may try to enter in to the EA-dominated sports market. The Sims saw almost as blatant a case of design-by-corporation. What was once a franchise born out of the insatiable creativity of Will Wright was bastardized into watered-down and creatively-void entries (like my "favorite" Sims 2: Ikea Home Stuff) and then milked for a disgusting profit. Buying licenses and charging exorbitant fees for paltry expansion packs are just not action of a company that want to endear the hardcore gaming market to them. But EA was content to ignore the hardcore; because they had the "hard-casual" market cornered and controlled the videogame market like Sauron in Mordor.

But then something changes. Activision merged with Blizzard and suddenly EA was in second place. And second place to a company that catered to the hardcore to boot! How did this happen? Well, if EA had asked me, I would have said that "hard-casual" can only take you so far, and that to thrive in the videogame market you have to put out games like Call of Duty 4 and World of Warcraft, games that are so absolutely awesome, that their appeal bleeds away from the hardcore and into the "hard-casual". EA just had the "hard-casual" with The Sims and Madden; Activision Blizzard had both them and the hardcore. Although EA didn't ask me, they asked someone who agreed with me, someone who agreed with me and also had a fancy title and a nice office. And while they could have just asked me and saved a lot of money on focus-testing and consumer analysts they still got the same information that I, and any other person in-tuned to the gaming industry knew: you can't beat Nintendo with the casual, and the "hard-casual" and the hordcore aren't going to carry you separately, get them both with high-quality games, and sooner or later you'll be back on top.

To do this, EA used the asset they had in abundance: Madden money. They bought companies like Bioware, Pandemic, and Criterion, companies that have immediate cache with the most hardcore of the hardcore, and placed them into a freer, more hands-off corporate system with the EA Partners program. Then they stood back, they stopped making games-by-committee in stuffy board rooms where men in suits try to make creative decisions, and instead let their developers make games that they're passionate about. And the results have, so far, been pretty great.

With Valve, EA has helped start the world's most successful online videogame distribution network; with MTV Games they have usurped the Guitar Hero throne with a music-based game that captured even the most tone-deaf gamers in its color-coded grasp; with Criterion EA has broken it's "nickel and diming" ways and actually given full-featured expansion packs away. Hell, their team-up with Turbine gave the world Warhammer: Online, which looks to have stolen the most die-hard MMO-ers from the thrall of World of Warcraft's hoary gaze.

Now here's the thing, I'm not saying that I'm completely for EA's business practices. I still think that there are certain people within the company's decision-making structure who have a big-bully's mentality that leads to arrogant and pigheaded moves like attempting a hostile takeover of another company (EA/Take-Two the Russia/Georgia of videogaming?) or getting into a pissing contest with Activision of exclusive tracks for Rock Band. Rather, what I'm saying here is that EA seems to have taken their eyes of of the ball of corporate-driven content, and has instead decided that they want to make good, creative games, which is something that I certainly can't fault them for.

Holiday season 2008 seems like the "coming-out" party for the new EA, with Mirror's Edge, Left 4 Dead, Rock Band 2, and Dead Space, the game that brought the EA logo to my TV screen to begin with. I feel almost overwhelmed with options form Electronic Arts this year, which is fine as far as I'm concerned, because after years of going without seeing that E and that A on my screen, I think I owe the company some money. It just looks like they earned it from me this time.

Highway to Eindhoven

2008-10-07T05:53:00.000-07:00

I've always admired Gearbox Software. CEO Randy Pitchford has put together a team of videogame developers in Plano, Texas who seem to have an intense passion for making World War Two-based first person shooters that aren't just the equivalent of popcorn-blockbusters, but that actually try to portray the conflict as realistically as possible. The result of their efforts is Brothers in Arms, a series that mixes the tactical aspects of a real time strategy game with the viewpoint and gameplay style of a traditional FPS. The series had two installments on last-generation consoles. Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 and Brothers in Arms: earned in Blood were both excellent, if slightly flawed games that followed a platoon of the 101st Airborne Division in the events of and following D-Day. Now, with a new console cycle Gearbox has gone back to the series, taking the plot forward in the war to Operation Market Garden and the Allie's failed attempt to end the war by Christmas 1944.

Hell's Highway is great because it doesn't need to constantly throw the most adrenaline-packed scenarios at you to be fun. Gearbox realizes that war isn't always about pitched battles with airplanes screeching overhead and buildings crashing down all around. They've studied history and know that just as often as not, the average GI's combat experience occurred in quiet fields and towns, in small infantry-based skirmishes between 30-40 men. In any other game, this kind of encounter would be utterly boring, because those games rely entirely on reflex, not thought. But in Brothers in Arms, this kind of fight becomes challenging and fun. It's no longer just a boring town or a field, instead it becomes almost like a chessboard that you're searching for the right moves on. It's not just your character you have to control to succeed, you need to order your squads into the proper position and then do your part in executing your plan.

The first two Brothers in Arms games focused almost entirely on this kind of "quiet-chaos" that distinguished itself as different from its competitors like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. The focus was a good one, because that's what it did best. The game's graphics engines simply weren't capable of churning out impressive explosions and frenetic activity while also spending system bandwidth on churning out AI that was smart enough to retreat and take cover. The power of the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 have freed Gearbox to actually venture into the rare, but more exciting pitched battles that are the most fun to study about. So while Road to Hill 30 and Earned in Blood limited you to the hedgerows and hollows of Normandy, Hell's Highway will sometimes throw you into the thick of the fiery hellholes of Eindhoven and Veghel, where the adrenaline-soaked set pieces are rewarding not just because they're spectacular, but because they've been earned by the quality of the quiet moments in between.

The options afforded in the actual ordering of your troops have been fairly streamlined for Hell's Highway. In the first two Brothers in Arms games, you were limited to two teams, your fire team and your assault team. The fire team was primarily used for laying down suppressing fire, and was equipped with BAR's and M1 Garand's, the assault team was more suited to rushing and flanking enemies. They were less encumbered and mainly carried M1 Thompsons, M3's and fragmentation grenade. So the entire game came down to leapfrogging both teams, the fire team covering the assault team, who flanked the enemy and let the fire team move up and repeat the whole scenario again… it was fun, I promise. Hell's Highway does away with the fire team, you still have the assault team though, and also have machine-gun and bazooka teams to fill in the fire team gap. Along with these changes, the hitherto essential "move to assault" command (your assault team would charge an enemy emplacement) was scrapped in favor of simply "move" "suppress" and "destroy cover".

In the past two games, a more comprehensive method of command was absolutely necessary, because you were almost forced to rely on the AI of your squad mates to do the lion's share of Nazi-killin'. This was because, to put it bluntly, the actual "shooting" of the first two titles in the series was kind of horrid. I don't know if this was done in an attempt to infuse the game with a more realistic sense of tension, or if it was simply a case of the developers just not having the time to properly implement a really solid shooting mechanic. Hell's Highway nearly completely does away with this foible. Now, when you sit still behind cover, take careful aim at a target, and pull the trigger (and of course depending on the type of weapon you're holding) you'll actually hit your target. (A novel concept, I know!) No, you're not suddenly endowed with super-accuracy, but you do feel a bit more like someone who's undergone marksmen training, and not a green GI fresh from the "repple depple".

On top of the new shooting mechanic, Gearbox also added a Gears of War-esque cover mechanic that makes aiming and assessing your surrounding much simpler. The improvements of the actual shooting gameplay (along with the excellent story, which I'll get to) are what really made Hell's Highway for me, the only downside to them is that the developers got so excited with how good their combat was, that they artificially separate you from your squad at times, forcing you to use only the new cover and aiming mechanics to survive. This is by far the biggest design mistake that I think Gearbox made with Hell's Highway, because as much as the combat has been improved, the game just isn't designed to hold its own against dedicated twitch-fests like Call of Duty, and by isolating your character from the thing that makes Brothers in Arms unique (the squad) Gearbox really watered down the integrity of the design.

For the levels majority of the levels though, you have your squad with you, and thankfully ordering your teams into cover has been improved immensely. If you've ever played a game with a recalcitrant grenade-throwing mechanic (the kind that resembles something out of a golf game, rather than a shooter) then you have an idea of what you would have gotten from the command interface of the first two Brothers in Arms. This oftentimes resulted in me reach controller-throwing levels of rage as I couldn't get the game to figure out that I wanted my men behind the stone wall, and not in front. This issue has been greatly rectified for Hell's Highway, of course there were times when I felt like my squad mates were dying because of the game's interface, but mostly I found ordering here to work incredibly well. As you begin to issue orders while in cover, the game's perspective pulls out to allow a better view of the surroundings, and then getting your guys into position comes down to moving a blue cursor around the screen from a perspective that resembles an RTS like Company of Heroes more than anything else.

Where Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 and Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood both told relatively linear and uncomplicated narratives, Hell's Highway ventures into the realm of non-sequential storytelling, and they do it better than almost any other game I've ever played. In broad strokes, the plot tells the story of the 101^st Airborne's participation in Operation Market Garden. But it's not the broad strokes that make Hell's Highway so great. It's the characters and the small moments, the way that the game will cut back to a week before the present to illuminate and expound upon the motivations for a characters actions, the way that the whole endeavor comes together to bring about some of the same types of emotions that watching Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers brings out.

When I actually think about what Gearbox has done with the title's narrative, I'm really amazed. So often videogames have taken the visceral route in portraying the Second World War, they want to show the heroism and the glory, but don't want to take the time to build their characters into real personages that seem human rather than superhuman. Hell's Highway doesn't do that, the game portrays real, three-dimensional characters. It shows soldiers who are human, who are at times cowardly, heartless, guilt-ridden and yet still heroic throughout, very few modern war movies have done nearly as good a job as Hell's Highway in striking a balance between the humanity and heroism of real soldiers, and it's honestly a bit perplexing why the game hasn't seen the kind of plot-related hype that's begun to be seen around certain big releases. The way the plot advances, and the slow integration of story and gameplay that crescendos into these surreal and psychologically shocking set-pieces reminiscent of Bioshock is something that no other WWII game has ever tried to accomplish. And the way that the gameplay tries to incorporate a relatively sophisticated non-linear plot along the lines of Memento is something that I don't think any other game has ever pulled off.

This is something that can be said about the game, and series, as a whole. While the rest of the FPS world races to ape Activision's Call of Duty formula, Gearbox has dared to be different and make the shooter that they want to make. And for that, I applaud them, and encourage you all to give their game a shot. And, just to reiterate… I love Gearbox.