Mike Reviews Life

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II Review

2010-10-31T11:52:00.003-04:00

When the first Force Unleashed game came out, I really enjoyed it. Despite its mixed reviews, it had a solid story that not only fit neatly into the continuity of the movies, but also provided some back story for the origins of the Rebellion. The characters were well-acted, and the main ones were even memorable. The game play had its flaws, sure, but it was undeniably fun to use your Force powers to toss enemies around (I always took a perverse delight in using Force Grip to lift an enemy up off a ledge, move him out into open space, and then just let go).

Perhaps The Force Unleashed's biggest flaw was that, to keep everything nice and tidy, protagonist Starkiller was dies during the canon ending. The game made money, and the developers decided a sequel was in order... but how do you do a sequel when you've killed off the hero? Maybe plays as Darth Vader (the intro level where you play as Vader was pretty awesome)? Or maybe Vader gets a new secret apprentice? Or why even focus on Vader's apprentice... maybe the Emperor was looking for someone to replace Vader the way Vader replaced Dooku. Maybe they could make a game about fan-favorite Emperor's Hand, Mara Jade?

Or they could take the easy and uncreative out and go with a clone. Which is what they did.

Easy and uncreative pretty much sets the tone for the whole game. While the story in the first one was interesting, with betrayals within betrayals and new insights into the early days of the Rebellion, The Force Unleashed II opens on Kamino with Vader telling Starkiller that he's a clone. Starkiller get's a little emo, decides he cares more about Juno Eclipse (his love interest from the first game) than anything else, and runs away to go find her. That's it, that's the whole plot. Which brings me to my second complaint... the game is really short. I mean, the first one was kind of short, but TFU2 is like half the length of the first game. There's the starting level on Kamino, then Starkiller goes to Cato Neimoidia to find Kota (whom Vader mentioned was there), just to ask Starkiller where Juno was. For some stupid reason (and fan service), Starkiller goes to Dagobah (which really isn't even a level, as there's no enemies and is completed by walking from point A to point B), before going to the ship in the Rebel Fleet that Juno is on. Bad stuff happens, Juno gets captured, and that ship becomes the third level in the game. Then Starkiller goes back to Kamino to rescue Juno and confront Vader. The end. Without spoiling anything else, at least both endings to the Force Unleashed II leave the plot open for more sequels now.

Despite my complaints about the crappy plot and the brevity of the game, it's really not all bad. In face, the game play has been a little tweaked. Not only is it still fun to tear through armies of Stormtroopers with your Force Powers, it's actually more fun now. You've still got your basic grip, push, and lighting powers, but they seem more effective now. It's easier to kill with a Force Push now, or once you've grabbed something (or someone) with a Force Grip, you can charge it with Force Lightning so that it (or he) explodes after being thrown. Distilled to its basic elements, the Force Unleashed II is a game that's more fun to play than the first one.

Improvements to game play don't really make up for the game's shortcomings, though. The fact that you can probably beat the game in one sitting (it took me three, but I was playing pretty casually) combined with the weak plot practically screams, "I'm a half-assed and half-done sequel that was rushed out in time for the holidays!" Because yeah, it's kind of fun to play, but it's ultimately a game that's too short to justify its $60 price tag on consoles, or even its $40 price tag for the PC version.

If you liked the Force Unleashed and wanted to check out the sequel, by all means give it a rental. But no one, not even the most hardcore Star Wars fanboy, should waste the money to purchase it.

Final Score: C-

Happy Birthday, NES

2010-10-18T17:12:00.002-04:00

As a child of the '80s, there's a lot of pop-culture influences on my childhood. But nothing, and I do mean nothing, influenced me quite like the Nintendo Entertainment System. I remember playing the games, but I also remember stuff like the Power Glove, Captain N, Nintendo Power, the Nintendo Cereal System, the Super Mario Bros Super Show, GamePro TV (ok, technically that was early '90s), and Video Power (again, technically early '90s). Pop culture of the late '80s and early '90s was heavily influenced by the NES in a way that modern gaming couldn't possibly replicate. And without the NES, I probably wouldn't have spent the last 25 years playing way too many video games instead of doing something worthwhile like curing cancer or something.

Well today, October 18th, marks 25 years since the NES's debut in America. And in honor of Nintendo's iconic console, here are my 10 favorite NES games off all time. They might not be the best, mind you, but they were the ones I played the most and have the fondest memories of. So, in no particular order...

Mega Man 2 - The game that introduced me to Mega Man, which went on to be one of my all time favorite series (I had all of the NES games except 6).

Mega Man 3 - I know I'm a minority, but I've always thought that this was the best of the NES Mega Man games. The soundtrack was awesome, the bosses were awesome, plus you got to fight the Robot Masters from Mega Man 2. And Proto Man!

Super Mario Bros 3 - Pretty much every kid that had an NES had the original Super Mario Bros. I remember when SMB2 came out thinking how disappointing it was because it wasn't much like the original (it would be years before I'd learn why). SMB3 wasn't just a return to the gameplay of the original, it was a vast improvement in every way. The result was probably the best NES game of all time.

The Legend of Zelda - The instruction manual to this groundbreaking game explained the story, but the game itself had you start, alone and unarmed, in the middle of the screen with absolutely no direction. And this was before the internet, so you couldn't just look for where to go or what to do next on Gamefaqs. I remember roaming the land for weeks looking for dungeons, heart containers, and other secrets, and sharing what secrets I found with other kids at the lunch table. You kids who grew up thinking Ocarina of Time was the greatest game ever don't know what you're missing, as later Zelda games fail to capture the magic of the original.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 - As a kid who loved the Ninja Turtles, I thought that the arcade game was about the coolest game ever (indeed, much better than the first TMNT game on the NES). I was super stoked when I found out that it was coming out on the NES. I remember saving up my allowance to buy it. Ah, memories...

Punch Out!! - The best boxing game ever made, until the new one came out for the Wii. Never could get past Bald Bull, though.

Final Fantasy - Technically, I got this game because a friend of mine already had an SNES and let me play Final Fantasy II, but I'll be damned if I didn't have an awesome time with it, trying out different parties, hunting down and beating a WarMech, etc.

Dragon Warrior III - While Final Fantasy might have reigned supreme for me during the SNES days, this was the definitive RPG of the NES era.

Castlevania III - I never did get Grant, but I still got further in this game than the first one. I didn't like the second one.

Duck Hunt - The only game I ever owned that used the pack-in Zapper.

Honorable mentions go to Super Mario Bros, Castlevania, Mega Man, Mega Man 4, Mega Man 5, Rescue Rangers, Batman, Super Dodgeball, and Skate or Die 2... they might not have had quite the impact the other 10 did, but I still spent way too much time playing them.

So how about you guys? What 10 NES games were your favorites? Sound off in the comments.

I've touched the future

2010-08-19T23:19:00.003-04:00

When I was in middle school, one of my favorite shows was Star Trek: The Next Generation. I mention this because very often in the show, you'd see people with these devices (they were called PADDs, if you must know). They used PADDs for a lot of stuff, including reading. They could get personal messages (like our modern email), read books both fiction and technical, complete with images and video. PADDs were a common item used routinely in daily life during the far future of the 2360s, when TNG was set.

I have touched the future, my friends. And it's got an Apple logo on the back.

You see, I bought an iPad. I did this after ridiculing the device as a large iPod touch, and I did this after ridiculing the device's price tag (for which you could buy a netbook with money left over for a Kindle). And after playing with it, I'm glad I did.

The iPad isn't my first experience with iOS. Curious about an iPhone I played with in an AT&T store, I bought an iPod touch, thinking that it'd be cool to have "an iPhone without the phone." And actually, I never used it. Sure, I'd occasionally play with an app. And I think the iOS version of Safari is the best mobile web browser I'd used. iOS struck me as flawed, but promising and intuitive. But since I don't often find myself in situations where I needed an mp3 player, let alone one as seemingly fragile as an iPod touch, I didn't have a lot of use for it. I wound up selling it, and haven't really regretted it.

I had, in the interim, thought that I might like a good ebook reader. I've actually been into ebooks a lot longer than even the first Kindle users. In fact, when the Kindle debuted, I'd already built quite the collection of ebooks in Microsoft's .lit format, and I used a Dell Axim X51 to read them. My first two smartphones, a Samsung Omnia and an HTC Touch Pro2, were chosen because they ran the oft-maligned Windows Mobile and could therefore display my ebooks. But since devices like the Kindle have started to hit the market, the .epub format has become more the standard. I've thought about getting a device with a slightly larger screen and converting my library to epub.

But I also like to read comic books, and I have a good collection of .cbz and.cbr files. I'd read them on my laptop sometimes, or more often on my desktop. I'd also download PDFs of magazines, but I found myself still subscribing to paper ones because it was nice to read them in bed or on the can without dragging out a 16" laptop that takes nearly a minute to boot.

That's pretty much the reason I bought an iPad. The free app Stanza plays back .epub and PDF files with ease. It's supposed to do comic book files too, but I've found that comic books larger than 15-20MB (which is a lot of them) won't load, but the also-free ComicBookLover handles them quite well. Indeed, the iPad's screen is just a bit smaller than an actual comic book, so it turns out to be an excellent display for them. Even the two magazines I've read on it were clear and easy to read without zooming in. The iPad doesn't stop there, though. A lot of the content I consume isn't just books, comics, and magazines, but webcomics, blogs, email, and Twitter feeds. And the iPad delivers all that through it's built-in Mail and Safari apps, plus the free app Twitterific.

Now it's true that my computer can do all that, and more. A laptop, or even a netbook could do all those things as well. But they come in bulkier packages, they're slower to start up, and for reading digital versions of physical material (comics, magazines, etc) the screen isn't usually oriented the same as the media you're reading. And that's where the iPad excels. I've even found that I prefer web browsing on the iPad with the screen in portrait mode.

The iPad's not perfect, though. Despite Steve Job's fondest fantasies, the iPad can only supplement a real computer, not replace it. I could never see myself typing anything lengthier than a paragraph (I went back to my desktop computer to type this blog post), and while it's got some fun little time-wasters I hardly think of it as a gaming device in the same way that I do my PC. That wouldn't be a big deal, and people wouldn't think about the iPad as a computer replacement, except for the price. If it wasn't for the fact that I sold a Macbook I wasn't using anymore to pay for the bulk of it, I wouldn't have bought an iPad. $500 really is too much for it. I like the iPad because it really excels at the things I wanted it for, but the iPad isn't going to have that market cornered forever. Kmart recently came out of obscurity to offer a tablet-style device running Google's Android OS for a mere $150. It turned out to be buggy almost to the point of being unusable, sure, but we didn't really have high expectations for it at that price. But that still leaves the door open for another manufacturer to release a higher-quality Android tablet and still undercut the iPad at $250 or $300. And even if you're anti-Android, if the competition gets fierce enough you can almost expect an iPad 2 at a more competitive price.

So there you have it. I think the iPad is an incredible device that excels at delivering certain media in a way that a smartphone, netbook, or laptop can't, but you should know that if you get one you're definitely paying to be an early adopter.

Final Score: B

Transformers: War for Cybertron Review

2010-06-24T15:24:00.002-04:00

Licensed games were once the bane of all gamers. A big summer blockbuster would come out, and a crappy game would inevitably come with it. Sometimes, this is still true (I'm looking at you, Iron Man 2: The Game), but with recent titles like X-Men Origins: Wolvernine and Batman: Arkham Asylum, games based on a license are starting to get good. And not just good enough for fans of the license, but really good. In fact, had BioWare not released Dragon Age: Origins last year, there's a good chance that Arkham Asylum would have been my pick for game of the year.

Amidst this renaissance of licensed games, Transformers: War for Cybertron was announced. As a huge Transformers fan, it was hard for me not to get excited. After all, this was a game being developed by professed fans of the franchise, being billed as a sort of origin story free not just from the mythos of Michael Bay's... reimaginings, but of any continuity at all. A clean slate, but one who's transforming robots clearly bore a resemblance to the beloved cartoon of my youth. Could War for Cybertron be the Transformers game I'd always craved?

Well... not exactly. But I'd say that High Moon studios has come closer than any previous developer.

We'll start with the good. War for Cybertron is a well-crafted third-person shooter. At the start of each of the game's ten chapters, you'll be given a choice of three characters to pick from, each with different starting weapons and abilities. Each character has been lovingly rendered with parts that move and twitch, even when he's standing still. Plus, each character's movement is fluid and natural, so you always have the sense that you're playing as a living being who happens to turn into a vehicle, and never a vehicle that turns into a clunky robot. The levels are also very well designed, so that one minute you might be racing down an open road, only to switch to bot-mode to hop across some spinning platforms to get the drop on an enemy sniper before ducking into a narrow corridor. It's a game that would be fun, even if you weren't playing out my described scenario as Optimus Prime.

But that's part of the game's problem. Even though you play as popular Transformers, even though the game is constantly referencing other Transformers material (especially the 1986 animated movie), the game felt as much like Gears of War to me as it did Transformers. I suppose it's to be expected on their home planet, but I never really got the feeling that I was a 20" tall robot. Each campaign had a epic boss fight with a huge Transformer, but neither felt as epic or as huge as the fight against Tidal Wave did in the PS2 Transformers game. And while the developers were hyping how this game was going to become the new basis for official Tranformers canon and how it was going to be full of deep revelations about the Transformers' past, the story was actually more like a "Megatron's scheme of the week" episode from the old 80's cartoon... that didn't include even one fight between Optimus and Megatron!

All-in-all, I think it was a good try, and I'm looking forward to seeing if High Moon, Activision, and Hasbro will make sequels. Aside from some minor flaws, War for Cybertron is a solid shooter and probably the best Transformers game to date. If you're a fan of shooters, check it out. If you're a fan of shooters AND Transformers, quit reading and go buy it.

Final Score: B+

Alpha Protocol Review

2010-06-07T21:45:00.003-04:00

In the late '90s and the early part of this decade, you couldn't talk about PC RPGs without mentioning two names: BioWare and Black Isle. While BioWare has gone on to develop some very successful RPGs (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Dragon Age) Black Isle sadly went down with publisher Interplay.

Several members of Black Isle went on to form Obsidian Entertainment, and Obsidian's been something of a mixed bag. Knights of the Old Republic II was pretty good, but buggy and lacking some of what made BioWare's original so great. Likewise, Neverwinter Nights 2 had an interesting story but failed to live up to the original.

Despite Obsidian's "good but..." track record, I'd been eagerly anticipating Alpha Protocol since it was first announced. Early details pegged it as an RPG with shooter elements and a rich dialogue system... something like Mass Effect, replacing the sci-fi elements with a 007-esque spy story.

Early reviews, however, were somewhat mixed (the game currently has an average score of 65% for the PS3, 64.1% for the Xbox 360, and 74.8% for the PC version at Gamerankings.com). Reviewers have complained that the game is buggy, the AI is poor, that combat with most weapons is useless, and that the stealth elements are fundamentally broken. While I can't deny that the game definitely had some bugs, I'm going to call bullshit on the rest.

I think a huge part of the problem comes from how the reviewers approach the game. I even recall one reviewer belly-aching about your ability to hit a target isn't simply a matter of where you aim your reticule (I wondered if said reviewer complained about that same fact in Mass Effect, but I was too lazy to look it up). The impression that I got was that most reviewers associate spies with stealth, tried to play Alpha Protocol like it was Splinter Cell, and declared the game broken when that approach didn't work.

Newsflash, video game press: Alpha Protocol is an RPG.

As someone who plays tabletop RPGs, I feel comfortable telling you that all RPGs come down to probability, and statistics for yourself and your enemies that modify probability. On a tabletop, everyone rolls dice. On a video game the dice-rolling might be simulated behind the scenes, but trust me, it's there. So in a game like Alpha Protocol, if one guard doesn't notice you killing his friend two feet away but another catches a few strands of your hair peeking out from behind cover from down the street, that's not an AI issue. One guard rolled high on his ability to notice you, the other didn't. And let's not forget that the enemy rolls are likely against a roll on the player's part to stay hidden, or that the player's ability to stay hidden is affected by any armor worn. Likewise, shooting at an enemy in an RPG isn't enough by itself to hit that enemy. Your ability to attack, stat boosts from the weapon being used, and defensive stats for the enemy all factor in.

To be fair, if you hate that sort of thing, then you probably won't like Alpha Protocol, and if you expect to play Alpha Protocol the way you play Splinter Cell, you're bound to be disappointed. However, it strikes me as unfair to criticize Alpha Protocol for being an RPG and not a stealth-action game with RPG elements.

As an RPG, Alpha Protocol is actually pretty good. You play as Agent Mike Thorton, a new recruit in a super-secret agency called Alpha Protocol. The agency and the protocol its named for apparently exist in extra super secrecy so that they can act in what they determine to be the country's best interests while leaving the American government total deniability. Thorton's first mission for the agency is to track down some missiles believed to be stolen from an American company and used by terrorists to shoot down a passenger airliner. There turns out to be more to that than meets the eye, and Thorton finds himself on the run from everyone, including the agency he works for. Throughout the game, you're never entirely sure who you can and can't trust. When dealing with some of the major characters, you'll have two to four dialogue choices. How you decide will affect how the characters treat you and sometimes have serious repercussions. It's true that you'll play the main missions no matter what, but the order you do them in and the relationships you have will affect how those missions play out. It's a great system that has me looking forward to replaying the game in the future just to see how differently things could play out.

The gameplay is also pretty good, once you accept that it's an RPG. I chose to play the game as stealthy as I could. While this meant that I could often sneak up on an enemy and take him out silently, I soon realized that it was impossible to never be spotted. Unlike games like Metal Gear or Splinter Cell, where being spotted meant your were screwed, being spotted in Alpha Protocol meant fighting some guys until you could turn the alarm off. Which brings us to your gear selection. You can take two weapons, armor, and a few gadgets. You actually have four choices of weapon, though, and the armor you wear affects things like how many gadgets you can carry, how much ammo you can carry, how much endurance you have, how much damage reduction you have, and how stealthy you are. I chose stealthy armor, a pistol, and an assault rifle. I used the rifle in most of my fights, but I had a silencer on the pistol and developed a skill that would let me kill an unsuspecting enemy with a critical headshot. The game reviewers who complained that the pistol is useless in a firefight are 100% correct, but they're missing the fact that it's supposed to be, and that's why you take two weapons on every mission.

Of course, stealth isn't the only option. You can wear heavy armor and simply charge enemies, guns blazing. Or you can build up your tech skill and use an array of gadgets to distract enemies while you go around. It's all about how you build your Thorton. I even built up my Martial Arts skills, so that by the end of the game I found that unless an enemy was a good distance from me that it was often more affective to beat the living snot out of him with my bare hands.

Alpha Protocol's biggest problems aren't enemy AI or broken stealth mechanics. Alpha Protocol's biggest problems are game bugs and it's inventory system. I leveled my stealth skill up until I turned my basic Awareness ability (an ability you start with that lets you know what direction enemies are facing, even if you can't see them) to advanced Awareness, at which point it just stopped working. I'd hit the button to activate it, the game would make a sound, and nothing would happen. Sometimes the game would pause as if loading, then when it resumed a second later the camera would be pointed at the ceiling. And let's not forget the time I went through a door and stepped off the world, falling until I reloaded an older save.

As for the inventory system, I mentioned that you can carry two weapons out of four types. The game has pistols, shotguns, submachine guns, and assault rifles. As I mentioned, I found that assault rifles were great in a firefight, and that a silenced pistol was good for the occasional stealth kill. I played the entire game using those two, and never once did I feel like there was a reason to try the other two. Also, while it was easy enough to figure out if another weapon was better than the one you were using, weapon upgrades were a bit of a mess. Lastly, there didn't seem to be enough of it. As you ran about, collecting money and upgrades, you rarely got new weapons or armor. In fact, when you found money it was often a small percentage of the cost of a new weapon. I replaced my starting piston and my starting assault rifle once each, and my armor twice over the course of the entire game.

Minority though I might be, I actually feel like the game's pros far outweigh the cons. Like I said before, if you're expecting something else Alpha Protocol might not be what you're looking for, but taken for the RPG that it is I found it to be a very engaging game well worth the 15 hours or so that it took me to complete my first play through.

Final Score: A-

Getting caught up with mini reviews

2010-05-28T13:16:00.003-04:00

Things have been a little hectic lately, but even I was kind of surprised when I realized that I hadn't posted anything in two months. Did this mean I wasn't playing games or doing anything else worth reviewing? Nope... it just means that when I haven't been working, I've been trying to play games.

At this point, I feel like it'd be a waste of time to write full reviews for everything, but I'd like to at least give you my basic feelings in case you were actually counting on me for such reviews. So here goes...

GAMES

God of War III (PS3): If you've played God of War or GoWII, you should know by now what you're getting into. Not a lot has changed... you start of the game all bad ass, something happens to de-power you, you run around getting powered up for a final boss fight. Considering that the final boss fight that you're preparing for is the same final boss fight you were preparing for in GoWII, the whole setup feels a little contrived. Another thing I didn't care for was how most of the weapons you collect in the game are essentially variations on the chain blades you've been lugging around for the whole series. It's almost as if the developers have come to accept that we don't really care to use a sword when we've got knives attached to chains to swing around. Thing is, giving us more weapons attached to chains doesn't make us any more likely to use them instead of the one we've started with, so just to make sure we have to use the new weapons, the developers threw in obstacles and enemies that can only be overcome with one type of weapon. Despite these minor quibbles, God of War III is both visually impressive and the combat is as fun as it ever was. Final Score: A

Gundam Assault Survive (PSP): Essentially, GAS is a sequel to the well-regarded Gundam Battle series. The controls are the same, the game engine is the same, and the game is still divided into eras. As you might expect by now, another campaign era is added in the form of the next Gundam series in the UC timeline (F91, for those of you keeping score at home). A bit more surprising is the addition of campaigns for Gundam SEED and Gundam 00. Then there are a few minor changes to the game's formula. The most welcome change is that you don't have to pick a side for a campaign. Once you've created your pilots, you can play both the Federation and the Zeon sides of the 0079 campaign, for example. This makes it easier to unlock all the mobile suits on one save file. Another change I like is that you earn credits for doing missions, and the credits can be used to buy new units, buy special parts, or buy tune points. You no longer earn tune points for playing with a suit, so when you get a new one you can start tuning it right away. Less-liked changes are the fact that everything's been re-balanced. Most enemies take more shots to kill, even after you've tuned your mobile suits. Likewise, the most kick-ass suits are not the killing machines they were before. Getting new suits is a pain as well. You don't unlock suits, you unlock the ability to buy them. However, most mobile suits will need to be developed before you can buy them. For example, after you have the Zaku II S-type, you'll need to find or buy a part to equip on it, then buy the development plan for Char's Zaku II just to unlock the ability to buy Char's Zaku II. This can make unlocking many of the game's suits an expensive chore.

But the biggest change in the game, and one I'm on the fence over, is the addition of multi-map missions. The first missions in a campaign may only have one or two areas, but later missions in the game will have up to nine. Finishing a mission now isn't about simply completing an objective; you will have to try to control different areas and defend your ship while trying to complete an objective. Sometime an objective might be to destroy a certain mobile suit, but that mobile suit won't appear until conditions are met like destroying enemy ships or controlling certain areas. The result is that many missions are longer and less-suited toward the bite-size gameplay the PSP is best for, and there are fewer missions. Indeed, missions like the War in the Pocket mission in previous Gundam Battle games are now a number of areas in just one mission. So while the new tactical elements are a plus, the way it's implemented can often be a minus. If push came to shove, I'd have to say that Gundam Battle Universe is still the better game. Final Score: B-

Pokemon SoulSilver (DS): I admit to having a certain weakness for core Pokemon games. There's a part of my brain that likes collecting stuff (it's the same part that compelled me to find all the Riddler Challenges in Arkham Asylum, or to unlock all the costumes in a Dead or Alive game). And when you get down to it, Pokemon is a basic, but fun, turn-based JRPG. Back in the days of the Gameboy, I liked the original, and I thought that Gold/Silver/Crystal were better. In recent times, I've enjoyed the newer ones but always felt that they were a step down from Gold/Silver/Crystal. SoulSilver is basically a DS remake of Silver. While newer moves and secondary types have rebalanced the game since the days when the Gameboy Color was king, SoulSilver (or HeartGold, if you prefer) is still probably the best of the Pokemon games. Final Score: A-

Battlefield Bad Company 2: I enjoyed Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare when it came out. When Modern Warfare 2 came out, it was a huge letdown. The characters in the game are unlikeable and possibly insane. The plot is convoluted and at times doesn't even make sense. Infinity Ward more or less jumped the shark, and I've pretty much lost any interest I had in the Call of Duty franchise. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is the new modern-military FPS hotness. All of characters in Bad Company 2 have their own unique (if sometimes stereotypical) personalities. This makes for likeable characters, humorous dialogue, and the occasional dig at Modern Warfare. While the plot is a little ridiculous, you can actually follow it without going "WTF?!" after every mission. And the combat is pretty much what you can expect from modern FPSes. My only real complaint is the amount of smoke in the game. Grenades will kick up dirt, wood will splinter, brick will crumble, and buildings will collapse. All of it kicks up dirt and dust that obscures your vision, but never really seems to bother the enemy AI. If you like FPS games, you owe it to yourself to pick up BFBC2, as it's better than Modern Warfare 2 in pretty much every way. Final Score: A

Forza Motorsport 3 (Xbox 360): Since the advent of Gran Turismo, racing games have been divided into two catagories. On the one hand, you've got your arcade racers, which range from Ridge Racer to Need for Speed to Burnout. On the realistic side, there's been a few games like TOCA Race Driver, but only Forza Motorsport ever really seemed to compete with Gran Turismo. The physics were better, and you didn't spend a ton of time screwing around in used 1989 Honda Civics. Forza 3 is hands down the best of the Forza series. Even though I thought Forza is better than Gran Turismo, Forza and Forza 2 were still too tedious for me to really get into. Forza 3 had me completely hooked, though. The career mode spans six seasons. Each season has a championship series, and you pass the time between championship events by racing in other evens. Different events will have you racing different cars in different classes. Forza 3 makes it easy to figure out what class you car is, and provides ways of automatically upgrading it to the top of one class without going over into the next one. For example, you might have a car that's an E class, and you might want to race it in a D-class event. You can choose to automatically take it up to D without accidentally going into C. As such, you don't spend too much time tuning, and you spend more of your time driving. The only (and I do mean only) complain I have about Forza 3 is that the game sometimes doesn't know when you've got too much of a good thing. Most races early in the game are two or three laps on a short track, but championship races in later seasons can be several laps on extremely long tracks. It's not uncommon for one race event to take a half-hour to complete. While it's sometimes fun to try to beat your best lap time on such a race, it can also be a little dull when you've actually lapped mos to of the competition and start to zone out. Final Score: A.

Silent Hill: Homecoming (Xbox 360): This was the first Silent Hill game I'd played since the original back on the first PlayStation. I remember really liking the first one, and I'd picked up Homecoming on clearance at a Best Buy. It's been sitting on my shelf for probably over a year now, unplayed. I decided to give it a whirl, and I'm actually sorry that I did. The game is complete rubbish, and it's really the fault of the combat system. People have complained that the combat in previous Silent Hill games have been the game's weakest points. In attempting to fix it, the developers actually made it worse. Homecoming is frustrating to the point of unplayable. Final Score: F.

Halo: ODST (Xbox 360): I have no clue why Halo is still so popular. Sure, the original was fun in its time. I didn't particularly care for Halo 2, but I could see people still being into it. But by the time Halo 3 came out, there were plenty of better FPS games, both for single-player and multi-player. I guess Bungie knows that the Halo fans will pretty much buy a sack full of turds if they put the Halo brand on it, and that's pretty much what they did with ODST. The gameplay, which has gotten worse with each new Halo game, is just awful in ODST, so I'm finding myself not caring about any of the characters. The story's kind of pointless, too, since by now most fans would know how Master Chief wins the war. The only positive thing I can say about ODST is that a lot of the voice cast are from Firefly (Nathan "Malcom" Fillion, Alan "Wash" Tudyk, and Adam "Jayne" Baldwin). Final Score: D-.

MOVIES:

Hot Tub Time Machine: Probably one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. What I really like about it is that it makes no excuses and attempts no explanations for how over-the-top ridiculous it really is. Final Score: A+

The Bounty Hunter: You'd think a movie about a bounty hunter trying to collect on a bounty that's on his ex-wife would be funny. The previews certainly make it look funny. But it's one of those movies where all the funny stuff is in the previous, and the rest of the movie is a predictable and dull romantic comedy. Final Score: D+

Clash of the Titans: It's a movie about a guy sets off on a quest to save a city from Hades. Not because he really cares about the city, mind you... mostly because he's pissed at Hades for killing his family. As he goes about his quest, he fights a lot of monsters. All-in-all, Clash of the Titans doesn't offer a lot in the way of plot or surprises, but watching a pissed-off dude fight monsters makes for a decent popcorn flick. Final Score: B

Iron Man 2: It picks up where the first one left off. Tony's dealing with being both the rock-star head of a huge corporation AND a superhero in the spotlight. Iron Man 2 is a little busy at times, though. We're dealing with the government wanting Stark to give them Iron Man, we're dealing with Ivan Vanko wanting revenge of Stark, we're dealing with Justin Hammer wanting his company to one-up Stark for military contracts, we're dealing with Stark's friendship with James Rhodes, we're dealing with Stark's daddy issues, and we're dealing Stark confronting his own mortality. It's all played brilliantly by the cast, but it feels rushed, especially the few brief fight scenes. It's a solid movie, just not as good as the first one. Final Score: A-.

The car is dead. Long live the car!

2010-05-16T15:03:00.008-04:00

As sad as it was to see my old friend go... this is my new hotness. This is the 2010 Mitsubishi Lancer GTS. Sure, it's not quite an Evo X, but you'd be forgiven if you mistook it for one. The 18" wheels are bigger than my old ones (or my wife's 2004 Lancer), the front air dams, side skirts, and rear wing are standard, and the 2.4L, 168hp engine is larger than the engine in the DE or LE trims. Inside we've got an automatic transmission with manual mode, cruise control, paddle shifters on the steering wheel, two 12v power adapters, six speakers, a CD player with mp3/wma decoder, steering wheel stereo controls, audio jacks for hooking up an iPod, and bluetooth hands-free calling. Power windows, power door locks, keyless entry, a color digital information panel, as well as a surprisingly roomy interior and an unbelievably quiet engine add to the car's overall comfort. Also, switching from a 2-door to a 4-door with seven airbags, antilock brakes, active stability control, and a LATCH system for hooking up a child's car seat mean that I made a practical choice instead of just buying a car for the sexy... and it is definitely a sexy car.

Farewell to a friend, 2002-2010

2010-05-15T23:15:00.003-04:00

It's pretty crazy how people can get attached to inanimate objects. The car in the above photo (a 2002 Mitsubishi Mirage DE coupe), for example. That was my car... scratches, scuffs, bird shit and all. I bought it on June 11th, 2002, just three days after my wedding. It wasn't the first car I'd owned, but it was the first brand new car. I don't know how we managed it. We managed to get deferred payments as part of the financing options, which we needed since we had almost no money at the time. With an 11% interest rate, our payments were around $312/month when we started making them. We didn't have a lot of choices... we needed a car right away, and Mitsubishi was the only manufacturer that was deferring payments, and the Mirage was the only Mitsubishi we could afford. I liked the car when I bought it. After all, it was kind of sporty-looking. It was a bit later that I realized that having a 2-door is kind of a pain, and that it was lousy to drive in the snow. Still, it got us where we needed to go those crucial years when we only had one car. Even after, it got me from Greensburg to Cleveland for job interviews. And even after my wife got a newer car (a 2004 Mitsubishi Lancer LS) and we started driving that car as our main car, my Mirage still got me wherever I needed to go when I was flying solo, for just a few weeks shy of 8 years now.

Lately, though, she'd been giving me troubles. There were some spots that were rusting, and I spent a bit of money repairing most of the exhaust last year. Then the battery went. About two weeks ago, I was on my way to a friend's house when it got obnoxiously loud. This time, it was the flex pipe, and it was going to cost another $1100. It was quite likely that, if I wanted to invest in a bit of repair, that she would have kept running for years yet, but I was getting frustrated with the expensive repairs and the plummeting Blue Book value. And she just didn't seem reliable anymore. So after much deliberation and soul-searching, we decided to get rid of her today, May 15th. And what was surprising to me was how similar that felt to the decision to put down our 18 year-old cat. Maybe it was for the best, but I was still saying goodbye to a loyal friend. So there you have it... I'm getting emotional over a car.

Farewell, old friend... you were a loyal and trusty car, and you'll be missed.

Mega Man 10 Review

2010-03-17T20:38:00.000-04:00

As a child growing up in the 80's (and early 90's), I have a lot of fond memories of the NES. At the time, if you played video games, you owned an NES. There was Nintendo cereal, a cartoon for Super Mario Bros and the Legend of Zelda, plus cartoons like Captain N and Video Power. We had movies like The Wizard, and accessories like the Zapper, R.O.B, the Power Pad, the Power Glove, the Advantage, and the Game Genie. Back then, we didn't check GameFAQs when we got stuck, we shared tips and secrets at the lunch table at school.

A lot of games from that era haven't held up that great, but one series that I feel has was one of my all-time favorites: Mega Man. I played and replayed all of the old NES Mega Man games (except 6, which got lost in the transition to the Super Nintendo) more times than I could count. I even took a copy of Dragon Warrior IV I'd received for Christmas back to the store, resisting the urge to open a new game, just so that I could get Mega Man 5 instead.

In 2008, Capcom surprised the gaming community by announcing Mega Man 9. The last official game in the "classic" Mega Man series was released over 10 years before on the original PlayStation, and rather than continue to improve the graphics Capcom and developer Inti Creates decided to make it 8-bit, in the spirit of the old NES games. Between the nostalgia factor and the fact that I'm a huge fan of Mega Man games in general, I couldn't have been more excited. And yet, when the game came out, it was kind of a letdown. At some point, Mega Man games had got a reputation for being hard, and Inti Creates decided to make Mega Man 9 one of the hardest. Thing was, the game wasn't hard because you had to learn enemy patterns or try to figure out what boss weapon worked on which boss. It was hard because it was cheap, with more spikes, pits, and blind jumps in a given Robot Master's level than previous games had in their Wily levels. I've played and beaten all six of the NES Mega Man games plenty of times (1-5 on the NES, 1-6 on emulators, 1-6 on the Mega Man Anniversary Collection, etc), and even I thought Mega Man 9 was so frustrating that I never even finished it. I could only imagine how many gamers who might have been newer to the series were completely turned off by Mega Man 9's insanely cheap difficulty.

In an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, Mega Man 10 was released with a Normal difficulty (still really hard), and an Easy mode. Despite the fact that players can chose which difficulty they want, many hardcore players cried foul. Easy mode, they said, was simply too easy.

I can safely say that, yes, Easy mode is too easy. Aside from being able to take more damage, floating platforms are scattered throughout the levels in places where players are likely to miss a jump. But the thing is, while Easy mode might be too easy, Normal mode (and Mega Man 9) is still too hard. It's one thing to enjoy a challenge, but only a sadomasochist could love Mega Man 9's level design. And when push comes a shove, I'd rather play a game that's too easy than too hard.

Funny thing is, since I wasn't throwing my controller, cursing, and pulling my hair out in frustration, nostalgia did take over. It was like being back in my childhood, getting excited to be playing a new game in my favorite series, running through levels and figuring out what order was the best to beat the Robot Masters. It was the feeling that I'd hoped I'd get from Mega Man 9. And as short as it was, Mega Man 10 became an instant classic, a game I'd played through twice (once as Mega Man, once as Proto Man), and a game who's downloadable content (Mega Man Killers! Playable Bass!) has me more excited than big-name releases like God of War III.

I would like to see Inti Creates come up with a better balance for Mega Man 11 (and I do really want a Mega Man 11 now)... maybe an Easy mode as easy as 10's Easy mode, a Hard mode as hard as Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10's Normal Mode, and a Normal mode that's somewhere in between. But even if Easy mode was too easy, it made Mega Man 10 fun enough that I'd pay another $10 if Capcom would re-release Mega Man 9 with an Easy mode.

If you've ever had even a passing interest in the Mega Man games of the NES era, you MUST play Mega Man 10. It's the kind of game that Mega Man 9 should have been: the kind that makes me want to blow the dust out of a gray cartridge and pop it into an NES.

Final Score: A+

Dante's Inferno Review

2010-03-11T13:55:00.000-05:00

If imitation is flattery, then the developers at Visceral Games are trying to get to third base with the God of War team.

Not that this is always a bad thing. Fact is, people can enjoy their Halo and their Call of Duty because people wanted to imitate Doom and Wolfenstein 3D years ago. You've got your Final Fantasy and your Dragon Age because people wanted to imitate Dungeons & Dragons. And Soul Calibur owes its existence to Virtua Fighter, which itself was an evolution of a genre practically defined by Street Fighter.

Imitation isn't always a good thing either. How many lame street racing games flooded the market after Need for Speed Underground? Or for every good FPS like Crysis there's going to be a Darkest of Days or two. And frankly, you can't throw a stick in a Gamestop without hitting an anime-inspired JRPG.

I'm pleased to say that Dante's Inferno trends more toward good imitation than bad. Despite some liberties taken with the story (instead of a poet taking a tour, Dante's a crusader fighting to win back the soul of his girlfriend, Beatrice), the circles of Hell that Dante fights through are lifted from Dante Aleghieri's Divine Comedy. So many games borrow from other mythologies that it was kind of refreshing to see one tackle Christian literature.

Combat in Dante's Inferno is fast and fluid. Like God of War, you have light and strong attacks, you can block, and you can evade with the analog stick. Where Inferno falls a little short, though, is variety. Dante never gets a melee weapon that isn't his scythe. And while Dante learns a few magic attacks along his journey, you can play the game and easily never use more than the first one you're given. The only other attack you really have to mix things up with is a cross that fires cross-shaped projectiles.

One area where Inferno does diverge from God of War is the upgrade system. In God of War, you collect souls and them apply them to a specific upgrade. In Inferno, you have a Holy and an Unholy skill tree. You can collect souls by killing enemies or from certain fountains, but some enemies and some characters from the poem will present Dante with the option to absolve or punish them. Punishment gives you Unholy experience, and absolution gives you Holy experience. When you collect enough experience, you can invest in skills from a higher tier on the appropriate tree. At first, this might seem like a morality system, where you must chose one set of skills over the other. In practice, I decided that I'd punish any enemy creatures and absolve any shades that I came across, and I had unlocked everything but the highest tier for both skill trees.

Perhaps Inferno's greatest misfortune is coming out just over a month before God of War III. It's hard to recommend it in light of the fact that you can just wait for what will almost certainly be a superior game. But I actually do want to recommend it, especially if you can get it on sale like I did ($40 at Target), because while it might not be as great as the game it so shamelessly copies from, it is still a good game. Sometimes that's good enough.

Final Score: B

Move Over Oscars... Here Come the Mikes

2010-03-07T22:50:00.000-05:00

So my wife decides that she wants to watch the Oscars. Frankly, I'd rather play a video game so that I'll have something new to review, but sometimes you gotta let the wife have her way. After all, a happy wife makes a happy life.

Obviously, even though they're not going to reveal it until later in the night, the big deal is Best Picture, and they open the program by mentioning all the films that were nominated. I was shocked when I saw that Star Trek wasn't nominated. They even doubled the number of nominees this year, and Star Trek didn't make it. James Cameron's vapid-yet-expensive Avatar gets a nomination, a couple of movies I'd never even heard of like An Education get nominated, but Star Trek gets snubbed. And that's when I realized that not only are the Oscars boring, they're bullshit. Good movies that people really like don't get nominations, but "artistic" crap that probably didn't even play at your local theater does because ordinary folk don't get to pick. The Oscars are about movie people giving themselves awards. Picking "artistic" movies, no matter how much they suck, is their way of affirming just how artistic they are. It'd be like if you and your friends formed a club, then once a year picked stuff that you did and gave yourselves awards for it.

While I enjoy a good movie (and a couple of bad ones), the fact is that I think most people in Hollywood are self-absorbed tools who don't have a clue what real life is like, so I don't really give a crap about their opinions. When it comes to opinions, the one that I really respect the most is my own. So forget about the Oscars; I'm handing on the one award that really matters... the Mike.

Best Picture - Star Trek
Best Actor - Optimus Prime, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Best Supporting Actor - Woody Harrelson, Zombieland
Best Actress - The Blue Chick in Avatar
Best Supporting Actress - Shia LeBeouf, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Best Animated Feature Film - Up
Best Art Direction - Star Trek
Best Cinematography - Star Trek
Best Costume Design - G.I. Joe
Best Director - J.J. Abrams, Star Trek
Best Documentary - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Best Editing - Star Trek
Best Makeup - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Best Musical Score - Star Trek
Best Original Song - "Jimmy's Dead", Black Dynamite.
Best Sound Editing - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Best Sound Mixing - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Best Writing for an Adapted Screenplay - Star Trek
Best Writing for an Original Screenplay - Zombieland

You'll notice I left a couple out. That's because I didn't watch short films. Instead, please accept my totally new categories.

Best Line in a Movie - "Give me your face!", Optimus Prime, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Best Sci-fi Movie - Star Trek
Best Horror Movie - Paranormal Activity
Best Comedy - Black Dynamite
Best Romantic Comedy - Zombieland
Best Product Placement - Twinkies, Zombieland
Best Fight Scene - Black Dynamite vs. Richard Nixon, Black Dynamite
Biggest Tool - James Cameron, Avatar

Darksiders Review

2010-02-11T23:21:00.000-05:00

When Bayonetta was released, it was high on my list of anticipated games for 2010. Not only did it get very high review scores from both Western and Japanese gaming press, it was also the pet project of Hideki Kamiya and followed closely in the footsteps of his excellent Devil May Cry.

Bayonetta wasn't the only well-reviewed game released that day, though. A new video game developer released their first game, an original IP from comic book veteran Joe Madureira. Based solely on the positive press the game was receiving, I decided to give it a try.

Darksiders, a term that's never actually used in the game, is the story of War, one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Horsemen serve a body known as the Charred Council responsible for maintaining the status quo between Heaven and Hell until such a day that mankind will have grown enough to figure into the conflict somehow. So when the forces of Hell start attacking the Earth, then the forces of Heaven start fighting the forces of Hell right in the middle of town, War shows up thinking that it's Armageddon time. Turns out he's the only Horseman to show up, because it wasn't really the Apocalypse after all. War gets stomped by a big ol' demon and mankind is wiped out it what I guess is some kind of false alarm.

War is saved from death by the Charred Council only to be stripped of his power and sentenced to death by said Council, who believe the whole mess is somehow War's fault. War argues for a chance to prove his innocence by going back to Earth, which is now overrun by demons. Figuring that War would probably die in the attempt anyway, the Council agrees.

Back on Earth, War figures that the best way to prove his innocence is to take out the demon he believes is behind it all, the Destroyer. But since he's be de-powered, he seeks the aid of Samael, a powerful demon imprisoned by the Destroyer. Samael agrees to help War if War will slay the Destroyer's Chosen and bring him their hearts. This quest becomes the bulk of the game as War travels to different areas with Zelda-esque dungeons to find and defeat the chosen. Also like Zelda, War picks up new abilities as he goes along, some of which are clearly Zelda-inspired in and of themselves, like the boomerang and the hookshot. Other abilities, like the portal gun, borrow their inspiration from other games.

There are plenty of demons, and even some angels, who get between War and his dungeon puzzles, and the combat is brutal. Some reviewers have compared it to God of War, but I don't think that's really accurate. God of War allows players to mix quick and heavy attacks to make satisfying combos. In Darksiders, different weapons are mapped to different buttons. X (or square for PS3 owners) is only for War's sword, and no other button does sword attacks. So for the first quarter of the game or so, your only real combat option is to mash the X button. Later you'll get weapons you can map to the Y (triangle) and R-trigger (R2), only to find that R-trigger items are more for puzzles than combat and the weapons you can map to Y are pretty useless compared to the sword. So while you'll have other options, 90% of the game is still all about mashing the X button with an occasional dodge in combat.

The Zelda-esque dungeons do help to set Darksiders apart from other action games. Figuring out how to use War's abilities to solve the various puzzles that he comes across is often much more satisfying than than combat. They can be genuinely clever and only occasionally involve moving boxes. They can be occasionally frustrating, though, due to the fact that War controls like a tank. Honestly, I died less in combat than I did from accidentally falling off a ledge trying to line up a jump.

Darksiders' biggest flaw, though, is its story. The plot gets very convoluted near the end, with betrayals heaped upon betrayals by characters making drastic decisions on the flimsiest of reasoning. I might have made more of an effort to follow along, though, if the characters weren't such dull archetypes. War is a duty-bound warrior with no personality. Uriel a hothead bent on avenging her leader. Azrael is the guy who helps the badguy come to power thinking it's for the greater good, only to regret and help the hero take out the badguy. And Samael is the badguy the hero has to make a deal with because the big badguy is worse. Samael is actually one of the things the plot really fails on. You're told from the get go that he's a real baddie; next in line for the throne of Hell until the Destroyer imprisoned him and went to take over Earth. You spend the bulk of the game killing the guys he tells you to hill, then bringing them their hearts. He tells you that you need to do this for him to help you get into the Destroyer's tower, but the game is constantly hinting that Samael has an ulterior motive. When you eventually find out what it is and that he's been playing you, you confront him... only for him to send you on your way to the tower. And then he's not mentioned for the rest of the game. I'd like to think maybe he'll have some part in any sequel the developers might make, but nothing's really foreshadowed in the game.

The one thing I would really like to give Darksiders praise for is its art and design. Characters are detailed and unique. Bosses are suitably impressive in appearance. And for an world overrun by Hell, the different areas of the game manage to be visually distinctive and at times even colorful.

At the end of the day, Darksiders is a fun game. The combat does get a little tedious, but the game does take the Zelda model of dungeon exploration and use it to good effect. It's just a real shame that such great game design was wrapped up in such a generic story populated by such dull characters.

Final score: B

Mass Effect 2 Review

2010-02-05T20:34:00.000-05:00

When the first Mass Effect was released it instantly became on of my favorite games. Bioware had crafted an amazingly rich and detailed universe, populated it with genuinely interesting characters, and used them to tell one of the best sci-fi stories I've experienced.

What Bioware did with Mass Effect 2 is to improve on the first game in almost every way.

From the get go, you can import a save from the first Mass Effect. The choices you made in the first game do have an impact on the second. What I found pleasantly surprising were some of the way even minor things from the first game carried over into the second one, helping to increase the sense that the world of Mass Effect is a living, immersive world. For example, while riding in an elevator during the first game I heard a news bit about a person named Kitt putting together an all-elcor production of Hamlet (which is funny if you had talked to the elcor ambassador and learned about their emotionless way of speaking). In the second game a terminal was actually advertising this production. Similarly, a minor character who gives you an optional side-quest in the first game turns out to be a more important character in recruiting a particular party member.

The story itself is slightly darker than the first. After nearly being killed, Shepard is revived by the terrorist group called Cerberus. During the time that he was out, the Alliance and the Citadel Council have convinced themselves that Sovereign's attack was an isolated incident and that the Reapers aren't really a threat. Human colonies are disappearing, though, and the Illusive Man behind Cerberus believes that a mysterious race known as the Collectors are behind it. More importantly, the Illusive Man believes that the Collectors are working for the Reapers, and he's recruiting Shepard to put together a team to stop them.

And what a team Shepard puts together! Without giving too much away, only two of the party members from the first game return. This seems disappointing at first, but you quickly become attached to the new crew. In typical Bioware fashion, each of the member of your party is a well-developed character with their own personality and back story. In fact, it will sometimes make it hard to do choose which members to take on certain missions. You might know that a certain party member will be more effective against a kind of enemy you expect to face on a mission, but on the other hand you might really like another less effective member. Mordin Solus, the salarian, was a particular favorite of mine.

The most jarring change is probably to the gameplay itself. Many of the RPG elements have been stripped down. All of the characters have fewer options for using their skill points, fewer ranks to buy, and fewer points are awarded. There are fewer weapons, and once you find one any party member that can use that kind of weapon are upgraded to it automatically. There are no weapon mods (special ammo becomes an ability for different characters). And Shepard is the only character who's armor you can customize at all. Combat is less about a weapons damage, accuracy, and heat stats and more about how well you as a player can aim and how much ammo you have. Heath and shields also deplete (and recharge) much faster, placing a greater emphasis on finding and using cover. At first, this seems like a turn off, but the reality is that after playing for awhile it makes the combat more intense and the inventory management much more streamlined and certainly more accessible to a wider audience.

2010 is just a little over a month in, and I know we've got a ton of great games to look forward to this year. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if Mass Effect 2 is mentioned in Game of the Year discussions a year from now.

Final Score: A+

Bayonetta Review

2010-01-16T19:27:00.000-05:00

In 2001, Hideki Kamiya delivered the first Devil May Cry game for Capcom. Later, some of Capcom's biggest talent formed Clover Studios, which delivered critical-favorite Okami and the sequel to (and PS2 port of the original) Hideki Kamiya's Devil May Cry. When Capcom decided to close Clover (while retaining the IP), members of Clover formed Seeds Inc. Seeds merged with another studio to form Platinum Games.

Bayonetta isn't the first game from Platinum Games, but it's the first one with Hideki Kamiya at the helm. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it borrows a lot of elements from Kamiya's earlier Devil May Cry.

The game tells the story of Bayonetta, a witch found in a lake where she'd been sealed in a coffin for the past 500 years. Bayonetta has incredible powers and a talent for killing angels, but she doesn't have any memory of who she is. Driving back from completing a mission, she's attacked by someone who sparks a memory from her past. Using her informant, Enzo, supplies her with enough information to track the attacker back to an old European country called Vigrid, where she recovering her lost memories is the key not just to solving the mystery of her attacker, but saving all of creation.

As I mentioned earlier, Bayonetta borrows a lot from Devil May Cry. The game is broken into 16 chapters, with slick cutscenes to fill in some of the story between the action-packed levels. Like DMC's Dante, Bayonetta can attack with weapons or guns. The big difference here is that Bayonetta can equip weapons in both her hands and on her feet, which can make for some pretty interesting combos. The enemy design is top-notch, too. While there's only a few different types, they do an excellent job of being both majestic creatures that really could be the Bible's angels as well as otherworldly, monstrous creatures. That fits well with the game's mythology, that light and dark, Heaven and Hell, angels and demons are opposite sides of the same coin with a careful balance maintained between them. This mythology provides a solid base for a surprisingly interesting story. For the first chapter or so, it's pretty easy to dismiss Bayonetta as a shallow sex-selling heroine. But as Bayonetta's past is explored, she's revealed to be a strong heroine who's playful innuendo hides the fact that she really does care about the people around her, with a sense of justice that's not a simple as "angels good, demons bad."

If I had to find fault with Bayonetta, is that it very much feels like a button-masher. While you have a button for shooting, a button for your hand weapon, and a button for your feet weapon, and tons of combos that you can make out that combination, the action is fast-paced and rarely allows you to think about what combos you're going to use. The thing is, mashing the buttons can still produce some very slick effects and you're never really penalized for doing it. The only other real flaw I can find with it is that it's a tad on the short side, with my first playthrough taking about 8 and half hours. There's some replay value to be had, though, with chances to improve your scores on the levels and plenty of hidden stuff to find.

Ultimately, Bayonetta is a stylish, fast-paced, well-polished action game. You're not going to push crates around or look for a crest to open a door under a fountain. You'll chop, smash, shoot, impale, crush, and otherwise brutalized tons of angels. If you're looking for a more evenly-paced adventure you might want to look at other games, but if you're looking for action there are few games that pull it off as well as Bayonetta.

Final Score: A-

Best of 2009

2009-12-31T20:36:00.000-05:00

As much as I wish otherwise, I'm not actually a professional reviewer. I don't get to play crap tons of games (I average like, what, one a month?), and they all tend to get decent scores from me because if I'm going to spend money on a game to play for fun (then just write about it in my free time), chances are I'm going to play something I think has at least the potential to be fun.

Anyway, the idea here is that I don't play enough games to have best games of certain genres, best music in a game, best console-specific game, etc. All I can tell you is what's the best. And the best is...

Dragon Age: Origins.

This is not an opinion, mind you. This is a fact. Dragon Age went up against some stiff competition, sure, but there was simply nothing else I've played this year (or last year, for that matter) that was so deeply engaging. While I was playing it, everything else in my life (work, sleep, food, etc) became an irritating necessity that kept me away from Dragon Age. And when I wasn't playing Dragon Age, I was thinking about playing Dragon Age. Dragon Age: Origins is the Game of the Year for 2009.

Here's some claims I feel comfortable making.

Best Wii Game: New Super Mario Bros Wii. Granted, it was the only Wii game I bothered with in 2009, I feel it's still worth mentioning. It's classic 2D Mario Bros, and that really tells you everything you need.

Best PS3 Game: Uncharted 2: Drake's Fortune. Again, the only PS3 exclusive game I played this year, but it's also the first PS3 game I played that really justified the console for me. There have been PS3 exclusives I've enjoyed before, but the best of them were still more, "I can play this game, since I have a PS3" and more "That goodness I own a PS3, so I can play this game."

Biggest surprise of the year: Batman: Arkham Asylum. I've played games based on comic books before. Most are crap. Some are good. Arkham Asylum is the first comic book game I've played that's actually great. Like, so great that if not for Dragon Age it might have been Game of the Year.

Best Downloadable Game: Shadow Complex. The apparent love-child of Metal Gear Solid and Super Metroid, its only flaws being wonky controls and the fact that it was over too soon.

In other, non-gaming related notes...

Best Movie: Star Trek. It's really incredible what Abrams pulled off here... a movie that rebooted Star Trek continuity, but did it within Star Trek's continuity. A movie that pleases Trek fans as well as casual movie-goers. A movie with fresh young actors that totally nailed their 40 year old characters. I'm not they type who likes to watch a movie over and over, but I loved Star Trek so much I saw it twice in the theater.

Best Cellphone maker: HTC. Everyone on the internet loves to bitch about how lame Windows Mobile is, but HTC managed to make not one but three WinMo phones I wished I could have (the Imagio, the Touch HD2, and the Touch Pro2). I let a friend of mine with a Droid play with the Touch Pro2 that I wound up with, and he was impressed. Of course, if you really prefer Android, HTC's got you covered there too with Android phones available on three out of four of the major carriers (AT&T currently doesn't have any Android phones, but an HTC phone codenamed "Lancaster" is rumored to be their first). Whether you go with WinMo or Android, HTC delivers stylish phones, then goes the extra mile to make the software look just as sleek with TouchFLO on their WinMo phones, and Sense on Droid Eris and the Hero. The smartphone market has matured enough to offer real alternatives to the iPhone, and a lot of the credit goes to HTC.

Best Operating System: Windows 7. All-in-all, it's been a pretty good year for operating systems. Mind you, Windows, Mac OS, and Linux (in the form of Ubuntu) all has their best releases ever this year. But Snow Leopard was mostly minor improvements to Mac OS X Leopard. And Ubuntu, while much improved, is still using the GNOME desktop environment, and I've always preferred KDE (the KDE variant of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, is still suffering from the awkward transition from the dated-but-solid KDE 3.5 to the pretty-but-problematic KDE 4). Windows 7, on the other hand, seemed like a godsend. Gorgeous, with new features that are actually useful, while maintaining a focus on compatibility and trimming the fat from Vista? I couldn't get it on my computer fast enough.

So how about you guys? Disagree with my pics? Have a favorite in a category I didn't mention? Post in the comments.

Microsoft, Google, and smartphones

2009-12-22T22:25:00.000-05:00

As someone who spends more time on the internet than watching TV, I tend to read a lot of blogs. One of them, Lifehacker, occasionally will ask readers what type of products they use. For example, they might have an open discussion about what users think is the best PDF viewer, and then later they'll post the top five based on the readers' picks. After reading a few, I began to notice a trend. Best e-mail? Gmail. Best search engine? Google. Even as real-world statistics have Firefox inching ahead of Internet Explorer, a disproportionate number of Lifehacker readers responded with Google Chrome when asked what browser they preferred. I was especially put off by one commenter who suggested that anyone who wasn't using Gmail was a dinosaur, as if the very notion that I'd prefer my Yahoo email over Gmail's disorganized mess was alien to him.

I don't mean to call out Lifehacker or its readers specifically; Google love seems to be abundant on the web. Another common web theme I don't get is how reviled Microsoft has become. They portray Microsoft as a greedy, evil empire. Nevermind that most of them are doing so from Windows PCs, or that many of them have Xboxes. Nevermind that Microsoft has given over $2 billion to charities since 1983. And nevermind that, as a business, of course Microsoft is trying to make money. Newsflash: so is Google. And maybe a few years ago when Google was competing with MSN and IE was over 90% of the browser market it was cool to see Google as the scrappy underdog. Today, Firefox has passed IE in total browser market share, and Google dominates the internet. Google is such a commonly-used search engine that "Google" has entered the English language as a verb meaning "to look something up on the internet."

Today, Google is very much an empire, pulling in almost $22 billion in revenue in 2008. And while Microsoft is trying to make money by selling things like Windows and Office, Google is making their money through advertising. Indeed, they monitor all sorts of things and buy up advertising companies so that they can make money advertising at you while you use Google, Gmail, Blogger, and other Google services. This somehow makes them benevolent and Microsoft the evil empire?

Since the debut of the iPhone, I've noticed another disturbing trend. Almost overnight, the cellular market shifted. Prior to the iPhone, smartphones were large phones with business in mind. Palm, Microsoft, and RIM were the big players. But the iPhone made smartphones cool with its undeniable good looks and ease of use (even if it was missing basic features like MMS). Palm, with their new webOS, and Symbian have their small but dedicated following. The iPhone rocketed on to take over 50% of the smartphone market, and its two strongest competitors are Microsoft and Google. And like everything else Microsoft, Windows Mobile seems to be taking an unfair beating, and like everything else Google, their Android OS seems to be getting a pass.

I'm not writing this as a defense of Windows Mobile. In fact, a lot of what you'll hear about it is true. Without modifications, Windows Mobile is an ugly beast. It's changed little since PocketPC 2002. It's menus look ancient, and it can be difficult to navigate them without a stylus. In fact, Windows Mobile doesn't technically support capacitive touchscreens, making their touchscreens less precise than devices like the iPhone. Windows Mobile 6.5 has be derided as a stopgap measure to keep pretty up Windows Mobile 6 until they can get a badly-needed ground-up rebuild of Windows Mobile out the door. All of this largely ignores the fact that most handset manufacturers put they're own graphical layers over Windows Mobile, and some of them (like HTC's TouchFLO 3D) are very usable and attractive. It also ignores Windows Mobile's biggest advantage: it's an open platform. Sure, it's not as user-friendly as the iPhone, but Windows Mobile phones are very customizable, hackable, and have a ton of third-party software available.

Android, on the other hand, is trumpeted as the iPhone's biggest competitor. As a new OS, it's definitely more finger-friendly than Windows Mobile currently is. What few people are telling you, though, is that even up to version 2.0 (the version on Motorola's Droid), Android is just as ugly as Windows Mobile. Most menus, instead of being plain black text on white, are plain white text on black. The icons look like they've been pulled from a very old Linux distro (yes, I know that Android is Linux-based, but anyone who's used Ubuntu can tell you that modern Linux distros look way better than Android). By default, most apps are tucked away on a tray instead of filling the home screen the way the iPhone does. Indeed, the best-looking Android phones are from HTC, and they have a custom GUI pasted over it just like Windows Mobile. In fact, the Sense UI they use on Android is actually an evolution of the TouchFLO UI they use with Windows Mobile. Meanwhile, although many Android phones can be "rooted" to allow third-party app installs, Android is actually a closed platform. Siding with Android against Windows Mobile means using an OS that's customized in a similar way to hide the fact that it's just as ugly, except that you're trading an open platform for one that ties you to Google services (so they can make money on those ads). So who's really the evil empire here?

With all that in mind, I've decided to be the opposite of the internet and be anti-Google. And yes, I realize the irony of declaring this from Google-owned Blogger, but I'm too lazy to move this blog to Wordpress. But I will go ahead and say that Gmail sucks. E-mail as conversations is stupid, labels instead of folders are stupid, and the whole thing is a disorganized train wreck. Google Docs is for people too lazy to download OpenOffice or too cheap to buy Microsoft Office. And Android is a ugly, basic OS for people who don't want to get an iPhone or Blackberry and who convinced themselves that Google is somehow better than Microsoft.

So what do you guys think? Am I crazy for actually liking Windows Mobile? Is Google the sun around which your internet universe revolves? Sound off in the comments. Oh, and for the record, I've had three friends now buy a Droid; I'm so unimpressed that I bought an HTC Touch Pro2.

Mike Reviews His Hat

2009-12-14T19:47:00.000-05:00

I've been wanting a nice hat for awhile. It's taken me something like two years to get around to it, mostly because it doesn't seem like many people sell hats in my area. I mean, sure, you can get a ball cap just about anywhere you go; I've got more of those than I know what to do with. And yeah, you can buy cheap fedoras at Target, but that's not what I wanted either.

Finally, a store in my area started selling them, albeit at around $70. When they finally went on sale at a price I was willing to pay, I was told that it was a doorbuster price and I'd missed it by two hours.

Having seen what I wanted in a hat, and having a price in mind, I eventually wound up at JC Penney's website, of all places, where I found the pictured hat for just $29.99 with free shipping. The price seemed better than anything on Amazon, and was certainly better than what I'd seen at the other store, so I bit the bullet and bought it.

The hat in question is from Dorfman Pacific's Scala Classico line. The style is called Outback; it's a style similar to a cowboy or western hat that originated in Australia. It's even been said that Outback hats are are Australia's version of the cowboy hat, although there are differences. The crown is shorter and teardrop shaped, and the brim is shorter and doesn't turn up as drastically as a cowboy hat. If the Outback is Australia's cowboy hat, then Akubra is Australia's Stetson, and an Akubra worn in Disney's "The Man From Snowy River" is credited with making the Outback style popular in America.

There's not a lot of bad to say about the hat. It's made of a crushable wool felt, so the idea is that you could sit on it, roll it up, jam it in your pocket, whatever you like, and it'll smooth back into its natural shape. It's also waterproof, which makes it well-suited to western Pennsylvania's unpredictable weather. The hat is a subtle black felt with a simple leather band and single small feather. It's stylish enough to look nice with nice clothes, but versatile enough to be a work hat. It's also exceedingly comfortable. It's warm enough that you'd want to wear it in the winter to keep your head warm and dry, but not so warm that it feels hot indoors. In fact, it seems comfortable enough that the protection it provides from hot sunshine would make it comfortable in the hot sun without making your head too hot. This isn't particularly surprising, since that's actually the purpose of the Outback, but it's good to know that its a design feature that wasn't lost in translation, as Dorfman Pacific is a Californian company.

I'm sure that there are better brands, like Akubra, but I more or less got what I wanted at a very reasonable price. Final Score: A

Need for Speed Shift Review

2009-12-04T15:50:00.000-05:00

In the world of racing games, there's pretty much two types. There's the arcade racers, and the sim racers. On the sim side, the field's been pretty much dominated by two franchises. For the PlayStation owners, there's been Gran Turismo. For the Xbox crowd, it's Forza Motorsport.

On the arcade side, there's a lot more variety. Some games use licensed cars, others fictional. Some have real tracks, some have over-the-top fake ones, and some take place on city streets. There are many great arcade franchises, but the clear king (by sales) is the Need for Speed series.

In addition to being a mostly-solid series, Need for Speed has occasionally reinvented itself. This has given us some great additions like street racing and police chases. Not all changes are for the best. This time around, it's like EA looked at the reviews for Need for Speed Undercover (a game I really enjoyed, critics be damned), decided that same changes were in order, then tossed the baby out with the bathwater.

Despite the name on the box, Need for Speed Shift is hardly a Need for Speed game. I could understand why you'd think so. The menus are very Need for Speed-ish. Like every other NFS of this console generation, you start out with a bevy of cars you might actually own (Chevy Cobalt, Volkswagon GTI) and graduate up to cars you'd be lucky to even see in person (Aston Martin DB9, Lamborghini Murcielago). And like other NFS games you can buy performance upgrades, body kits, and vinyls to tart your car up.

But the similarities stop there. Because, in an effort to reinvent itself, Need for Speed crossed a line it was never meant to: Need for Speed Shift is a sim racing game.

To be sure, it's a fairly competent game. The career mode consists of earning stars in different racing tiers. Once you've earned enough stars, you can go for the World Cup. A bevy of driving aids will help ease NFS fans into the sim shoes. The car models are great. Shift doesn't really do anything wrong, per se.

The problem, though, is that it doesn't do anything exceptionally well, either. The car selection is limited to 65 cars, which is pretty good for a NFS game but far below most sim racers. There's just 18 tracks. Career mode is driven mostly by selecting racers from simple menus. And car customization isn't particularly deep, either.

EA is essentially alienating the huge base they've built with the arcade racing crowd in an attempt to muscle in on the sim racing crowd. And frankly, the timing couldn't be worse. A minimalist sim racer, no matter how pretty or competent, just isn't going to stack up when compared to other sim racers on the market. It really can't help when Forza Motorsport 3, and infinitely superior sim racing game, released about a month later, or with Gran Turismo 5 coming in February. Luckily, Shift does seem to be an aberration; Burnout developers Criterion studios is working on the next game in the franchise.

Final Score: C+

New Super Mario Bros. Wii Review

2009-11-20T00:43:00.002-05:00

As a child of the 80's, I grew up with the Nintendo Entertainment System. I can remember when we didn't say we were going to play a game, we said we were going to play Nintendo. I remember when we didn't call our games discs or cartridges, we called them tapes... even though they actually were cartridges. I remember terrible cover art, I remember the Zapper, the Power Pad, and the Power Glove. I remember a time when a game took you months to beat, if you ever did, not because it took a long time to get through but because whenever you died or shut the system off, you were starting at the beginning.

Some statistics to help frame this review (release years are based on the US release).
Super Mario Bros. came out 23 years ago in 1986.
Super Mario Bros. 3 came out 19 years ago in 1990.
Super Mario World came out 18 years ago in 1991. To put it another way, children have been born and graduated high school since the last time a "proper" 2D Mario game was released on a home console (although we did get the original New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS in 2006).

As a huge fan of 2D Mario games, New Super Mario Bros. Wii is all kinds of old-school good. Just like Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros, NSMBW will have you hopping, collecting coins, eating mushrooms, and fighting turtles through a variety of environments spread out in ever-increasing difficulty over a number of themed worlds. There's not a lot I can really say about the gameplay; either you've played a "real" Mario game or you haven't (feel free to argue with me, but Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy are fun, but they're not real Mario games).

It's hard to put into words what exactly makes Mario games so fun, to the point that even the old NES games hold up much better than most games from that era (the only NES games I like better are the first three Mega Man games). It's colorful, it's got memorable enemies, and the level-design is top-notch. None of that's changed in the past 24 years. And if New Super Mario Bros. drew its inspiration from the original Super Mario Bros, NSMBW is taking cues from Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World. The Koopalings are back. There are airship levels. You can't keep him after a level, but some levels have Yoshi. Bowser Jr. fights in a clown car like the one from Super Mario World.

For all the nostalgia borrowed from the NES and SNES Super Mario games, what holds NSMBW back from being as huge in my mind as New Super Mario Bros. on the DS (which I named Game of the Year 2006) is how much it borrows from the DS game. The Wii game looks like a more polished version of the DS game. The world maps are laid out the same, you still have one mini-castle in each map, you still have flags at the half-way marker of a stage, and you still have a big flag pole to jump on at the end of each level. There are still red-coin hoops and three large star-coins in each level. As much as things stayed the same between the various Super Mario Bros. games, each one felt new and fresh when compared to the previous one... until now.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii is not, however, a Wii-ified port of the DS game. Some changes are welcome. All of the levels are new, even if they're in worlds that look that they were pulled from the DS version. Some power ups are gone (the Mega Mushroom, the Turtle Suit) and new ones take their places (Penguin Suit, Propeller Suit, and an Ice Flower). Instead of random bosses like a giant Cheep Cheep or Petey Piranha, the Koopalings from Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3 are back. Amazingly enough, the designers did an amazing job of making sure that each battle with each Koopaling is unique. The Wii version uses an item storage system similar to Super Mario Bros. 3. Instead of carrying an extra item that could be activated mid-level, you store them so that you can use them to power up before entering a level. And, perhaps most welcome of all, you can quick-save anywhere instead of just after castles.

Some changes are less welcome. The star-coins you collect, instead of opening up alternate levels, are used to buy gameplay hint movies. And of course, they had to stick waggle in the game somewhere. There are in fact a few times you'll use it. For starters, shaking the Wiimote will cause Mario to do a spin jump. Unlike the spin jump from Super Mario World, there's no real advantage to it in NSMBW. In fact, a few times I accidentally spin-jumped to my death because I was moving in my seat, and the Wiimote took that as shaking. The Propeller Suit is powered by spin-jumping, and it functions like the propeller pads in the DS game. And in some levels, there are screws that move parts of the level around. To use them, you have to shake the Wiimote while standing on them. The final use for shaking is, while holding the 1 button, you shake the controller to pick up objects. Why they added this extra motion to something we've been doing since SMB3 is beyond me. The other way the Wiimote is used is that there are some platforms that tilt when you tilt the Wiimote. This is less irritating than shaking the Wiimote, but given the series awesome pedigree, I'd rather leave Wii-specific controls out of the game entirely and include an option to use the much more comfortable Classic Controller.

The two biggest additions to the game are Super Guide Mode and the ability to play with four other people. Frankly, I don't know about the multiplayer. When playing with someone of similar skill on one of the earlier levels, I can see where competing and cooperating might be fun. But the second half of the game is hard, and having other players seems like it'd be a distraction. This is especially true if you're playing with someone who's skill at the game is lower than your own.

Speaking of the difficulty, the Super Guide is used whenever you die eight times consecutively in the same level. A green block will appear, and hitting it will cause the game to ask you if you'd like Luigi to show you how to do the level. After he does, you'll be given a choice to try it again on your own or to skip the level. I've heard some people complaining that it's a dumb idea, but I'd like to say I think it's great for a couple of reasons. For one, whether or not you use it is up to you. Two, it's not even available until you've died so many times on the same level that you might actually want to skip it, and three, the game is really hard. Of the five Mario games I've mentioned, NSMBW is far and away the hardest. I've cursed, I've thrown my Wiimote, and I used the Super Guide to beat not one, but four levels for me. And this is coming from someone who thinks Mega Man 2 is easy.

All-in-all, New Super Mario Bros. Wii is too much like it's DS sibling and too lacking in originality to be better than SMB3, Super Mario World, or New Super Mario Bros. That also means that, especially with a kick-ass game like Dragon Age Origins still fresh in my mind, it won't be winning any Game of the Year awards from me. But it's still a 2D Mario game, which makes it one of the best 2D platformers available and one of the best reasons to own a Wii.

Final Score: A-

Dragon Age Origins Review

2009-11-19T15:57:00.004-05:00

I have said this before, and I'll say it again: I have never played a bad game by BioWare. And I think pointing that out is the best way to start this review.

BioWare is best known for their RPGs, and there are many reasons for this. In addition to creating games that are fun to play, BioWare has a knack for creating deep characters with complex personalities and huge, living worlds. This is especially true of their original IPs: they've created rich histories, local legends and complex politics for Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age that are every bit as fleshed-out as Dungeons & Dragons or Star Wars even without the 30+ years of history behind them.

Dragon Age has all the hallmarks of a BioWare game. The Tolkein-esque story is simple: an uprising of creatures known collectively as Darkspawn are rising up in a "Blight" in the kingdom of Ferelden, and naturally it's up to the hero you create to save the world. Along the way you'll deal with werewolves, the undead, and other monsters, as well as betrayal, politics, and magic gone awry, as you seek to recruit allies in your fight against the Darkspawn. What makes the story unfold in such a gripping way is how it's told. You will learn about the history and culture of humans, elves, and dwarves of Ferelden. And if you take the time to engage your party members in conversation, maybe give them a gift or two, you'll also get to know a lot about them. They all have rich back-stories that make them engaging, three-dimensional characters that you will develop feelings for. This is furthered by the banter between themselves whenever they're in your party while your traipsing about the countryside.

As for the gameplay, I can't comment on the console versions, but anyone who's played an MMO like World of Warcraft will be right at home with the PC version. Although the PC version gives the option to pan the camera up for an overhead view similar to Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate, I've found it's easier in most situations to use the standard behind-the-back camera and the WASD keys for moving. Combat seems easy enough. You right-click on an enemy, and your character will attack that enemy. As your character levels-up, he or she will learn a number of abilities or spells based on their class. These skills can be placed on a quick bar. They require stamina or mana to activate, and just like an MMO they require a cool down period before they can be used again.

After getting a feel for the combat, it can actually be remarkably deep. Your party members all have tactics slots, so you can dictate what they should do in a variety of situations. If necessary, you can click on their portrait to take direct control of them, and at any time combat can be paused by pressing the space bar. While paused, you can still issue commands to characters, which allows you to set up combos. For example, you can have a mage cast Freezing Cone on an enemy, which will freeze them in ice. You can then have a character with training in bows use Shattering Shot for a chance at instantly killing the frozen enemy. Or you may have a Warrior use a stunning attack, only to have another party member follow it up with an attack that takes advantage of the stunned enemies lowered resistances.

The combination of gameplay, story, setting, and characters makes Dragon Age Origins a highly addictive game. For a good long while, if I wasn't sleeping, eating, or at work, I was playing Dragon Age. I couldn't put it down, and even when I was eating or at work, I'd be thinking about playing Dragon Age. The downside to that is that I started to look for other games to play on the side if I didn't think I'd have at least an hour and a half to devote to playing Dragon Age (which is how I was able to not just play Modern Warfare 2, but actually finish it first). Playing Dragon Age won't just take up a large portion of your free time for a few days, either. It took me almost 45 hours to finish the game, and BioWare included plenty of reasons to replay it. For starters, depending on the options you pick when creating your character there are a total of six unique origin stories to play through. And even after they merge, there's a lot that you can do differently on subsequent playthroughs. While there's no clear-cut good and evil paths to pursue, at many points in the game you'll be forced to make a choice. And they're not always as simple as A or B, either... sometimes you'll have many options available. Sometimes more than one will seem right, and sometimes you'll be forced to make hard calls to pick the least-bad choice. You can easily play through Dragon Age Origins twice and never make the same decision in both games, and even then you'll need to play through yet again to explore other decisions. If all that's not enough to keep you hooked, BioWare has an ambitious two years of downloadable content planned, with two quests and some armor available at launch and another quest announced for December.

In a year when a number of big games were moving into 2010, I've found a number of games that have been able to impress me this late in the year and be serious contenders for a game-of-the-year award. I'm happy to say that Dragon Age Origins crushes them all. It's not only the best game I've played this year, but it's easily better than anything I played last year, Fallout 3 included.

Final Score: A+

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Review

2009-11-15T13:09:00.003-05:00

THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS! Mostly because it's impossible to talk about how stupid the plot is otherwise.

Ah, Call of Duty... once a sort of niche game held in high regard by the PC shooter crowd, the franchise has become another whore for Activision to pimp annually since the launch of the Xbox 360 back in 2005, split between series creator Infinity Ward and Treyarch. Traditionally, the Infinity Ward games have been stellar while the Treyarch games have been a tad more mediocre. Last year's Treyarch-developed Call of Duty: World at War bucked that trend with a slick presentation and by taking place on World War II's Pacific front, a front rarely covered despite the over-abundance of games set during World War II.

Sadly, Modern Warfare 2 also stands against convention as a somewhat lukewarm sequel to 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

To be sure, the game has all of the hallmarks of an Infinity Ward Call of Duty game. You've got some intense firefights and adrenaline-pumping scenes. Main characters can and will die. When Modern Warfare 2 is at it's best, you'll think it's one of the best games available today. Three problems prevent it from living up to its potential, though.

For starters, the game is way too short. I was only playing it when I only had a half hour or hour of free time. If I had more, I was playing Dragon Age: Origins. Three days of playing it off-and-on was all it took to run through the single-player campaign. It's shorter than the first Modern Warfare, and maybe half as long as World at War.

Second, every time you finish a level and think, "Man, that level was awesome!" the next level is going to suck. One of the early levels has you infiltrating an enemy base in the snow to recover a module from a downed satellite. You've got some stealth bits before all hell breaks loose, leading up to a big firefight and a snowmobile chase. It was great! The next level, though, has you slogging through some Brazilian slums chasing some informant. The local militia is trying to stop you, and the level more or less consists of you moving to a spot where you have cover, shooting an impossible number of enemies, moving up a little bit, and shooting more enemies. The number of enemies is so ridiculous that it kills your suspension of disbelief and ruins any immersion you had, and the level is flat out boring to boot.

Lastly, the plot makes no sense. Granted, Call of Duty has never been a series known for its gripping narratives. For many of the games in the series, simply playing out the life of a soldier against the backdrop of one of the bloodiest wars in history is enough the carry the game. Without that historical setting, Modern Warfare was forced to come up with a plot about a Soviet ultranationalist funding a terrorist takeover of an unnamed Middle Eastern country to draw attention away from his own attempts to restore Russia to its Soviet days. Modern Warfare 2 picks up that thread five years later, but makes zero sense out of it. See if you can follow me here... one of the followers of the main bad guy, named Makarov, is committing acts of terrorism in Europe... because he hates Europeans? I don't know. A general named Shepard recruits a fellow named Allen to infiltrate Makarov's cabal. Makarov takes Allen with him on a mission to kill a bunch of people at an airport, except Makarov kills Allen too. Allen is exposed as an American, and somehow instead of investigating for any ties to the European terrorism, the Russians invade the United States. They're able to sneak attack, because somehow the Russians had an American military satellite, and it had some kind of codes that were cracked before Task Force 141 could retrieve it. To stop the war, Task Force 141 decides to get some intel on Makarov in the hopes of exposing him. All they can figure out though is that there's a prisoner in a gulag that Makarov hates. So 141 decides to get the prisoner, and it turns out it's Price from the first game. He joins 141, but he's crazy now. He thinks he knows how to end the war, so he takes 141 on a mission to take some Russian sub, which he uses to launch a nuke at the United States. Great plan, right? When that doesn't seem to stop the war like Price thought, the 141 try to find Makarov. They split into two teams, and while they don't find him, one team finds intel that proves he was behind everything. They bring the intel back to Shepard, and Shepard kills them because... I have no idea. Then the remaining two members of the 141 (Price and his buddy Soap) decide then that it's more important to kill Shepard now than to end the war or capture Makarov. So that's what they set off to do. The campaign does end with Shepard's death, but that also leaves the war and the whole thing with Makarov unfinished.

If you're a fan of the Call of Duty franchise, Modern Warfare 2 is still a good game. I'm sure the multiplayer will keep people entertained on Xbox Live until the next Infinity Ward Call of Duty. But in a market over-saturated with shooters, Modern Warfare 2 is a little shorter, a little more stale, and a lot more stupid.

Final Score: B-

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (P)Review

2009-11-06T12:26:00.002-05:00

I didn't technically finish Uncharted 2 yet. You see, Dragon Age Origins came out, and I've lost any interest in anything else. I'm at the second to last chapter, though, and I wanted to write something about the game for you guys. You can probably take this review as definitive, unless something happens during the last chapter to make me change my mind. But I doubt I'll get back to it until I'm done with Dragon Age.

I my little home theater setup, I use my PlayStation 3 a lot... as a media player. I play DivX files on it all the time, I use it as my main DVD player, I use it when I want to listen to music on the big speakers, and it's my only Blu-ray player. But when it comes to games, I'm rarely using it. It seems like the Xbox 360 gets more better exclusives (Project Gotham, Forza, Mass Effect, Ace Combat 5, etc), or when games come out for both consoles the PS3 version gets the short end of the stick (Fallout 3 not getting the DLC until later, Bioshock not coming out on the PS3 until later, games like Ghostbusters and Bayonetta looking like shit on the PS3 compared to the Xbox 360 version, etc). For people thinking about the PS3 as a game machine, especially if they already own a 360, it can be a hard sell. Sure, it's got some exclusives, and some of them are even pretty good. But I think the PS3 has been lacking that one killer exclusive that single-handedly justifies purchasing the console. I figured that exclusive wouldn't come until God of War III comes out next year.

Turns out, I was off by a few months. If you're on the fence about getting a PS3 and the recent price drop/redesign hasn't swayed you, Uncharted 2 is all the justification you need.

The original Uncharted was a good game. It was very impressive graphically (for a console game), and it had very human characters with believable dialogue and top-notch voice acting. Uncharted 2 becomes a great game by taking all that was good about the first one and taking it up a notch. The game's plot, which is sort of like Indiana Jones with a touch of James Bond, blurs the line between a cinematic movie experience and a game. On the game side, you're looking at a mix of platforming, puzzles, and gunplay that makes you think, "This game is like Tomb Raider, if Tomb Raider stopped sucking and became awesome!"

The game opens with our hero, Nathan Drake, hanging from the end of a train that's falling off a cliff in the Himalayas. You have to climb up the train (often as it's falling), grab a gun, and fight your way to a cliff... before the game goes back to the beginning of the story to explain how Drake got there. Without giving too much away, it starts with Drake being hired to help steal something from a Turkish museum and winds up with him fighting some guy who could have been a Die Hard villian.

As good as the game is, it's not perfect. Fortunately, my complaints are few. For starters, a lot of the game is starting at point A and trying to figure out how to get to point B. This is usually done by climbing and jumping around the environment. The problem here is that the game's graphics are so good that it's not always obvious what you're supposed to be climbing on. Which brings me to my second complaint. While the controls feel tighter than the original's, they can still be imprecise at times. I can't count how many times I've died because when I jumped Drake went a little to the left and missed his ledge, or how many times I've fallen off a roof trying to line up a jump. My last complaint, and this one might seem a bit odd, is that the game is a little too long. For the majority of it, it's an absolute blast, but near the end you start to feel like, "Ok, another area where I have to climb and jump on shit. Oh, and another enemy ambush at the end. Haven't I beaten this game yet?"

Minor complaints aside, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is the single best exclusive games on the PlayStation 3, and one of the best games of 2009.

(Maybe) Final Score: A

Macross Ultimate Frontier Review

2009-10-21T11:09:00.002-04:00

Some of you are probably wondering what I've been up to. After all, it's been nearly a month since I reviewed Arkham Asylum, and all I've mentioned since then was a F.E.A.R. 2 micro campaign that took me something like two hours to finish. The short answer is work, with some Fallout 3 on the side.

The long answer, which will give us our review, is Macross Ultimate Frontier.

Macross Ultimate Frontier is the sequel to last year's Macross Ace Frontier, which I reviewed just over a year ago. A lot of what I wrote about the gameplay still applies here. You still take your pilot, grab one of the games mecha, then run or fly around shooting other enemy mecha. The graphics and gameplay have been a little more finely tuned, though, so this feels less like Macross tacked onto a Gundam game and more like a genuine Macross game.

But those aren't the only improvements. In fact, most of the complaints about MAF have been addressed. The Macross Frontier campaign extends the whole way to the end of the series. In fact, the original Macross show does too, ending with Kamjin's assault on on the SDF-1 rather than the final battle of Space War One. Macross Zero is given a campaign, as well as Macross Dynamite 7 and the Macross Movie "Do You Remember Love". The Extra campaign still has the over-the-top waves of enemies missions, but it also includes missions and units from non-canon Macross II show and the canon Macross VF-X2 PlayStation game.

The number of playable units has also greatly increased, from 57 to 102. All of the units from the the canon Macross animes are present now, including the odd exclusions from Macross 7. That's more of an increase than it seems, since units with FAST, Armored or Super packs are no longer separate units. On the Player or Partner tab at the hanger, you can choose what optional equipment to install, if any. With the default selection of "Type B" for any equipment, your weapons and special attack will change, and you'll get a second health bar. When that bar is depleted, you'll lose your optional parts. You may also chose to dump them manually.

The tweaks and additions sever to make Macross Ultimate Frontier the best Macross game in the franchise's 27 year history. I can see some room for improvement, though at this point I might just be being nitpicky. Basically, despite the additions, we're still missing a few canon and plenty of non-canon Macross units, like the VF-3000 Crusader and the VF-14 Vampire and pretty much every unit from Macross II that isn't a Gilgamesh or the VF-2SS. And the handful of Extra missions from Macross II and Macross VF-X2 feel like a tease. What I'd really like to see in the next one are actual campaigns for Macross II, Macross M3, and Macross VF-X2 that would include all the missing mecha from those games and series. In the Extra campaign, throw in some missions for the Stealth Wing Experiment, and toss in the SW-XA1 and SW-XAII. And with new movies coming out for Macross Frontier, either addition Frontier missions or a new campaign with new missions, mecha, and optional parts like the Tornado Pack from the movies.

In the meantime, every Macross fan needs to get a PSP, and get Macross Ultimate Frontier.

Final Score: A

F.E.A.R. 2 Reborn Micro Review

2009-10-11T20:47:00.002-04:00

It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of Monolith's F.E.A.R franchise. As a matter of fact, up until Arkham Asylum came out F.E.A.R. 2 was looking like a strong candidate for my Game of the Year award. Although some criticized it for not deviating very far from the original in terms of mechanics, I'd thought that those mechanics were tight, making for a solid experience. And after playing mediocre fare like Wolfenstein (and less-than-mediocre fare like Darkest of Days, but I'm sure we'll talk about that another day), I was definitely interested when F.E.A.R. 2 Reborn, a downloadable expansion for F.E.A.R. 2, was released. What really sealed the deal was when Steam was selling it for half price.

Let's just say I'm glad I waited.

I'm not saying that F.E.A.R. 2 Reborn is bad. The gameplay is still very tight, and it's much more challenging that the original campaign. The story's pretty interesting, too. You take on the role of Replica unit Foxtrot 813. At some point during the events of F.E.A.R. 2, you're sent to reinforce Replica forces in Auburn. Everything seems like it's going okay for 813, until he starts hallucinating, hearing voices, and killing is squad mates. The rest of the campaign is all about 813 finding the voice that's calling to him.

The biggest problem is that it only takes about two hours to do this. During those two hours, you'll continue to hallucinate, but the campaign lacks any of the slow-burn horror of its predecessors. Indeed, the campaign seems to take you from one firefight to the next, giving you a chance to run through a laundry list of enemies that were in the main campaign. The ending possibly makes it worthwhile, if you're a big F.E.A.R. fan who's been following the story. Like the ending to the main campaign, it has a sort of cliffhanger that makes you long for a F.E.A.R. 3.

The story and gameplay are good, but ultimately the campaign is too short to be worth the $10 price of admission. If you're a fan of F.E.A.R. and you can get it on sale like I did, you might want to bite. But otherwise I'd have to recommend a pass.

Final Score: C+

Batman: Arkham Asylum review

2009-09-22T19:45:00.004-04:00

As a comic book fan (granted, more Marvel than DC, but still), I was curious about Arkham Asylum. And I know that some of my readers, who've never really cared for comic books or enjoyed comic book-based movies (even Spider-Man!), who have basically been hearing the press about AA and thinking, "good comic book game, but not for me."

It's time to fix that line of thinking.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a good comic book game. I'd agree with the reviewers who have said that it's the best comic book game ever, and it's certainly the best Batman game by a large margin. But to simply label stop there would be doing the game a huge disservice. Forget that Batman's a comic book; Arkham Asylum is a great game. Period.

The story, by long-time Batman scribe Paul Dini, is actually pretty basic. Batman had caught the Joker with suspicious ease during his latest caper. More suspiciously, a fire at Blackgate Prison caused a large number of criminals, many former members of Joker's gang, to be transfered to Arkham Asylum on the same night. Figuring that Joker was up to something, Batman decided to personally escort Joker all the way to his cell at Arkham. What Batman hadn't counted on was that the Joker wasn't planning an escape, he was trying to take over the Asylum with a little inside help. So it's up to Batman to rescue Commissioner Gordon, defeat a couple of super villains, and stop the Joker's master plan.

What really makes AA shine is the execution. At it's core, the gameplay is fairly simple. The camera is a third-person over-the-shoulder camera similar to recent Resident Evil games or Dead Space. The X button is the attack button. This is an important distinction from being a "punch button," because if three goons are attacking you from three sides, you might tap X, X, X and Batman might punch the first goon then throw and elbow back at the second goon before spinning a kick at the third goon. The Y button is for counters. When an enemy has blue lines by his head it signals that he's going to attack, and by pushing the Y button Batman will counter that attack. This makes combat fluid and somewhat free-form instead of just churning out the same combos over and over. It also makes you feel like Batman when you're kicking, punching, kneeing, elbowing, flipping, parrying, and blocking, surrounded by eight goons, and taking them all out without taking any damage.

Combat, while very satisfying, isn't actually a major focus. In fact, when enemies have guns, they can do a lot of damage to Batman very quickly, and sometimes it's best to be a little stealthy. Batman's stealth isn't the same as Sam Fisher or Solid Snake's, though. Batman isn't trying to get by undetected. Batman's still going to take enemies out, but with stealth takedowns or by picking off stragglers in a group then fading back into the shadows. (A little advice on this note, buy the "Inverted Takedown" upgrade as soon as humanly possible. You'll thank me later.) One of the game's highlights for me was taking out no fewer than ten armed enemies in one room without being seen.

Mostly, though, Arkham Asylum is about getting from point A to point B. Arkham Asylum might be comprised of a few buildings on an island, but the entire game takes place on that island. You might find that your current objective has you go to one area, where you get info that leads you to another area, only to follow your objectives back to the first area. Events that happen in the game will cut off some routes or open new ones, and some areas will be unaccessible until you get a certain upgrade, ala Metroid.

If fantastic combat and exploration are like cake, the game's atmosphere is like a creamy filling. I've heard it compared to Bioshock in that sense, and while I'm not sure they're conveying the same sense of atmosphere, the level of atmosphere each game brings to the table is similar. Arkham Asylum is a run down, creepy mental institution in a run down, creepy town. Even without any supernatural enemies, the game can tread close to survival horror at times. Some of the best scenes, including one very reminiscent of the boss fight with Psycho Mantis in the original Metal Gear Solid, are when Batman is suffering from the effects of Scarecrow's fear toxin.

The icing on all this delicious bat-cake is the voice acting. I think the voice acting in a lot of games today has come a long way from the "Jill Sandwich" days of the original Resident Evil game, but Arkham Asylum's voice work is truly a gem. Fans of the DC Animated Universe will recognize Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, and Arleen Sorkin as the voices of Batman, the Joker, and Harley Quinn, respectively.

If you like video games, even if you don't really like Batman or aren't really familiar with him outside of Christopher Nolan's recent films, do yourself a favor and play this game. With a lot of game's slipping into 2010, and even as much as I loved F.E.A.R. 2, Arkham Asylum has become my front runner for Game of the Year.

Final Score: A+

100 Posts!

2009-09-22T19:43:00.003-04:00

As of the Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 review, this blog has 100 posts! Granted, they're not all reviews, but still, 100 posts is pretty good for someone who updates, on average, once a week. I also think 100 posts is pretty good for a blog that has, if I'm lucky, a dozen readers.

Still, my thanks goes out to all 6-12 of you. Thanks for reading what I write, and I hope you're looking forward to more!

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 Review

2009-09-19T21:12:00.003-04:00

As a nerd, if there's two things I love (besides the many other things I love) it's comic books and dungeon crawlers. As such, I enjoyed X-Men Legends and its sequel, X-Men Legends II. But as more of a Spider-Man and Avengers fan than an X-Men fan, I really loved the original Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and I was really looking forward to the sequel.

A lot has changed in the last three years, though. The two biggest affecting MUA2 are that development was handed from Raven, who developed the first one and the two X-Men Legends games, to Vicarious Visions, a company best known for taking over other developer's franchises, and that in the last three years Marvel's actually been turning out some major company-wide crossovers. The end result is something that's worse in some areas and better in others than the original.

The gameplay, especially the RPG elements, have been dumbed down quite a bit from the previous games. Each character is restricted to four powers, one for each face button. When you level up, you get a pip that can be put into a power. Your stats also go up, but you have no control over them aside from picking up one-time, one point boosts hidden throughout the game. You also collect some other kind of experience points that can be invested into ability boots. If this all sounds too complicated, you can let the computer auto-allocate pips and points. In fact, if you don't level up a character for awhile, the game will do it for you anyway. You can remove pips and points and re-allocate them yourself, but due to high point costs for ability boosts and level restrictions on powers, there's not a lot you can do differently than the computer.

There's also no equipment in the game anymore, which is a major let down. Half the fun of dungeon crawling is collecting loot. Instead, either hidden in the levels or obtained by completing certain goals, are medals. You can equip three medals at a time. The medals provide a boost for the entire team, such as an attribute bonus or resistance to certain types of damage.

With the RPG elements eliminated or dumbed-down, the game really plays more like a brawler than a dungeon crawler.

Lastly, the save locations are gone. The game simply autosaves at certain checkpoints, and if you blink you'll miss the little "saving" message on the bottom of the screen, often leading you to wonder if it's okay to stop playing or not. You can switch team members at any time now, although that hero will have health equal to the hero that was replaced.

The roster is also a mixed bag. Out of the box, without any DLC, the original MUA actually had one hero more than the sequel. Most of the characters are holdovers from the original. Some characters from the original are simply not in the game, or have been reduced to NPC status. Most of the new characters are there because they better fit the story, although some of the holdovers really had nothing to do with the story. There are also a lot fewer NPCs and villians in the game, but this is again somewhat story-related.

Speaking of the story, the story is one of the areas where MUA2 really shines. While the first one was almost a glorified fan-fiction of an excuse to get a bunch of characters from the Marvel Universe to team up and visit several locations in the Marvel Universe, MUA2 borrows heavily from two of the best Marvel crossover stories in the actual comic books, Secret War and Civil War. The end of the game does totally re-write the ending to keep it more self-contained in the game, but that still leaves the plot of MUA2 as one of the best in a comic book-based videogame.

The graphics are also more polished than the first one. MUA was originally going to be cel-shaded, like the X-Men Legends games, but the developers decided not to go that route for the next-gen versions. The result wasn't cel-shaded, but still cartoony. Vicarious Visions really cleaned it up and made it look a little more realistic, as well as added more effects for the powers that are going off. The news-style cutscenes especially really evoke the simplistic style of the Civil War comic books. The Civil War story also forces you to chose a side. Which side you chose will determine which heroes you can use, what story you see, and what abilities you can upgrade.

Another plus in MUA2's corner are the Fusion attacks. By filling up a meter, two of your heroes can team up for a powerful combination attack. This is an interesting idea that can be really handy in the thick of a fight. The only problem is that they all break down into either guided, targeted, or clearing types, and even in each type there are only a few combinations. For example, there's one where Spider-Man webs up a bunch of guys so that Iron Man can blast them. It looks pretty much the same as when Spider-Man webs them up for Ms. Marvel to blast, or for Venom to web up for Iron Man (or Ms. Marvel) to blast.

If push comes to shove, I'd have to say that the dumbing down of the RPG elements mean that MUA2 doesn't quite live up to the original. However, the story is very good, and trashing hordes of robots with your favorite super heroes is very satisfying anyway. I enjoyed it enough that I already finished it once, and will replay it to see the other side.

Final Score: B+

Wolfenstein Review

2009-09-17T00:38:00.002-04:00

If you're asked to think back to the earliest first-person shooter you can recall, you might answer Wolfenstein 3D. You'd be wrong (the first game to fit all the criteria for an FPS is actually a game called Maze War that was in development back in 1973), but it's understandable that you'd think it. After all, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom are largely credited with popularizing the genre.

Today you can't throw a rock without hitting an FPS. Console gamers cut their teeth on the N64's Goldeneye, EA made World War II cool to fight, then over done with Medal of Honor, and the Xbox might never have taken off if it weren't for Halo. Even franchises like Metroid and Fallout have gone first-person (although whether they count as shooters or not is debatable). In a market when it seems like one out of every three games released during the holiday sales period is a first-person shooter, is it enough to be a sequel to one of the most venerable FPS games of all time?

In a word, no.

In Wolfenstein's defense, it's trying. You can really tell it's trying. The developers tried breaking up the usual linear nature of shooters by giving you some freedom to decide which mission to take and when. In between the missions is a sort of hub city area where you can find people to give you side missions or buy weapon upgrades on the black market. They put in some memorable boss fights. They gave you a special medallion that gives you access to special powers. The game's graphics are decent, and the gameplay is fluid, and shooting a Nazi in the face will cause him to die with a satisfying gurgle as his facial features turn into a fine red mist.

Unfortunately, the game's pros are negated by it's cons. The city-hub is actually an annoyance that forces you to fight your way from one mission to the next. You character, BJ Blazkowicz, has less personality than an empty bucket. The enemy AI is retarded and works mostly by funneling a crap ton of enemies to a choke point and having them spam grenades at you. The enemies themselves are either generic Nazis or ripped off from FEAR 2. (Laser-shooting dude, check. Feral dudes that crawl around, check. Invisible dude that sneaks up on you to try to melee you, check. Flamethrower dude, check. Missing anyone?) Your powers aren't even original. Mire slows things down, and is essentially the same bullet-time we've been using forever. Shield is, well, a shield. Sight allows you to see enemy weaknesses and hidden paths. And Empower adds some extra oomph to your shots, allowing them to pierce enemy shields or just straight up do more damage.

For all the game's cool ideas and cool weapons, the game quickly devolves into you taking up a position where you have some cover, and shooting as many enemies as you can with the KAR98 rifle before moving up. There are cooler and more damaging weapons, but I found myself hoarding the ammo and saving them for really big enemies and bosses. Meanwhile, the KAR98 had the scope and the silencer.

The end result isn't a bad game. It's just that, when the cons cancel out the pros, the result is utterly average, and average just doesn't cut it anymore in today's FPS-saturated market. Wolfenstein is the kind of game that, when you're playing it, it seems okay but when you put it down you don't find yourself having any strong desire to pick it up and get back into it. It's competent, but lacks character. Next summer, you might pick up a discounted copy of Wolfenstein and you might find it an enjoyable way to get through that summer slump. But if you pay full price for it, especially with a ton of other new releases coming out that could be (and in some cases already are) better, you're going to regret it.

Final Score: C

Operating System Showdown!

2009-09-12T10:49:00.002-04:00

This fall, we have a convergence of new operating systems. On October 22nd, Microsoft will replace the oft-maligned Windows Vista (and maybe, finally, for real, XP) with Windows 7. And just this past August 28th, Apple released the new version of Mac OS X, named Snow Leopard. I got a copy of Snow Leopard, since the "upgrade" copies are cheap. And while Windows 7 doesn't officially go on sale until October 22nd, it actually went gold in July. Members of the Microsoft Developers Network are already able to download it, and I was able to exploit some connections to get my hands on a copy of Windows 7 Professional.

So how do they stack up?

I've been talking about Windows 7 a lot since I'd been beta testing it for quite some time. In fact, you can read about the release candidate version here and here, and my impressions of the beta from all the way back in January here. The truth is, if you'd read my posts about the release candidate, or if you tried the release candidate yourself, not much has changed. This isn't really a bad thing. I was very impressed with the release candidate, and I'm not at all surprised that they just cleaned it up and shoved it out the door.

One of Microsoft's goals was to not have a repeat of Vista on their hands, so a major focus was on compatibility. Your hardware should all work fine. I installed Windows 7 on my main computer, a gaming desktop with a 3.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 3GB of RAM, and an EVGA GeForce 9800GTX+. All of my hardware, including my monitor, was recognized out of the box. The few things that weren't, like my printer and my Samsung Omnia smartphone, grabbed the drivers from Windows Update. I've never had to load drivers from a CD, and ironically the only hardware that needed software from the internet was my Microsoft Wireless Desktop Elite mouse and keyboard combo. To be fair, they worked without downloading any software, but I customize the two thumb buttons on my mouse for gaming, so I needed to download the Intellipoint software to set it up.

Software seems to be just as compatible. Everything I've tried to install since getting the final version of Windows 7 has worked without any issues. In fact, some software is updating to be even more compatible with Windows 7. iTunes 9, for example, supports Jump Lists on the Taskbar.

There's a lot of changes going from Vista to Windows 7, and more so going from XP to Windows 7. As I said, though, there's not so much from the release candidate to the final version. So I encourage you to go back and read my earlier posts on the release candidates. The bottom line is that it works great, looks good, and is lighter on its feet than Vista. I wholeheartedly recommend Windows 7. If you've got XP, upgrade. If you've got Vista, upgrade. If you're buying a new computer, either wait until after October 22nd, or buy it now and check out the manufacturer's upgrade program.

Apple has taken a sort of different path with Snow Leopard. While Microsoft was trying to sweep Vista under the rug, Apple's previous OS, Leopard, was generally well-received, although not without its problems.

Snow Leopard is Apple addressing those problems. Not a lot is different than Leopard. In my time using it, mostly what I've noticed are improvements to Stacks, which sorely needed. Apple's also been able to trim some fat from Leopard by finally ending support for PowerPC processors. So, unless you have an Intel Mac, you can't upgrade (and poor suckers like me that bought one of the original MacBooks with the Core Duo are stuck with 32-bit apps). Ironically, that puts Apple in the position where Vista was, with a number of incompatible applications. Unlike the mainstream PC market, where people cling to their computer for ages, Apple seems to have a program of planned obsolescence. Apple users have had to deal with incompatibilities when they went from the G3 to the G4, when Apple went from OS 9 to OS X, when Apple went from OS X 10.2 Jaguar to OS X 10.3 Panther, and when Apple went from the G5 to the Intel processors. What Apple would really like to tell me is that my three-year old MacBook is obsolete and I should buy a new one. I'm not going to, since I think it's ridiculous that an $1100 computer I bought three years ago is comparable to a $300 netbook I bought a little less than a year ago, but that's a story for another day.

Despite scary stories of incompatibilities, the fact is that the upgrade process for me went very smoothly. Unlike previous versions of OS X, a clean install is NOT recommended for Leopard users. Just put the Snow Leopard disc in, and it'll walk you through the upgrade process. It took about an hour on my MacBook (1.83GHz Core Duo, 2GB of RAM, Intel GMA 950 graphics), and when it booted into Snow Leopard, everything was pretty much as I left it. My wallpaper didn't change, my arrangement of apps on the Dock was the same. Some Apple apps, like Quicktime and Safari, were updated, but my other apps all appeared to be there. I've read on other reviews of Snow Leopard that the installation will take incompatible apps and put them in their own folder. Since I couldn't find any such folder on my MacBook after upgrading, I'm going to assume I didn't have any incompatible apps. For professionals, this might be more of a problem, but for generic use, all I can say is that Firefox, VLC, App Zapper, Office 2008, Parallels 4, Transmission, and Toast Titanium 8 (I guess I'm a little behind on that one) all work just fine in Snow Leopard.

It's not all raindrops and roses, though. To be as fair as possible to Snow Leopard, I decided to hook my MacBook to the same 22" Samsung Touch of Color monitor that my Windows 7 desktop is connected to. This turned out to be my biggest headache. When I connected the MacBook then woke it up, everything was huge and stretched, because the MacBook defaulted to an 800x600 resolution. The monitor's native resolution, 1680x1050, wasn't even on the list. I wound up having to get another app, SwitchResX, to get a 1680x1050 resolution. Maybe things would have gone more smoothly if I'd used the monitor's DVI connection, but the Windows desktop was using it, and all I had was a MiniDVI to VGA adapter (mind, you that adapter worked find when I had connected the MacBook to an older Sony monitor with a 1280x1024 resolution back when I was still using Leopard). Apple shouldn't assume that everyone who wants to connect their Mac to a monitor is either doing so via DVI or using an ancient 4:3 monitor, because I shouldn't have to resort to an app that costs as much as the OS to get the thing to display in the monitor's native resolution.

Would I recommend Snow Leopard, then? I don't think it's as essential an update as Windows 7. It's definitely more evolutionary than revolutionary. You'll definitely want to check if you have any incompatible software first, and if you don't have an Intel Mac you're left out in the cold. If you do have an Intel Mac, though, and you don't have too much in the way of incompatible software, the major factor here is that Snow Leopard is only $29. There seems to be some confusion as to whether that's an upgrade copy (others say that the upgrade license is the $9.95 license Apple is offering for people who have bought Macs since June of 2009) or the regular single-use license; all I can tell you is that you can do a clean install from the $29 Snow Leopard disc, and you can install it on Macs that are running Tiger. With the low price, I'd say it's probably worth it, with a few buts to consider.

DS Double feature!

2009-09-09T17:41:00.005-04:00

I know, I know... you're all waiting for me to review something awesome, like Arkham Asylum (still don't have, waiting for a buddy to finish it and give me his copy), or Wolfenstein (made it to the Downtown area). But I sadly haven't finished a console or PC game in quite some time. Hey, I've been busy! Labor Day, vacations in Maryland, babies being born (not mine), and what have you have been eating up quite a bit of my time, and when I am home I've finally found a game that I can get my wife to play with me: Rock Band 2.

I have managed to sneak in some handheld time, and since I recently bought a new red-and-black DS Lite to replace my launch day white unit who's hinge finally gave up the ghost, that handheld time has been spent playing the DS, where I've finished two whole games. So, without further adeiu:

Mega Man Starforce 3: Red Joker

Around the time that the Gameboy Advance came out, Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune decided to reinvent Mega Man, in a way that his children could appreciate. The result was the Mega Man Battle Network series, a series that was popular enough with its target audience to get five animes and a manga series, in addition to six main entries in the series and a few spin-off games.

The Mega Man Starforce series, while featuring an entirely new cast, is largely a continuation of the Battle Network games. They're RPGs, with a heavy emphasis on collecting (and trading, I suppose) battle cards/chips/whatevers. The game is mostly isometric sprites running around, either in the real world or in the EM Wave world, which is where most of the similarities between Starforce and Battle Network lie. The main difference between them is the combat. Battle Network had a 3x3 grid on the left for Mega Man and another on the right for enemies. In Starforce, Mega Man can only move left or right over three squares, with enemies in front of him and a camera angle high over Mega Man's shoulder.

Despite the different versions of each game, there are really only three games in the series. Continuity is fairly tight between the three games, with events in previous ones being referenced, sometimes to the point of being major plot points, in the sequels. Starforce 3 might be the last one, though, as it does a good job of tying up lose plot points and resolving the series. What's more, while previous games in the series have come out on an annual basis, the newest Mega Man game looks to be some kind of crossover between Battle Network and Starforce, with more emphasis on Battle Network.

In general, I've found the Starforce series to be more fun than the Battle Network games, so if you're a fan of those you might want to check out Starforce 3. The difficulty was also more finely balanced than Starforce 2. However, the Starforce games are definitely aimed and the younger Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh!/whatever crowd, and probably isn't everyone's cup of tea.

Final Score: B-

Super Princess Peach

I'm not exactly sure what Nintendo was thinking when they came up with this one. Were they trying to capture a new audience by appealing to younger girls? Were they simply interested in bucking the status quo in the Mushroom Kingdom by having Mario get kidnapped and having Peach set off to rescue him, instead of the other way around?

Regardless of what was running through the developers heads, the result is a relatively solid, if a tad easy, 2D platformer.

Despite it's roots in the Super Mario Bros series, the game play is a bit different. Peach has an umbrella named Perry that gives her a few options unavailable to Mario. She can pick up most enemies instead of just Koopa Troopas, or she can smack them. Later in the game, she can even fire small blasts of energy from the umbrella. Also, like Super Mario Bros 2, Peach has a health bar. She starts the game with three hearts, but can increase that to five. Also like Super Mario Bros 2, levels aren't timed.

The most important difference, though, is that Peach has some emotion-based abilities. It's been argued that that's a little sexist, but I prefer to think of it as a side-effect of the game's setting of Vibe Island (that is, if Mario had been doing adventures on Vibe Island, perhaps he'd have emotional powers as well). She can get angry and catch on fire, giving her the ability to burn some objects and pound the ground. She can get happy and float through the air or create a little whirlwind around herself. She can get sad and cry, watering some objects and allowing her run a bit faster. Or she can get calm and recover lost health. She can't use those powers indefinitely, though. Her emotional powers come from her Vibe Gauge, just under her health bar.

The change in game play versus a traditional Mario game makes for slightly less linear levels. The game is still divided into eight worlds, and each world has a few levels inside and concludes with a boss battle. In each level, you still need to make it from the start to the goal, but you have the added goal of rescuing three Toads hidden in each level. There are also, especially later in the game, often multiple paths through a level. This combination of looking for hidden Toads (or other items) and multiple routes encourages exploration and replay. Later in the game, though, it also means that finding the Toads and navigating the levels becomes more of a challenge than the enemies in them, leading to a few frustratingly confusing and long levels with totally anti-climactic boss fights.

Ultimately, Super Princess Peach is a Mario game that's also not really a Mario game, one that's fun for gamers of all ages and genders, not just little girls. If you enjoy the Super Mario series, or just enjoy a well-crafted 2D platformer, you'll definitely want to check this one out.

Final Score: A-

Another slump?

2009-08-29T21:31:00.003-04:00

I know it's been awhile since I've posted anything, but please forgive me! For one thing, I honestly haven't played any games since Shadow Complex, or watched any movies since G.I. Joe. For another thing, I was on vacation! I just managed to sneak my review of Shadow Complex up before we left our home in Greensburg, PA (about 45 minutes to an hour east of Pittsburgh) to visit relatives in Maryland (across the Bay Bridge from Annapolis). We only arrived home Tuesday night.

Rest assured, I do hope to have some reviews up soon. After coming back from vacation, I installed the final version of Window 7 Professional on my main desktop, and I'm installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard on my ancient MacBook as we speak. If I get the time, I'd like to see District 9 and Inglourious Basterds. And the game drought should be ending soon, so I've got a game or three to play through in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, amuse yourself with one of the following websites.

People of Walmart.

The FAIL blog.

And one of my reader's personal favorites, Awkward Family Photos.

Shadow Complex Review

2009-08-21T14:21:00.002-04:00

Let me start off this review by telling you that the reason I'm able to review Shadow Complex so quickly is because I beat it that fast. Not because it's a short game, mind you... because I literally could not put it down. Seriously, I finished the game in about three long play sessions. That right there should tell you everything you need to know.

If it doesn't, I'm happy to expound. Shadow Complex, which ties into Orson Scott Card's novel Empire, is the story of a young couple, Jack and Claire, having fun exploring a cave in the woods when they happen to run into a the Restoration, a terrorist organization seeking to overthrow the government of the United States. Claire is taken prisoner by Restoration soldiers on the suspicion that she is actually a spy. And Jack, armed with naught but his trusty flashlight and the fighting skills taught to him by his military dad (even though he doesn't actually want to be part of the military), sets out to infiltrate the titular Shadow Complex to rescue Claire.

Jack picks up a few things alone the way that help him on his quest, including some guns, missiles, grenades, and special body armor. And between Jack's growing inventory and the game's paper-thin plot, you might be forgiven for thinking Shadow Complex is a run-of-the-mill first-person shooter. You might be in for a shock, then, when I tell you that the game is a 2.5D side-scrolling platformer. Indeed, if there's only one single game I could could compare Shadow Complex too, it'd have to be Super Metroid.

The Shadow Complex itself is displayed on a map, and like Super Metroid a small section of the map is displayed in the upper right corner of your HUD as you explore. Like Super Metroid, you won't be able to access certain areas until you fight the right weapon or armor upgrade. And like Super Metroid, you'll be spending as much time looking for secrets as you will shooting enemies.

Aside from the obvious change in characters and settings, the most obvious difference is that Super Metroid is a 2D, sprite-based game, while Shadow Complex is a 2.5D game where everything is rendered in 3D polygons. This has a few benefits, but a few drawbacks as well. The most obvious benefit is that the game looks gorgeous. But the drawback is in the controls. Shadow Complex has both your main and sub weapons mapped to the trigger, because the right thumbstick is used for aiming. And the reason you have to aim in more than 8 directions is because enemies often attack from background. Similarly, the d-pad is used for switching sub weapons, and you have to use the left stick for moving. These control differences are minor nitpicks. You get used to the controls very quickly; they just seem a little unintuitive for a 2D platformer.

Another drawback to the 2D gameplay in 3D levels is that, occasionally, you're in a room where there's a staircase clearly rendered in the background, but you can't walk up the stairs. To progress upward, you have to jump from landing to landing, which can ruin your immersion by reminding you that you're playing a game.

Fortunately, these minor annoyances don't take away from what is ultimately a classic, non-linear side-scrolling good time. Shadow Complex has that rare quality that makes it difficult to stop playing. The result is a game that's not just one of the best games on the Xbox Live Arcade, but one of the best games on the Xbox 360 period. The game is good enough to be sold as a full-price retail box game. At the $15 asking price on the Xbox Live Arcade, there's simply no reason you shouldn't play it.

Final Score: A+

Hot Mess Review

2009-08-19T19:47:00.003-04:00

Despite being on the soundtrack for Snakes on a Plane, despite being on the soundtrack for TMNT, and despite being part of the Decaydance/Fueled By Ramen crowd, Cobra Starship never struck me as being as famous as bands like Panic at the Disco or The Academy Is...

I'm of the opinion that that's a shame. Cobra Starship has a unique sound that's like a fusion of '80s pop and modern rock. And unlike PatD's attempt to be unique by aping the Beatles, it really works for Cobra Starship.

Hot Mess is Cobra Starship's third album. With a lot of bands, it usually takes them awhile to mature as musicians and find their sound. I'm not really sure that's the case with Cobra Starship, though, and I'm not really sure where they're going musically.

I don't mean to imply that Hot Mess is a bad album, though. Although not as strong as their first album, it feels more solid and more cohesive than ¡Viva la Cobra! All of the songs but the final track, "The Word Will Never Do", are enjoyable, even catchy songs. But none of them really stand out the way "Send My Love to the Dance Floor" did from the first album, or the way "The City is at War" did from the second album.

On the whole, I'm going to recommend this album. You can get it at Best Buy or Target for $10, which makes buying an actual CD with a case and cover art cheaper than buying the digital version in a lot of cases.

Album highlights:
"Nice Guys Finish Last"
"Good Girls Go Bad"
"Hot Mess"

Final Score: A-

Summer slump

2009-08-18T17:54:00.003-04:00

I ran into one of my readers the other day, and he (you know who you are) was disappointed at the lack of updates.

Well, it's the summer slump, people. I'm broke. I don't have any new games (okay, I'm playing one that I've got maybe 15-20 hours into, but I have to finish it before I can review it). I haven't seen anything since G.I. Joe (I do want to see District 9, but it's unlikely that I'll have to to see it until I get back from the trip I'm planning to Baltimore).

But hey, if there's something you guys really want me to review, send it to me. I'll be happy to play/watch/experience whatever it is, and even return it. Comment below if you're interested.

G.I. Joe Review

2009-08-08T18:08:00.002-04:00

In the 1990's, 70's nostalgia was all the rage. That's how we wound up with the return of bellbottoms and That 70's Show.

It was only natural, then, that the new millennium would bring with it a wave of 80's nostalgia. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles got a new comic book, cartoon, and movie. He-Man got a new cartoon. The Thundercats and the Transformers both made a return to comic books. The Transformers even wound up a blockbuster movie. So, it's not a huge surprise that G.I. Joe also made it to the silver screen.

Now, I was pretty forgiving with the re-imagining of the Transformers. Optimus Prime was still the leader of the Autobots, who were still from Cybertron, and were still fighting the Deceptions, who were still being led by Megatron. And Prime still turned into a truck. Maybe the designs were a little unusual, but the basics were all in place. I enjoyed both movies, even though it seems most people didn't.

And so far, it seems most people aren't really liking G.I. Joe, either. I figured I'd give it a shot anyway, and I figured I'd probably enjoy it, since I wasn't as fervent a Joe fan as I was a Transformers fan anyway. As long as the basics were there, right?

Wrong.

G.I. Joe is still a team of "real American heroes," right? Nope. They're a world team now, with a headquarters in Egypt of all places.

Well, they still fight Cobra, right? Nope, despite the title, no one mentions Cobra until the very end of the movie.

Cobra or not, Cobra Commander is still the boss, right? No, Destro's the one calling the shots.

Destro's okay. He's a in a mask, right? Again, no. He's just some Scottish dude. He doesn't even go by Destro until the very end of the movie.

Well, the Baroness is still in the movie. She's still got that cool accent, right? No. Rather than being the sister of a baron (who's murder was falsely pinned on Snake Eyes), she's an American girl who happens to be married to some baron.

Did they get anything right? Snake Eyes is still cool, right? Kinda. Snake Eyes, and his bouts with Storm Shadow, are probably the only reason to watch this turd of a movie. And even then, the fights used jerky, too-close cameras similar to the fights in Transformers, and they molded a mouth onto Snake Eye's mask. A mouth!

Maybe these changes could be overlooked if the movie was a fun action movie in it's own right. But it fails at even that. The story, while seemingly simple on the surface, manages to drag on for an excruciating length. And the CGI battles that they fill the time with are just boring. You know you've got a dud on your hand when, during the middle of an action sequence two-thirds of the way through the movie, you're checking your watch and wondering if the movie's going to be over soon.

It's really hard to figure out who this movie was aimed at. People unfamiliar with the G.I. Joe story will likely find the movie's convoluted plot confusing and cheesy. Meanwhile, the movie's too far from the source material to please long-time G.I. Joe fans.

The Snake Eyes was cool (even with a mouth), Ripcord made me chuckle a few times, and Scarlett and the Baroness were hot. That's about all the praise I have for this crapfest. I recommend this movie to absolutely nobody, nowhere, under any circumstances.

Final Score: D

Retro Review - The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons

2009-08-04T16:58:00.003-04:00

We're in the middle of the summer slump, and a lot of the games you'd think would be hot holiday titles are getting pushed back to 2010. So what's a guy to do? Answer: play really old games he somehow missed.

And I can tell you exactly why I missed this one: I thought I didn't like Zelda games. Everyone talks about Ocarina of Time and how it's like the "Best game EVAAAHHH!" Yeah, I actually didn't like it. Not even a little. And I skipped Majora's Mask entirely. I seriously tried to like The Wind Waker, because I really did like the art style, but I was just bored with it. I gave Twilight Princess a shot too, and I kinda liked it, but not as much as everyone else seemed to.

But I recall that the reason I didn't like those games was because they didn't really seem like Zelda to me. This might be blasphemous to the "Best game EVAAAHHH!" crowd that didn't play a Zelda game prior to Ocarina of Time, but I grew up with an NES. My first Zelda game was the original, which I loved. While we're on the subject, I remember a big blizzard closing school when we were supposed to be going back to school from Christmas break... in a sense, extending our break. It was the year I got my SNES, and I remember spending that break playing A Link to the Past almost exclusively. In the newer games, sure you play as a fellow dressed in green exploring dungeons on his quest to rescue Zelda, but the similarities end there. The atmosphere of the game was changed.

Which brings us to Oracle of Seasons. At some point in time, Capcom and Nintendo partnered to explore the idea of remaking the original Legend of Zelda for the Gameboy color. That project expanded into what was going to be three games, then eventually scaled back to the two that were eventually released. And it was an ambitious release... completing one game would give you a pass code that you could use to alter the second game. In the altered second game, characters would give more codes to go back to the first game and get the best items, including the Master Sword. Of course, they don't do you a lot of good in a game you just finished, so you'd actually get codes from the people who give you the items to take them back to the altered second game. And the true ending to both games could only be found in the altered version.

I decided to start with Oracle of Seasons. After some initial introductory scenes and a quest to get a sword, I set off for the first real dungeon. In that first dungeon, as I killed some bats, went down some stairs to get the dungeon's treasure, and checked the dungeon's layout on the map screen, I felt a surge of nostalgia. This game, more than any of the fancy 3D ones that have been on Nintendo's home consoles, truly evoked the atmosphere of the original game and the SNES sequel. This feeling was further cemented when the boss of the dungeon turned out to be an updated version of the first boss in the original game.

I'm not sure what else I could tell you about the game that says more than that, but the plot revolves around Din, the Oracle of Seasons. She gets captured by a guy named Onox, and Link is pulled from Hyrule to the realm of Holodrum to rescue Din. In typical Zelda fashion, he has to collect 8 things, in this case Essences, before he can confront Onox and rescue Din. As he quests through the dungeons to retrieve the Essences, he collects a variety of items to aid him on his quest. This includes series' staples like the boomerang and the power bracelet, as well as adding new ones like the magnetic glove and seed satchel.

The most significant new item Link collects is the Rod of Seasons. Link can use the Rod of Seasons at certain tree stumps to change the current season into another. Vines grow up cliffs and rivers dry up in summer, flowers that allow Link to bounce grow in spring, some water freezes and snow drifts form walkways in winter, and (oddly) some rocks become pickable mushrooms in autumn. Manipulating the environment by changing the seasons helps open up areas of Holodrum that were previously inaccessible.

The enemies in this game seemed a tad on the easy side. The original one isn't particularly difficult either, but I recall that I didn't go into any dungeon past maybe the fourth one without a stock of healing potions, while Onox himself was the first and only point I needed a potion in Seasons. The ease of combat is perhaps off set by the difficulties in the puzzles. There were a few times I had to consult GameFAQs before I could figure out how to proceed, and I'm not ashamed to admit that every time I read the answer I was thinking, "There is no way I'd have figured that out on my own."

Gameboy Color games are becoming a little trickier to find with Gamestop dumping them, and of course your Nintendo DS doesn't play Gameboy Color games, so you'll have to have hung onto a Gameboy Color or a Gameboy Advance (or grab an emulator on your computer). But however you wind up doing it, you really should play Oracle of Seasons, as it turns out to be one of the best Gameboy Color games, one of the best Zelda games, and an all-around good game, even by modern standards.

Final Score: B+

Ghostbusters: The Video Game Review

2009-07-29T14:59:00.002-04:00

Like most people who grew up in the '80s, Ghostbusters was a big part of my childhood. Granted, for me it was mostly about The Real Ghostbusters cartoon. Good times. Of course, at some point I did watch the film and its sequel. As a kid, I think what stood out the most for me was how Egon was blond in the cartoon but he had dark hair in the films. I definitely appreciate them, especially the original, a lot more as an adult.

I was naturally curious about Ghostbusters: The Video Game. After all, the mechanics of what the Ghostbusters do seems like it'd translate well into a game, as long as the story is good. And with the original writers writing the game, and the original actors lending their voice to their characters, it certainly seemed like it should be a good story. Dan Aykroyd himself said, "This is essentially the third movie."

As it turns out, the story is the game's strongest point; it just doesn't start out that way. When the game starts out, it's essentially one big fan wank. You begin the game as "the Rookie," a new Ghostbuster recruit just getting an orientation when a massive PKE surge sets Slimer free. Slimer takes off for the Sedgewick Hotel... that is, the hotel where he was first encountered in the movie. And of course, the PKE surge is caused by Gozer, the villain from the first movie, who is of course back in our world as the Stay Puft Marshmallow man. Not enough fan wanking yet? Well you get to go to the library from the first movie, too!

A strange thing starts to happen around then, though. The story starts coming together, stuff from Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II become tied together, and everything starts making sense. And as the story starts to kick in, the game suddenly goes from mediocre to really good.

Why mediocre before? Well, the game does do a lot of things right. It lets you use the money you get for catching ghosts to buy upgrades. It gives you some variety of enemies including some that can be dispersed so you don't always have to get out the traps. That helps to keep you in the action. It even adds a few weapons to the standard proton pack, so scanning enemies, finding their weakness, and using the best weapon for the job or to solve certain puzzles helps keep things from becoming repetitive.

What ultimately bogs the game down are the controls. Dodging enemy attacks and turning to shoot at the enemy you want to hit just feels clunky sometimes. Fortunately, the game is rarely difficult. If you go down, one of the other Ghostbusters will come and revive you. There are only a few moments in the game that are truly difficult, but when those moments come expect to curse and maybe throw a controller or two.

The clunky controls can be easily overlooked if you're having fun with the game, though. And whether or not you'll have fun is very much dependent on whether or not you like the Ghostbusters. If you enjoyed the original movie, you'll enjoy the game, it's that simple. If you thought the movie was dumb, you're going to think the game is just as dumb. Personally, I liked the movies, so I liked the game.

One final side note: if you've got a PC that can run it, you might want to look into the PC version. You'll sacrifice multiplayer, but I frankly didn't miss it. What you'll get in return is a price tag that's half the Xbox 360 or PS3's.

Final Score: B

Reminder: post if you read my blog!

2009-07-20T14:41:00.002-04:00

Just a friendly reminder, if you read my blog but haven't posted to tell me that you do, please go here and leave a comment, any comment, even if it's an anonymous one, so I can get an accurate idea how many people read this thing. (If your curious, the number so far is six... maybe you guys could tell your friends?)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Review

2009-07-20T00:03:00.003-04:00

It seems like ages ago that this whole Harry Potter thing began. In fact, the first book was published in the United Kingdom in 1997, and although it took some time to make it's way to the U.S. and get popular on this side of the pond, I can safely say that I've been hearing about Harry Potter for a third of my life.

Initially, I had no interest in Harry Potter. After all, I'd read Terry Brooks' Shannara books, Weis and Hickman's Dragonlance and Death Gate books, and Salvatore's Drizzt books when Rowling was still scribbling notes on napkins. Why would I waste my time reading what I thought to be children's books when I was already reading hardcore fantasy?

My then-girlfrend-present-wife was interested in the movies, though. I thought the first one was a snoozer. The second one was boring, but not as bad as the first. By the third film, I found I was actually entertained. After the fifth film, I decided to read the books.

It's probably best that I did. One thing you'll notice about the books, if you ever line them up at the bookstore, is that each book was thicker than the one that came before it. The pacing of the first two films seem okay, but the third film feels a little rushed. It was jarring when you realized that the events of the fourth book were supposed to be spaced out over a year at the school. The fifth film plays out like a Reader's Digest version.

This unfortunately makes the latest film, the Half-Blood Prince, play out almost like the Cliff's Notes.

Don't get me wrong, you'll get the gist of it. The key events, like Harry using the Half-Blood Prince's Potions book to excel at the class are presented. But very little background is presented. Secondary characters like Bill Weasley and Fleur are missing entirely, and scenes with those characters are either edited to used main characters or omitted entirely. Subplots are removed as well, grossly simplifying the developing relationships between the characters. Even as scenes are changed and dropped to fit in the film, new scenes were added, which actually don't fit very well with what does happen, either in the books or in the film.

This makes the Half-Blood Prince and odd creature; fans who have already read the books will get the most out of it, since they're the only ones who will really understand what's going on, but fans who have read the books are also the most likely to criticize its differences from the books.

I don't want to be too hard on the film, though. The actors played their roles brilliantly, especially Daniel Radcliffe as the titular Harry Potter. The scenes presented in the film are presented well, especially a particularly creepy scene when a student is cursed near the beginning. And with a book as long as the Half-Blood Prince, it was inevitable that it would have to be edited to fit the time constraints of a movie. The director and/or the producer seems to be aware of the problem as well, as the final book will apparently be split into two films.

It's hard to say for sure if I recommend seeing the Half-Blood Prince. If you're a fan of the books or have enjoyed the movies thus far, you might enjoy seeing the film. By the same token, if you're a fan of the book (which was my favorite of the 7, by the way), you already know how the story goes, and you might not appreciate a few key scenes stitched together into a film that doesn't really do justice to the source material. Personally, I was entertained by the film, but I'll say that it definitely wasn't my favorite of the films.

Final Score: C+

30 Days of Night Review

2009-07-13T23:29:00.002-04:00

I was reorganizing my Netflix queue, and I noticed that 30 Days of Night expires from the Instant View catalog at the end of the month. Since my wife's been on sort of a vampire kick since watching the short-lived CBS show Moonlight, I figured I'd get her to watch it with me.

The film is set in the town of Barrow, Alaska. Barrow happens to be the northernmost town in the United States. Because it's actually above the Arctic Circle, there's a period in the film where the sun sets and doesn't rise again for 30 days (in reality, it's actually 65 days!).

As the residents are getting ready for this period, many of them by leaving, a man is seen getting off of some cargo ship. The man sets about stealing cell phones, cutting phone lines, and killing sled dogs... essentially all he can do to make sure that after the last plane leaves it will be nearly impossible to leave town or to contact the world outside Barrow.

After the sun goes down, Eben Oleson, Barrow's sheriff, discovers a grisly murder. When his investigation causes him to realize the danger the town is in, he tries to gather as many residents as he can in a safe hiding place. But with limited supplies and sunrise a month away, time isn't on their side.

I'm not sure how the original graphic novel the film is based on is different from the film, but let's be clear on something. Yes, the villains in the film are vampires, but 30 Days of Night is actually a zombie movie. After the initial zombie/vampire outbreak, the film really focuses on a small band of people trying to hole up long enough to survive. Hiding in an abandoned house? Check. Raiding the local store for supplies? Check. Chopping up monsters with heavy machinery? Check. Having to kill one of the band because they were bit back when they were raiding the store, but didn't tell anyone until he started to turn? Check. One survivor heroically sacrifices himself so the others can escape? Check. If it wasn't for the vampires having an occasional spoken line (most of the time they just sort of scream, which is sort of analogous to a zombie's moan) and the film's comic book ending, the film could have just as easily been 30 Days of the Dead.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing; when zombie movies are good (like the original Night of the Living Dead or Shaun of the Dead), they're good. Too often, though, they're reduced to a plotless two hours of people getting eaten by zombies (alá the Dawn of the Dead remake). For most of the film's 113 minutes, 30 Days of Night is more of the latter. Not until the comic book-style ending does the film really come together, and even then a lot is left unexplained.

I will say one thing... after watching Twilight, 30 Days of Night is almost therapeutic. You won't find any of the "sexy" pale loners sparkling in the sunshine while they drink animal blood from a cup and fall in love with their classmates here. The vampires of 30 Days of Night are REAL vampires... cunning, feral monsters, pale likes corpses with black eyes and long yellow nails, ruthless killers that don't just puncture their victims' throats with pointy incisors, but rip their victim's throats out with a mouth full of fangs. I wish I could show 30 Days of Night to every teeny-bopper girl with a poster of Edward on her wall, then ask them if they still think vampires are hot.

But I digress. If you like zombie-style horror movies, there's a lot better to watch than 30 Days of Night. But there's also a lot worse, so give it a rental if you're bored.

Final Score: C-

Free stuf in exchange for good reviews?

2009-07-13T13:48:00.002-04:00

Some of you may have read this article on Kotaku. The gist of it is that the FTC seems to have issues with truth in advertising, but only as it relates to bloggers. Oddly enough, the FTC doesn't seem so concerned with reviewers who write for magazines, newspapers, or TV shows, despite the fact that they likely have larger audiences and are more likely to get free stuff from publishers than the college student with the personal blog given in "Example 7." An example, mind you, that specifically singles out video game bloggers.

I'm not saying that the FTC doesn't have any points with reports, but it does seem unfair to single out independent video game bloggers, or bloggers in general. For starters, where do we get this assumption that the FTC seems to have, that mainstream, professional journalists are any more honest than bloggers? Do we not recall the New York Times running tabloid-worthy stories about John McCain having an affair with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, despite having zero evidence (a story, for the record, that resulted in a defamation case against the paper), while they studiously ignored the evidence of John Edwards actual affair pretty much right up until Edwards came out and admitted it? The elitists in the mainstream media have been pushing agendas on their audience for years under the guise of professional, unbiased journalism. Small wonder that more people trust what they read on the internet more than what they read in the newspaper or see on television news.

What's more, by singling out bloggers versus other forms of media, the FTC is dangerously close to defining what is and is not journalism. At a moment in American history when people are sharply divided already about whether or not the federal government is getting too big and overstepping its authority with things like bailouts and health care, do we really want the government to start regulating personal blogs?

In any case, I'd like to assure all of my readers right now that no one ever gives me free stuff. I certainly wouldn't object to free stuff, but I doubt anyone would figure it's worth it, since maybe 5-10 people read this site regularly. That's why I haven't even bothered with ads. If it seems like I'm giving out too many favorable reviews, that's only because if I'm going to spend my own money, I'm going to try to spend my own money on stuff I like. I actually do enjoy ripping into stuff I don't like, though, and I know my readers really enjoy reading when I rip into something. Even if I did get free stuff, it certainly wouldn't affect how I write reviews, or cause me to suppress negative ones (if anything, I'd write more, since I'd have more stuff to to write about).

As for the journalism thing, well, I simply have too much integrity to be a journalist.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (the Game) Review

2009-07-06T11:06:00.004-04:00

It's the way of the world that many popular G, PG, and PG-13-rated movies will have some form of video game tie-in. It's an arrangement that works well for the movie studios, because they get money from the publisher for the license. And it works for the publisher, because the movie winds up being a two-hour ad that screams at children and parents "BUY ME!" I'm going to assume it's a wash for the developers, since they're pressured to have the game done by a certain deadline, but they're not actually pressured to turn out a good game. So the only losers in this system are gamers, who more often than not are left with a game that's only marginally more fun than getting your teeth cleaned at the dentist.

Despite the perils and pitfalls of playing a game based on a movie license, I must confess a certain weakness for all things Transformers. I grew up watching the 80's cartoon. I could, and probably still can, quote the 1986 animated film verbatim. At nearly 30 years of age, I currently have Transformers DVDs, Transformers T-shirts, Transformers books, and probably more Transformers toys than I did when I was a kid. And so, I bought the new movie game, just like I bought the last movie game.

I'm pleased to report that this game exceeds expectations. That doesn't necessarily make it a good game, but it's not as awful as it should be.

Let's start with the good. You have two campaigns to play, and each campaign has 23 missions (counting a tutorial). Each campaign has five Transformers; the Autobots have Optimus Prime, Ironhide, Bumblebee, Ratchet, and Breakaway. The Decepticons have Megatron, Starscream, Grindor, Sideways, and Longhaul. Each Transformer is beautifully rendered, and each Transformer has different weapons and special abilities. For example, Breakaway has a sniper rifle, Bumblebee can shoot mini-missiles, and Ratchet can heal. Initially, for each mission, you can only use the Transformer that's assigned to you. By completing certain goals, you can use other Transformers in other areas. In fact, there's actually a list of things you can unlock by completing the required goals, and the unlocks include concept art and episodes of the old cartoon, not just in-game things. Personally, I love a game with unlockable anything, as the urge to unlock everything serves at a replay motivator.

Some reviewers have complained of the controls. In this game, pulling the right trigger will cause your Transformer to change into their vehicle mode, and releasing the trigger will cause him to revert back to bot mode. They will insist it should be "hit a button to transform, hit it again to change back." After spending time with RotF, I'm inclined to disagree with them. In previous Transformers games with the button-tap method, you pretty much transform into a vehicle to travel from point A to point B, change into a bot for fighting, then change to a vehicle again for travel. With the trigger method, transforming becomes part of the action. There are many times when you'd fire off a few shots, transform into a vehicle and charge at the enemy, revert back while doing a special melee attack, then finish the enemy off with a quick melee combo. In fact, certain moves in the game require you to transform, hold down a face button, then release the trigger while still holding down the face button.

The levels and missions tend to be a little on the bland side. The East Coast and West Coast levels especially look alike. There is some variety to the mission goals... kill all enemies, defend allies, retrieve people from one point and take them to another, destroy a certain target, repair (or hack) some antennas, or go through a series of checkpoints to find (and usually destroy) a goal. The thing is, despite the goal, most of the time you're going to be blowing up the same four or five types of enemies.

The game is also not particularly long. According to my stats, my average mission completion time is around 6 minutes, which means you can finish all the missions for both campaigns in about five hours. The shortness of the game is actually made worse by the fact that the missions are timed. You want to explore those sandbox levels? Too bad! To advance the campaign, you need to collect campaign points. The better the medal you get on a mission, the more points you'll earn. And those medals are awarded based on one thing and one thing only... speed. Every mission you play, you'll want to complete as fast as you can. Getting gold or platinum medals can be pretty challenging, but if all you want is to finish the missions getting silver or bronze medals is pretty easy. If you're not concerned about unlocking anything, you can probably finish the game in five hours after playing every mission just once. The only thing that's going to extend your five hours of play is if you do replay missions, either to complete the list of unlocks, or to try to get platinum medals for all of the levels.

I'm tempted to criticize the game's story for being a jumbled, incoherent mess... but that's actually pretty close to the movie.

I'm told the multiplayer is pretty good for this game. I can't see that being a huge factor for anyone thinking of playing this game, though. For one thing, the multiplayer is online only... whatever happened to splitscreen, people? For another, a deathmatch third-person Transformers shooter with a bunch of pre-teens sounds more like my idea of hell than something I'd actually chose to do of my own free will.

Ultimately, given the shortness of the game, it's hard to recommend as a purchase to anyone, especially at the $60 price point that the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions are sitting at. I'm kind of kicking myself for not picking up the PC version, since I do most of my gaming on my PC, I'd play with the same controller, and the PC version costs half the 360 version. It'd be nice if the game were longer, and it'd certainly be cool if more of the bots that were in the movie were playable (Sideswipe? Jetfire?), but the game is honestly pretty fun while it lasts, so for many the game might be worth a rental.

Oh, and for the record, Revenge of the Fallen is a better game than the first movie tie-in game, but not as good as the Atari PS2 game that was based on Armada.

Final Score: C+

There Will Be Blood Review

2009-07-01T15:32:00.004-04:00

If you'll recall, when I reviewed Prototype I talked a little about good storytelling. There Will Be Blood is an example of very poor storytelling.

Everyone who's had a literature class, even a high school one, has be told about how characters are supposed to grow, how there's conflict and resolution. There Will Be Blood has NONE of these things. Characters couldn't be more static, there's so little plot that I'm hard pressed to explain it, and there's no resolution. The movie just sort of ends.

I guess you'd say the movie is about a man named Daniel Plainview. At the beginning of the movie, Daniel's mining silver all by his lonesome. Somehow, he makes a little money at it, starts hiring people, and becomes an oil man. He adopts a son, too. I'm mentioning that because the movie makes it seem like that might be important to the plot, although I don't think it actually is.

When Daniel's business is booming, he buys a ton of land near New Boston, California. A lot happens to him after that... his son goes deaf, he meets his half-brother, he has a run-in with the Church of the Third Revelation. I wouldn't call any of it a story, though. Many years later, after his son runs out on him, the movie ends with Daniel bitter and alone in his private bowling alley.

So what's the point? I'm tempted to say that there isn't one. But there is... I'm sure, if you've read anything else on this movie, you've surely heard that it's absolutely adored by critics. Most critics aren't just liberals, they're fringe-left liberals, who hate things like religion and capitalism. They adore this movie because both the leader of the church and our entrepreneuring Daniel are depicted as greedy, deceitful, and slightly crazy. This is the only point that I could see... that Hollyweird thinks capitalists and Christians are crazy, dangerous, evil people. Daniel and Eli begin the movie that way, and the movie ends with them that way, bludgeoning the audience with that message.

On a side note, this movie did give rise to the whole "I drink your milkshake" internet meme. That does make it better than Twilight.

If you like movies with plot, character development, and good acting (or at least a car chase or explosion), avoid this movie. If you often find yourself thinking that capitalism and religion are ruining society and the only way to save it is "free-thinking" via socialist conformity, then feel free to take a break from blogging about how every bad thing in the world is Bush's fault, watch this tripe, nod sagely at its "message," then tell all your friends how much you loved it because it's "artistic." Personally, I'm not moonbat enough to think There Will Be Blood was anything more than garbage.

Final Score: F

Prototype Review

2009-06-30T14:35:00.003-04:00

People will often tell you that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But some of the best-told stories actually begin in the middle. Take the film Memento, for example. The story itself, about a man trying to find the person who raped and killed his wife, isn't terribly interesting in and of itself. But the main character, Leonard, has a type of amnesia that gives him no long-term memory of anything since his wife's murder. As Leonard uses an elaborate system of notes, photos, and tattoos, the story is actually presented in the film from a point near the end of the story backwards to the beginning.

Prototype's story is a little like that. You play as Alex Mercer, a man who wakes up in a morgue with fragmented memories, strange powers, and a military that wants to take him out. You spend the beginning of the game with no idea what's going on, and learning about Mercer's powers as he does. The plot unfolds by completely story missions, but also by absorbing the memories of people he kills. And what unfolds is a story of government conspiracies and bioterrorism that dates back to the sixties.

The developer, Radical Entertainment, is the same developer that brought us 2005's Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, and it shows. Mercer has free reign about the island of Manhattan. Like the Hulk, he can climb buildings, jump really high, and throw heavy objects. But Mercer has many more powers, some more useful than others. He can cover his body in a suit of armor, turn is arm into a blade or a whip-like weapon, and glide through the air. His most interesting ability, though, is the ability to grab and absorb other people. This can have three benefits. The first, and most immediate, is that he regains health. The second is that he can take the appearance of whoever he absorbed, effectively disguising himself. And finally, for marked targets, he gains their memories. These memories might just open up a bit of plot background, or they might teach you a new skill, such as how to fly a helicopter.

The mix of powers and gameplay makes for some very fluid combat. You could run up the side of a building, jump off and glide to a nearby building, kill and absorb a soldier, use his rocket launcher to take out the helicopter tailing you, jump down into an alley until the heat's off you, then run back to the enemy soldiers on the ground, accuse one of them of being you, hijack a tank while your patsy is killed by his comrades, use the tank to take out a guard tower, then get out and throw the tank and the backup that's been called in before sprouting claws that you use to eviscerate any survivors.

The game's pacing is very good as well. The first few missions you do are relatively easy as you get used to using Mercer's powers. Just when you start to feel invincible, a new type of enemy will be introduced that will seem overpowering... until you unlock a new power. The story missions are varied in type so you don't really feel like you're doing the same thing over and over, and the bosses are challenging without ever feeling impossibly frustrating. When you die, you don't want to throw your controller in frustration; you want to try again and approach the situation a little differently.

Like most sandbox games, you're not confined to story missions. There are plenty of side challenges. Doing them is totally optional, but they give you "Evolution Points" that you can use to buy upgrades.

The only real knocks I have against the game are that it could be a little short if you don't do any of the side missions, and that everything in Manhattan sort of looks the same. The fluid gameplay, buckets of combat options, and interesting story all serve to make those complaints very minor and easy to overlook. If you like sandbox games, comic-bookish superhero games, or action games in general, you owe it to yourself to check out Prototype.

Final Score: A

An informal survey.

2009-06-30T01:10:00.002-04:00

Officially, this blog has seven followers. Now I figure some people are swinging by from time to time without creating a Google account, and thus not *officially* following. I also figure some people with Google accounts signed up to follow this blog out of support, but probably only stopped in to read content once or twice.

Well, I'd sort of like a more accurate idea of how many people read, say, at least once a month. If that's you, PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT! Anonymous comments are cool, just one post per reader. At the end of August, I'll count the comments, estimate the readers, then decide how to proceed with PHASE II... or if phase II is even worth it.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Official Review

2009-06-27T19:47:00.002-04:00

IMPORTANT: THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS! If you don't want details, skip down to my spoiler-free review.

Two years have passed since the events of the previous Transformers movie. Sector Seven has been disbanded, but a new alliance between the humans and the Autobots called NEST. New Autobots have arrived on Earth, which is fortunate since apparently more Decepticons have arrived as well. The premise is that during the last two years, the Decepticons would do something (we're never told what), and NEST would show up and try to kill them.

After two years of... whatever, the Decepticons steal a fragment of the Allspark being held at NEST's base, then use it to resurrect Megatron. And it turns out, Megatron's got a boss of his own, who's got plans for the Earth. To implenent them, though, they'll need information... information that's currently stored in Sam Witwicky's head.

Much like the earlier Transformers movie, Revenge of the Fallen isn't exactly plotty. Despite that, I do have to give the screenwriters some kudos for trying to flesh out some of the "Bayformers" mythos is a way that ties into the Transformers mythos at large. We've got the Fallen, the origin of the Primes, and the Matrix of Leadership. We've also got Bay's usual hallmarks: explosions, the military, explosions, some other actions scenes, and explosions. The result is a mostly-good popcorn action flick. There are a few problems, though, that keep it from being as good as the first one.

For starters, this is a movie that tries to do way too much. There are several new Autobots and Decepticons alike, and most of them have less screen time than the American aircraft carriers. There's Megatron and Starscream looking for Energon to give life to the protoforms on their ship. There's Sam trying to figure out what the symbols in his head are and why the Decepticons want them. There's the Fallen trying to destroy the sun. There's Sam trying to find the Matrix. There's even Devestator, and not as a mistaken subtitle for the tank guy in the last film, but a real, honest-to-goodness giant robot formed from amalgamated construction equipment. The problem is, as they're trying to bring everything to a close for the end of the movie, you've got bots who's names you might not have even caught duking it out in battles that leave one or the other dead after a few unsatisfying minutes.

Bumblebee is a little downplayed in this one, given more spotlight to Optimus Prime (as it should be). Megatron gets a few more lines, but is reduced to a patsy for the Fallen. Starscream's craven opportunism is expanded, which is good, but most of the new characters (including Sideswipe, Sideways, Long Haul, Rampage, Ravage and Arcee) get few if any lines. Soundwave doesn't even seem to leave orbit, and one guy, Grindor, could easily be mistaken for Blackout from the first movie.

Worse, though, are the ones who do get lines, and do get personality. Jetfire turns out to be a crotchety old bot who's slightly senile and walks with a cane. Wheelie is a toy truck who starts as a spy for the Decepticons, switches sides after Mikaela locks him up for awhile, and humps her leg. I could live with those two, mind you. Kids see Transformers, after all, and you gotta have some comic relief... like when Bumblebee peed on Simmons in the first movie.

But then you have Mudflap and Skids. They're irritating like Jar Jar Binks is irritating. They're vaguely racist. I wanted them to die. Hell, I wanted them to not exist in the first place.

Problems aside, Revenge of the Fallen is still, as I already stated, a pretty good popcorn action movie. If you liked the first one, go see the new one. Simple as that.

Final Score: A-

Mike's Spoiler-free Transformers 2 review

2009-06-27T19:46:00.000-04:00

Pretty good, save for a few minor irritations. If you like explosions and giant robots beating the snot out of each other, go see it.

Final Score: A-

007: Quantum of Solace Review

2009-06-23T16:01:00.002-04:00

007: Goldeneye was more than just a 007 game. For many, it was the first game since Super Mario 64 that justified owning an N64. It also helped bring first person shooters, largely the domain of PCs at the time, to mainstream console gamers.

Since Goldeneye, the007 license went to EA and 007 games have largely been a crapshoot, with only really Nightfire standing out among them. That's not to say that they were bad (although some were), but they were all largely forgetable.

In 2007, with no game tie-in to the Casino Royale movie, MGM and EA's licensing agreement was terminated early, and the license went to Activision. With nine months until the expected relase of the Quantum of Solace movie, Activision set Treyarch (who were already at work on Call of Duty: World at War) to the task of having a game ready for the movie. The end result is a game that's not too bad... but not great either.

For starters, the good. Bond's third person adventures from Everything or Nothing and From Russia With Love are gone, and we're back to first person shooting built on the back of the Call of Duty 4 engine. Both Daniel Craig and Bond girl Olga Kurylenko lend their voices and likenesses to the game, among other Bond actors. And in a sort of extended flashback, you actually get to play through the events of both the Quantum of Solace and the Casino Royale movies, which helps add cohesion to the game's plot that I would have sorely appreciated when I watch the movie. This also gives the game a decent length.

The problem is that, while the Call of Duty 4 engine makes for great hectic battlefields, it either doesn't work as well for 007 or Treyarch was incapable of making it work for 007, take your pick. See, to make the most of having Daniel Craig's likeness, they implemented a cover system that switches to third person. You're more accurate when your sticking to cover... which is to say, you're penalized for playing a first person shooter as a first person shooter. They also added some stealth segments that, while certainly Bond-like, break the gameplay up like this: sneak from point A until point B, when scripted enemies start flooding the room. Find cover, moving only to avoid the occasional grenade, and shoot the enemies until the "Checkpoint reached" message pops up. Then stealth to point C, where you do the whole thing over again. Sometimes, as you shoot at enemies as they run into your field of view from your cover, the game almost feels like a shooting gallery.

In a way, though, I feel like we're expecting too much from the game, simply because we have fond memories of Goldeneye, and simply because we know the game is built on the Call of Duty 4 engine. Because, while Quantum of Solace is certainly no Call of Duty 4, it's really not a bad game. I daresay that Quantum of Solace is the best 007 game since Goldeneye.

Final Score: B-

Mike Reviews Twilight (the movie, not the book)

2009-06-11T21:21:00.003-04:00

Remember, about a month and half ago, when I reviewed Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem? I said I couldn't think of too many movies worse than it?

I found one.

Twilight is the story of a teenage girl, Bella, who goes off to live with her dad in a podunk town in Washington. Upon arrival, all the kids in the school decide to be her friend instead of picking on the new girl, so naturally she's kind of moody. And then she meets Edward. Edward's kind of a jerk to her, so she falls totally in love with her. Oh, and Edward happens to be a vampire. Apparently that's hot. Unless it's the pale skin, poofy hair, and more lipstick than any of the girls in the film. Or maybe it's the way he sparkles in the sunshine. Did you know that's why vampires avoid the sun? Here I was thinking that they burst into flames. Silly me.

So the movie breaks down sort of like this... the first 40% is about Edward being a jerk while saving Bella from trouble, while Bella tries to figure out what's up with him. The next 40% is after Bella finds out Edward's a vamp, and starts going on dates and meeting his vamp family. Isn't it cute that they call themselves "vegetarians"? Because they don't eat people? Nevermind that they drink animal blood, not carrot blood, which kind of defeats the whole vegetable part of vegetarian. The last 20% of the movie is about Bella running from a vampire, James, that does eat people. Why the dude doesn't find somebody else to eat is beyond me. And then Edward and Bella go to prom.

This movie was directed at the teenage girls who read the books. I get that, I really do. But what is it with teenage girls and vampires? When did vampires become "sexy" loners who drink animal blood and sparkle in the sun like the ring my wife insists I should have bought her instead of the engagement ring I actually bought? Who do I blame for this? I miss the good old days when vampires were undead monsters to stake.

So, yeah, unless you're a 14 year-old girl, this movie sucked.

Final Score: F-

TouchWIZ vs. TouchFLO

2009-06-11T15:46:00.002-04:00

Years ago, I bought my first Windows Mobile device, a Dell Axim x51. It was an interesting little device that I carried around with me for one main reason: before the Sony Reader, before the Kindle, I was reading ebooks in the .lit format on my Axim via Microsoft Reader for PocketPC.

In the years since (and before, actually), a handful of smartphones running Windows Mobile had been released, but they were all large, clunky phones that were geared mostly towards business folks. Until Apple came along with a little gizmo you might have heard of, the iPhone, and suddenly smartphones are cool. And different companies started releasing different smartphones with different operating systems, and now it's almost impossible to get a decent new phone that doesn't require a mandatory extra data plan.

This put me at sort of an impasse. I knew I was going to wind up getting a touchscreen smartphone, but which one? A part of me did want an iPhone. I'd even bought a first-gen iPod touch, and I will concede that, for all it's flaws (the iPhone's been out for two years, and it's just now getting MMS?) the iPhone's OS is still probably the best smartphone OS available (though I'd like to run Android or webOS in an emulator or virtual machine). But I also didn't feel like switching carriers just to have an iPhone.

The deciding factor for me went back to my collection of ebooks. I wasn't looking for a phone with an app store to charge me for yet another copy of Bejeweled to play. But I did want to read my books. Getting the books onto an iPhone would be a royal pain, as I'd already experimented with it on my iPod touch. Even if it were a little easier, my .lit books would still need to be converted, unless I stuck with Windows Mobile. So I decided to stick with my carrier, and stick with Windows Mobile.

When it came time to buy, I'd narrowed it down to two choices: the HTC Touch Diamond, and the Samsung Omnia. Loyal readers will know that I picked the Omnia from my earlier review. It really came down to the fact that I liked the physical design of the phone better, and the fact that it cost less than half of the Touch Diamond.

You might think that's the only real differences between the phones, since they both run Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. But see, there's one major issue with Windows Mobile that has most tech bloggers trashing it for not even being in the same league as the iPhone OS, webOS, or Android. Windows Mobile is ancient, by tech standards. Sure, Windows Mobile 6.1 is only about a year old, but the truth is Microsoft's really just been tacking new features or updated apps onto the same basic OS since PocketPC 2002. Even with Windows Mobile 6.1, a lot of the underlying Windows Mobile stuff looks the same, expects a stylus, and expects resistive instead of capacitive touchscreens (which means no support for multitouch).

To make up for Windows Mobile's ancient, boring, and stylus-driven interface, different manufacturers have taken to making their own shiny, slick, finger-friendly applications and interfaces to replace the stock Windows Mobile Today screen. Samsung uses what they call TouchWIZ, which I mentioned before. It's basically a virtual shelf full of widgets. The widgets are slid off the shelf where they expand with some limited functionality, or opened to a Samsung-specific, finger-friendly app like Touch Player. TouchWIZ is a huge improvement over the stock Windows Mobile Today screen, but it's not perfect. For one, the widgets on the shelf can't be customized. For another, it's kind of a pain to scroll to the app you want, drag it off the shelf, open it, do want you wanted, close it, and put it away.

The best thing about HTC's Windows Mobile smartphones wasn't the design of the phone, but its interface. HTC uses an interface they call TouchFLO 3D. Like TouchWIZ, TouchFLO 3D replaces the Today screen with a finger-friendly interface that puts most of what you need from the phone up front, sparing you from going deeper into Windows Mobile. Unlike TouchWIZ, TouchFLO uses tabs. For example, there's the Home tab, which displays the time and date, and gives quick access to your call history and calendar. There's the People Tab, where you can set up speed dial buttons for your most frequent contacts. There's the Programs tab, where you can set up one-touch access to your favorite applications. The Music tab is a portal to Audio Manager, HTC's music player. There's also tabs for your texts, emails, photos, the internet, the weather, etc. You can switch between tabs with a band at the bottom of the screen. If an icon for a tab you want is showing, tapping it will bring it up. If it's not, sliding your finger along the band will scroll it. An icon will tell you what tab you've scrolled to, and releasing the band will switch over to that tab.

Now, I really do like my Omnia. I've had several Samsung phones, and all of them have been great save one (and that one was replaced for free). The Omnia is much more sleek than any phone HTC makes. But TouchFLO is better by miles than TouchWIZ. Audio Manager is a better music player than Touch Player. Everything is easier to access with TouchFLO, and TouchFLO has a more sophisticated, slick look than a simple shelf of cartoony widgets. The only thing I really like better about TouchWIZ is that Samsung included a clock widget with it's own alarm clock app that's much easier to use with your fingers than the default one. The clock on the Home tab in TouchFLO seems to go to the Windows Mobile alarm, which is difficult to operate without a stylus, and is limited to system sounds instead of ringtones for alarms.

Luckily, thanks to some entreprenuering individuals on the internet, it's possible to install TouchFLO onto the Omnia. I get the easy access to everything TouchFLO offers, and the TouchWIZ apps (like the clock) can still be used. I put it on one of the quick buttons on the Programs tab.

For update reasons, if I was going to consider a Windows Mobile smartphone in the future, I'd definitely take a long look at HTC's phones. Still, it's hard to argue with the Omnia's much lower price and sleeker form. If you do have or go with an Omnia, you might want to start googling how to get TouchFLO on it, though, because TouchFLO beats TouchWIZ hands down.

Windows 7 RC1: One Month (ish) in.

2009-06-10T21:48:00.002-04:00

Back at the beginning of May, I wrote about my first 24 hours with Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 as my main operating system. At the time, I figured I'd just give it a whirl, buy new hard drives, then go back to business as usual with Windows Vista.

I wound up using Windows 7 for so long because it took a little longer than I'd thought for the right combination of funds and specials at Newegg. I did get new hard drives, though. I replaced my Western Digital 80GB SATA I hard drive with a WD 640GB Caviar Blue SATA II hard drive, and I replaced my WD 320GB IDE drive with a Hitatchi Desk Star 1TB (that's 1000GB for my less technically inclined readers) SATA II. I got a slight speed upgrade, and more than triple the ammount of storage I had before. And when the time came to install Windows, I went right for...

...Windows 7 RC1.

It's hard for me to really express why, but Windows 7 really is the best Windows yet. I know that Windows Vista put off a lot of people with demanding (at the time... let's be honest, who doesn't have at least a gig of RAM in their main computer these days?) system requirements and compatibility problems on both the hardware and software ends. On the other hand, XP looks as ancient as it is, and is lacking some of features I liked in Vista.

Windows 7 seems to be out to please both fans of XP and fans of Vista. In some ways, Windows 7 is still Vista. It's got Vista's underpinings. It's got the Vista Game Explorer. It's got User Account Controls. It's got Vista's Start Menu (with a few tweaks), Vista's sounds, Vista's cursors, and Vista's icons. It's got the Aero Glass effects and Flip 3D. The thing is, all of this stuff works as well or better than Vista. There are more UAC levels than just on or off. The button in the Start Menu shuts off the computer by default now. And the kernel has be streamlined so that, even with Aero turned on, Windows 7 runs as fast (or some people have claimed even faster) than Windows XP on the same hardware.

Windows 7 isn't just a faster Vista, though. Windows 7 brings some slick new features and upgrades with it. Here's just a few that I've enjoyed.

DirectX 11: Okay, since I don't have any games that use it, or a graphics card that officially supports it, I can't claim to have really enjoyed it yet. But I'm confident I will... on some of the games that used it, DirectX 10 did make a difference, and from what I've read DirectX 11 will make more of a difference from 10 than 10 did from 9. In the meantime, every other game I've tried (except one), from games as old as Neverwinter Nights to games as new as Terminator Salvation, from games as simple as Luxor to games as graphically demanding as Call of Duty: World at War has run just fine. And for the record, the game that didn't run (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II) seems to have issues in Vista as well.

XP Mode: I personally haven't found much use for it myself, since everything has worked fine in Windows 7 (and trying to install KOTOR II in XP mode failed). But this does seem like a way to help win over the XP hold outs. XP mode is actually a pre-set up Windows XP virtual machine for Windows Virtual PC. You run XP in the virtual machine, but the idea is that once a program is installed in the virtual machine, it can be run from Windows 7.

The new taskbar. I know some people don't care for it, and I'm pretty sure if you change the settings you can make it more like Vista's, but I love it. Intead of pinning a few programs to a tiny quick launch area, pinned programs icons are big. And open program windows sit with their icon. The whole thing is sort of like a cross between the old task bar and Mac OS X's Dock. Hovering the mouse over a program icon will give you previews of all the open windows for that program. Windows 7 also neatly organizes all the programs that install stuff on the system tray in a neat little box that helps reduce clutter by only showing you icons for the ones that you allow, and even then mostly only when they need attention.

Windows Update. Yeah, I know that Windows XP and Windows Vista has them too. But this really comes down to hardware compatibility. You see, since using Windows 7, I haven't had to manually install a single driver. Windows recognized most of my hardware from the initial installation, including my monitor. Windows Update was also quick to offer me udpated drivers for my graphics card. What impressed me the most, though, were the two devices that it didn't have drivers for: my printer, and my Omnia smartphone. In both of those cases, though, Windows asked if it could check Windows Update, then promptly found and installed the apropriate drivers. That especially impressed me, as I had a hard time getting my old Axim to sync with Vista back when Vista was a release candidate.

Libraries. This was something that took a little getting used to, but now that I'm used to it, I can't believe it hasn't been done sooner. Basically, instead of having a shortcut to your "My Music" folder on the side of a Windows Explorer window, there's a library named "Music" (not to be confused with your iTunes music library). By default, the Music library will display the contents of "My Music" as well as "Public Music." But let's say you use your "My Music" folder as a place for your iTunes library, but you have another folder of unsorted music that you don't want to include in iTunes. You can still set up that other folder to show up in the Music library, and you can use Windows Media Player or VLC to play them.

There are other features I'm sure I haven't mentioned, but that's the stuff that really stands out for me. As long as Microsoft doesn't screw anything up between now and October 22nd when Windows 7 officially launches, I definitely plan to upgrade and use Windows 7 as my main operating system for a long time to come.

Ignore this post!

2009-05-28T10:41:00.004-04:00

Let's see if this works.

EDIT: Apparently not. But I'll tell you what... if you happen to have a computer handy that has a second or or third web browser that does NOT have this site bookmarked, type the URL manually into it, and tell me if you see the standard Blogger favicon or not.

May Movie Reviews

2009-05-27T11:43:00.002-04:00

I'm always lazy this time of year. In the fall I'd be playing and reviewing games left and right, but lately I've just been laying around, playing old games I've already played and watching the Venture Bros.

In the spirit of summer laziness, I give you not four movie reviews, but four mini-reviews presented as one review!

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - In an attempt to keep the X-Men license while banking on the popularity of what is arguably the most popular X-Men character (at least as far as the movies go), X-Men Origins: Wolverine does what the title says by telling how Wolverine came to be. It does this mostly by taking the 2001-2002 6-issue Origin comic book series, bastardizing it, then adding some stuff about the Weapon X program. To help fill out the cast, they add characters like the Blob (who never had anything to do with Weapon X in the comics), Gambit (who is barely recognizable as Gambit), and Deadpool (who the writers basically raped with their portrayal). Top it all off with some jarringly bad CGI and what you've got is a movie that manages to be worse than X-Men 3. Final Score: D

Star Trek - I think everyone had some doubts about this one. The same director as the mind-numbingly dull Mission Impossible III, a cast of young and mostly unknown hipsters, and the fact that out of ten previous Star Trek films maybe half were good doesn't exactly sound like a recipe for success. So you may be shocked to hear that the end result is actually the best Star Trek film so far. Each of the cast members manages to perfectly capture their character. And, without giving too much of the plot away, the writers managed to create a Trek story that is easily accessible to new fans, completely disregards all of the Trek that came before it, and yet does it with a logical explanation. If there's a must-see movie so far this summer, Star Trek is it. Final Score: A

Angels and Demons - Well before the The DaVinci Code hit theaters, I'd read all of Dan Brown's books. And while Brown might not be the best writer, and his claims of artistic and architectural accuracy are often as fictitious as the characters, the man does tell an interesting story. As much as I enjoyed his books, I hated the movie adaptation of the DaVinci Code. Still, I'd dragged my wife to see Wolverine and Star Trek, and she wanted so see Angels and Demons, so with some trepidition, I went. And I'm glad I did. Angels and Demons is a much better movie. The pacing is better, the acting is better, and the story works better as a movie. Mystery fans , especially those who haven't read the book, might want to check this one out. Final Score: B.

Terminator: Salvation - The Terminator franchise can be a tricky one. The original was meant to be a simple action thriller, yet managed to lay out some predestination paradoxes that made T2 one of the best sci-fi movies ever. T3 pisses on the franchise by replacing T2's "No fate but what we make" message with the notion that Judgement Day was inevitable, and showing us that the future leader of humanity was a huge wuss who was completely incapable of acting under pressure without his girlfriend telling him what to do. T3 was followed up by The Sarah Conner Chronicles, which was probably one of the best shows on television until it's cancelation. Salvation avoids stepping on the toes of any previous Terminator fiction by simply showing the earlier days of humanity's war with Skynet. What follows is a vapid movie with a shallow, predictable plot that requires very little thought to follow. However, it's also full of explosions, chase scenese, and man-versus-machine action; in short, it's a popcorn movie. If you go in expecting a cerebral sci-fi flick on the level of T2, you're going to be sorely disappointed. If you take it for what it is, though, it's a cheesy, entertaining action movie. Final Score: C+.

Looking at May overall, we have a solid month that could have been a great one if Wolverine wasn't such a dud, especially with Angels and Demons turning out so much better than expected.

Final Score: B

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Uncaged Edition Review

2009-05-20T15:55:00.002-04:00

Wolverine is pretty much a household name, right on par with Spider-Man or Captain America in the Marvel pool. Actual comic book fans might have different opinions on different X-Men, but for the masses Wolverine is pretty much the face of the X-Men.

So eventually, after three X-Men films starring Hugh Jackman, Hugh as Wolverine gets to star in his own summer movie. And like most summer movies, we get the inevitable crap movie tie-in game, right?

Actually, X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Uncaged Edition is actually pretty good. You may have heard it compared to God of War, although I've decided to dispute that.

The story follows the movie, although rather loosely. You play as Logan, aka Wolverine, aka Weapon X, with about 30% of the game being told as flashbacks to the mission in Africa that had Wolverine quit Stryker's team, and the other 70% sort of filling in what happened from the time Wolverine had the adamantium fused to his bones until the end of the film. While the film is loosley covered, some things happen differently and Wolverine goes to some different locations than he did in the movie, which helps to keep the game fresh.

The gameplay is mostly pretty simple. Bad guys, of which there are only a few types, will try to kill you. You kill them. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wolverine has several attacks at his disposal. You can do quick strikes and heavy strikes, which make for some combo building. You can grab most enemies and toss them around. He's got a lunging strike that helps close the distance between himself and enemy gunners. He's got a variety of quick-kills that are executed by grabbing an enemy and hitting the heavy attack, then a second time at just the right moment. He's got rage moves that are powerful attacks that use up the rage meter. By hitting the block button at just the right moment, you can parry many enemy attacks. And there are often environmental hazards that can be used to great affect.

The problem with Wolverines combat, and why it doesn't really hold up to comparisons to God of War, is that for all your options, you're actually not going to bother with most of it. The lunge attack will take out most weaker enemies. For 75% of the enemies in the game, the next best thing is to grab them. You can toss them over ledges or off buildings, you can toss them onto environmental hazards, or you can quick kill them a lot faster and easier than trying to fight them by slashing them with claws. If all else fails, parry. As for the rage attacks, you can go through the whole game with out using them once. I really only used them to whittle down bosses, and even then, most of the damage I did came from parrying.

Another thing that God of War has that Wolverine is lacking is really epic boss fights. While there are a few bosses in the game, most of them are pushovers. There's only one truly epic boss in the entire game, although that boss is almost enough to make you forget about the other lame bosses. Of course, that boss isn't even the final boss. After you take it out, you can expect four more pushovers before the credits.

I know, it almost sounds like I'm hating the game, but pointing out that a game doesn't live up to God of War is really just saying that the game isn't perfect. It does do a lot of things well. The level designs are solid, and even if you don't use most of Wolverine's repetoire, killing baddies is still entertaining. In fact, one of the things the game does well is show just how violent, how borderline animal Wolverine can be. In the cartoon, you never see Wolverine cut anyone living with his claws, and in the movies he might stab a few people, but there's no blood. There's plenty of blood in the game, as Wolverine often chooses to slice rather than to stab. You will see people lose limbs. Often. When you do quick kills, you might even see heads explode or people get ripped in half. The action is fast, fluid, and bloody.

Another thing I liked was that damage on yourself was more than just a missing portion of your health bar. As enemies slice and shoot at Wolverine, his body would become more and more mangled until you could see the skeleton underneath. Stay out of combat for a bit, and you could watch his healing factor kick in and his body would slowly regenerate.

The game has a decent length to it, with plenty to do besides kill. There are some puzzles to solve to progress, although they're not terribly complicated. There are some light RPG elements. And there are some upgrades to find. Most give you bonuses like extra health or more damage, but the best ones unlock bonus challenges. The challenges are pretty lame: you basically fight Wolverine in different costumes. The good thing about that is that once you beat him, you unlock the costume he's wearing. While Hugh Jackman running around in jeans and a wifebeater might be true to the movie, it doesn't have the same Wolverine feel that brown and yellow spandex does.

So, maybe Wolverine isn't as good as God of War. Hambugers don't really top a tasty steak, either, and that doesn't stop us from scarfing burgers. Wolverine is a solid action game that might be a rare case of a movie game being better than the movie it's based on.

Final Score: B+

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X review

2009-05-08T00:35:00.002-04:00

Way back in 1996, military thriller writer Tom Clancy and British Navy Captain Doug Littlejohns formed a company called Red Storm Entertainment to cash in on the growing videogame market by making games based on Tom Clancy's books. The first two games were strategy games based on actual novels, and the third was one of the first 3D RTS games. But it was their next game, Rainbow Six, that caught the attention of Ubisoft, and Ubisoft who went on to make the "Tom Clancy's" label a gaming household name.

Since the original Rainbow Six there have been numerous sequels, as well as the Ghost Recon series to do the first and third-person shooters. There's been the Splinter Cell series to cover the espionage aspect of war. Endwar brought the whole "Tom Clancy's War Games" full circle back to the RTS genre.

Of course, there's one major aspect of modern warfare that's been glimpsed in other Tom Clancy games, but never really experienced: air combat. Which is where H.A.W.X steps in.

Air combat games have traditionally been one of two types. In one corner, there's the realistic PC games that involve complicated controls, limited ammo and health, and missions that often come down to dogfights with guns. In the other corner, there's the console "arcade" games with simple controls, planes that can take a few missiles to the tail before going down, impossible ammounts of ammo, and crazy missions that make you think the course of an entire war is decided by one ace pilot. Namco's Ace Combat series has absolutely dominated the latter, becoming a sort of gold standard to which all other arcade-style flight sims are compared. Some (Air Force Delta) have fared marginally well, while others (Lethal Skies) seemed way off the mark.

The truth is, H.A.W.X is not Ace Combat. Ace Combat games have this odd mix of truly crazy missions, boss fights against super weapons, cheesy stories set in fictional countries, and tendency to give you the really cool planes at just the right point that you can enjoy them for a bit before the game ends that no one has been able to match. Judging by the most recent Ace Combat, even Namco might be having a little trouble keeping up with past efforts.

Despite the game's flaws, though, H.A.W.X is probably the best game in the genre that's not Ace Combat. The game is at it's best when it's mimicking Ace Combat. There are a good number of planes in the game, each better suited to different missions with a variety of different weapons. Control is also very similar to Ace Combat, so fans of the series will find themselves quite comfortable in David Crenshaw's flight suit. Your plane can sustain a reasonable ammount of damage, and can apparently carry around 200 bombs and missiles. The story, while lacking the over-the-top cheese of the Ace Combat games, is a serious story of a Private Military Company, and is enough to keep you engaged in what's going on. And H.A.W.X has excellent graphics with scenery of real places including D.C. and Chicago modeled with images taken by GeoEye's IKONOS satellite.

H.A.W.X does try to bring a few things to the table. The simplest is that your plane carries a few flares. This real-life countermeasure is very welcome when you're just about to line up a shot on a target, only to have a missile coming at you. The biggest is the E.R.S, or Enhanced Reality System. The E.R.S. has two main functions. On some levels where you have to fly at a certain altitude or stay in a certain area, the E.R.S. displays holographic boundaries automatically for you. It helps the game retain some of the high-tech futuristic hallmarks of other Clancyverse games without being obtrusive, and can be easier to watch than your altimeter during a mission. The second function, only used at certain times, creates a series of colored gates for you to fly through, showing you the optimal path for a certain task. At times, it's necessary, like one level that you use it to show you the only path you can take through a certain area to avoid being hit by surface-to-air-missiles (SAMs). At times, it's sort of useful, like when you're trying to line up a shot on a tank tucked between some buildings. Most of the time, it can be used for lining up a shot on an enemy plane or to dodge an enemy missile, and in both of those cases, it's sort of useless.

The other big feature the game has is called "Limiter Off Mode." The idea is that modern planes have flight control software that keeps you from performing maneuvers that would cause the plane to stall. By turning that software off, you can pull off sharper turns and more extreme maneuvers. This is supposed to be one of the game's big features. There's even an entire mission devoted to training in Limiter Off Mode.

The problem with Limiter Off Mode is that it switches to the most ridiculous camera angles. When there's no target, the angle makes it look like the plane is flying from the lower left corner to the upper right, and slightly away from you. When there is a target, the camera is centered on it. Flying in Limited Off Mode isn't just a pain because it's awkward to fly a plane with those angles, but you also have to worry about stalling as struggle to point your plane in the right direction. The developers at Ubisoft Romania shouldn't be bragging about this crap, since I'd call any feature that broken a bug, not a highlight. The only good thing I can say about it is that aside from the aforementioned training mission, you never actually have to use it.

There are other little flaws, too. Most of the game's missions are very similar. They seem to either involve taking out some ground forces before they take out your allies on the ground, or taking out jet planes to protect some other plane. None of the missions involve any superweaon boss fights, either. In fact, after playing two or three missions, I found myself wanting to do something else, because I didn't feel like doing the similar tasks that the game's missions require. This might help offest the fact that H.A.W.X is also very short, at just 19 missions. In fact, I finished the single-player campaign after two days of playing it.

There may be some replay value. Unlike Ace Combat, where you buy your planes and weapons with cash you earn, you gain experience in H.A.W.X for completing levels, completing other goals, or basically killing stuff. Completing missions will unlock new planes, but so will gaining experience levels. By the time I'd finished the campaing, several planes and weapon packages were still locked, simply because I hadn't reached a high enough level. This seems a bit like forced replay value to me.

So H.A.W.X wound up being a game that I wanted to stop playing after playing a few missions, but wanted to play again after taking a short break. H.A.W.X's flaws keep it from being a stellar game, like the Ace Combat series (which, I confess, is one of my favorite series), but the stuff that H.A.W.X does right does make the game ultimately entertaining, at least for a little while.

Final Score: B-

Windows 7 Release Candidate 1: 24 Hours In

2009-05-06T15:58:00.002-04:00

Loyal readers may recall that I was beta testing Windows 7. And anyone that cares about the new Windows also knows that Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 was released yesterday, May 5th.

Release Candidate software is a bit different than beta. Beta software is expected to have bugs. Beta testers are expected to play with the beta software and report bugs they find to the developers. New features might be added, and some features might be taken away.

Release Candidate software is still test software, but RCs are supposed to be near final. There are no major changes from RC1 to the final version. Testing is to verify that everything works the way it should and stamp out any remaining bugs before the software is released to manufacturing (aka RTM, aka the retail version you can expect to see on computers being sold sometime during the next year).

Back when the beta came out, I installed it on a computer I wound up selling to finance my new monitor, as well as a netbook that I used pretty much just for instant messaging and web browsing. I was impressed with it then, because everything was up and running smoothly, including the wi-fi, which is often a rarity for beta software. Frankly, I was content to use it, never once firing up Windows XP during the beta period.

RC1 went on the netbook first. To my disappointment, I didn't really notice much of a difference from the beta. If anything, it was a little more sluggish. Whenever you'd click on anything, it seemed like Windows needed a moment to think about it before it acted.

Mostly because I'm ready to leave XP behind, I'd already made up my mind to stick with Windows 7 on my netbook. The real question is whether I want to upgrade my desktop, or if I want to stick with Windows Vista for awhile.

Just like the netbook, installing Windows 7 on my desktop computer was a breeze. Windows recognized everything, including my monitor. Desktop resolution was the correct 1680x1050, and I was getting sound from all five speakers and the subwoofer. The only driver that didn't show up from the fresh install was for my printer, which I didn't even think about until well after the fact. And even then, Windows Update was happy to provide me with a drive for it.

The setup is basically:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz
3GB Kingston Hyper-X
DFI Lanparty Dark P35 Motherboard
BFG GeForce 9800GTX+ Overclocked
80GB SATA 1.5 C:\ Drive
320GB IDE D:\ Drive
Pioneer DVD burner for D:\
Some generic internal flash card reader for B:\

The Windows Experience Index rated it like this:
Processor 6.4
RAM 6.4
Graphcis (Aero) 6.1
Graphics (Gaming) 6.1
Primary Hard Disk 5.4

The WEI goes up to 7.9 now, as opposed to Vista's 5.9 (and where everything except the processor [5.6] and hard drive [5.3] were 5.9).

It was already clear that my day-to-day tasks like websurfing, watching videos, bittorrent, etc was going to work fine in Windows 7. I'd tested Nero 8, VLC Media Player, Ultra ISO, μtorrent, 7-Zip, GonVisor, AVG, and Foxit. The real question, then, was whether or not I'd be set for gaming.

In an effort to get this online as fast as I could, I didn't spend too much time with any one game. Instead, I selected three modern games to run the computer hard, and one older game to check for compatibility issues. The breakdown is more or less like this:

Dead Space: Ran on the highest settings. Didn't run noticably different than on Vista.
F.E.A.R. 2: Ran on the highest settings. Didn't run noticably different than on Vista.
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.: Never tried it on Vista. Ran it on the highest setting, and it seemed like it was occasionally stuttering. Turned V-sync off and turned AA down to 4X, and it runs fine.
Star Wars Republic Commando: Ran on the highest settings. Didn't run noticably different than Vista.

One interesting thing to note is that H.A.W.X. has two .exe files. One is the regular (and I assume DX9 version) and the other looks like a DX10 version. The DX10 version failed to launch, and reported that I was missing a .dll file. I downloaded the .dll, and Windows reported that the .dll isn't compatible. The DX9 version worked fine, though. I know Microsoft has said that Windows 7 is going to have Direct X 11, but is it not DX10 compatible?

When the dust settled, for the most part Windows 7 handled everything I tossed at it like a champ. I'd say Windows 7 is ready for prime time, and most people should be happy with the upgrade, whether they're going from XP or Vista. Gamers might want to hold off just a little longer until they get this Direct X thing sorted out... assuming they really care about the games that actually make use of Direct X 10 anyway.

Alien Vs. Predator Requiem Review

2009-04-30T20:30:00.002-04:00

Sometimes, a movie gets almost universal acclaim, like The Dark Knight. Or, like Fight Club, it becomes something of a cult classic. And sometimes there are movies that are widely disliked, but for you personally they're something of a guilty pleasure. For me, the first Alien Vs. Predator was that kind of film. It was by no means a great movie, but it made for a cheesy, action popcorn kind of movie. Sure, the plot (Predators building a temple in the Arctic so that once a century they can raise a few Aliens to hunt as a sort of rite of passage) wasn't going to win any literary awards, but it was enough to set up the premise, as well as avoid contradicting either the AVP comic books or the Alien movies. Two hours of Aliens and Predators killing each other (and a few curious humans who got caught in the crossfire) later, you at least have the satisfaction of having watched Aliens and Predators fighting for two hours.

With that in mind, I figured I'd give the sequel a rental. And how, having watched it, I can safely say that the Strauss Brothers should be tried for crimes against humanity. Honestly, these guys make Michael Bay look like Francis Ford Coppola.

The "story" picks up just after the end of the first movie. The Predators are on their way home with some dead Aliens and a couple of live facehuggers. Then an little Alien busts out of one of the dead Predators... and immediately grows up and slaughters the crew? It's hard to tell with the choppy camera work. Oh, and for some reason, it's not just an Alien, but some kind of Alien-Predator hybrid. Not that it matters... when the Predator ship crashes back on Earth, the Predalien sets about spawning more Aliens, just like a regular Alien queen. Meanwhile, some other Predator finds out about the crash, then sets off to Earth for Alien killing. Hilarity ensues.

Think I'm kidding about that hilarity? Well, the Strauss Brothers borrow just about every horror/slasher cliché they can until the whole thing becomes some sort of sick joke. Serious. The Aliens breeding spreads like an infection. Teenagers hanging out at the school pool at night get attacked. Total power outtage. A little girl sees a monster out the window, a parent doesn't believe her, and gets killed attempting to prove that there's no monster. The National Guard gets called in. People hole up in a gun store. The employees of said gunstore are killed. Stuff goes on in the hospital with flickery lights. Survivors split up over a disagreement over which way is safer. One side of that disagreement ends up dead. Survivors have to try to get to the helicopter... just before the nuke hits! The helicopter crashes, but the people aboard are saved by military people. And the mother promises the daughter that it's over and they're safe now. If only there was some way that a shady government-sponsored corporation could be involved, we could have a complete set of clichés... oh wait, at the end of the movie, a government agent turns over a Predator weapon recovered from a survivor to a Ms. Yutani... as in the shady Weyland-Yutani Corporation of the Alien films.

Alien Vs. Predator was mildly entertaining because the Aliens and the Predators were the stars of an action movie. The humans were inconsequential. Requiem makes the mistake of trying to make the movie a horror film by focusing on a menagerie of humans. It fails, because the humans are just as inconsequential. Most of the cast dies shortly after you first meet them. And when a few actually survive the whole mess, you're almost surprised. The Predator and the Predalien fighting? Just a distraction to help fill the time between the start of the movie and the nuke hitting when it becomes apparent that the human cast isn't enough to carry along the string of clichéd scenes that passes for the story.

Next time you find your Netflix queue running a little low and you're looking for movies to add to it, go with anything besides AVPR. Don't even watch this crap if it turns up as part of their Instant View collection, you're bored, and you've got an Xbox 360. If you're channel surfing and Requiem happens to be on TV, keep going, because I honestly can't think of too many movies worse than this garbage.

Final Score: F-

Sega Dreamcast Review

2009-04-30T14:16:00.003-04:00

So OutRun comes out a bit ago, and it really has that Sega arcade feel. And now Virtual-On hits, and I find myself really thinking about Sega.

Kids today might remember Sega best for shitty Sonic games, but as I said in my OutRun post, Sega made some of the best arcade games back in the day. I mean, there were racing games, and then there was Daytona USA. Or, there were lightgun games, and then there was The House of the Dead. Even genres I never liked before, like fishing, made for some truly awesome arcade games like Sega Bass Fishing and the even better Sega Marine Fishing. Bottom line is that when you were playing a Sega game, you knew it.

Sega's console history is a little bit more complicated. When Sega got out of the hardware business, it was the final nail in the coffin of an era that was already fading when Sony's upstart PlayStation started dominating the console fields. A lot of gamers today might not be able to remember a time before PlayStation, but for myself the real console wars were between Nintendo and Sega.

A number of bad decisions forced Sega to lose every time. The Genesis (Megadrive for everyone outside the U.S.) was crushed everywhere but the States, and even then only until the Super Nintendo debuted. Then there was the SegaCD add-on... and the Sega 32x add-on... and the planned Sega Neptune that would have combined the Genesis, 32x, and the SegaCD in one package. And the Saturn, which was was outpriced by the PlayStation. And finally, there was the Dreamcast.

In some ways, it's not too surprising to see why the Dreamcast failed. Sega launched it a year before the PlayStation 2 was set to debut, and they'd designed a console that was a strong competitor... against the original PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. The Dreamcast arguably did a better job of anti-aliasing than the PlayStation 2, although I think later PS2 games like God of War put to rest any debate about which console was more powerful. It lacked the DVD-ROM of the PS2 and the Xbox. It only had one analog stick. And, perhaps the most damaging of all, it was a tad too easy to get copies of games working on the Dreamcast.

The Dreamcast was still ahead of it's time in a lot of ways, though. The built-in 56k modem meant that, while not the first online console, it was the first console that a lot of us actually played online. I also can't help but notice that both Xbox consoles have shoulder triggers. Even Sony, who's used pretty much the same controller since the first PlayStation, changed the design of the back set of shoulder-buttons on the PS3's controller(s), to make them more trigger-like. Perhaps Sony was aping Microsoft and their appeal with shooter-fans, but it's not really a secret that Microsoft was copying Sega first. Finally, while EverQuest beat Phantasy Star Online out by a few months, PSO showed that MMO's could be played on home consoles.

You take the good, you take the bad, but the thing I'll remember the most about the Dreamcast was it's incredible line-up of launch titles. Growing up, I'd always been in Nintendo's camp. I had an NES and a Gameboy, and I was content to wait for the SNES without ever considering a Genesis or a GameGear. I reluctantly picked up a PlayStation since it seemed to have a lot of games I wanted, but I still had an N64 as well. The Saturn wasn't even a blip on the radar. But the Dreamcast, which would be my first foray into Sega territory, was not only a must-buy for me, but the first console I bought with my own money. And the reason was games. Nintedo could get away with launching with little more than a Mario game. I didn't get a PlayStation until Castlevania came out for it, nor did I buy an Xbox at launch. My launch game for the PlayStation 2 was Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore, a beefed up port of a game I already had for the Dreamcast.

The Dreamcast, on the other hand, sold me with Sonic Adventure, House of the Dead 2, Power Stone, and Soul Calibur. Even games like Hydro Thunder, which haven't necessarily aged well, were amazing at the time.

And while third-party developers would eventually resort to shoveling out PlayStation ports, Sega continued to deliver. Crazy Taxi, Seaman, Shenmue, Samba de Amigo, Space Channel 5, the 2K sports games, the Sega Fishing games, Virtual-On, Jet Grind Radio, Metropolis Street Racer, Virtua Fighter... Sega games were innovative, fun, or both. As a Capcom fan, I also delighted in Capcom's use of the Dreamcast as the definitive platform (at the time) for the arcade games like Street Fighter III, Marvel Vs. Capcom, Cannon Spike, Giga Wing, etc, as well as non-arcade games like Resident Evil: Code Veronica.

Today, we might be playing our modern HD consoles, but the fact remains that the Dreamcast had one of the best launch lineups to date, and a software library that justifies pulling it out of the closet for some gaming to this very day... fishing controller and all.

Final Score: A+

OutRun Impressions

2009-04-23T13:29:00.002-04:00

I know, I know... it's been like a month. I figured I'd better write something.

Well, one of the new Xbox Live Arcade games that's been getting a lot of hype lately is OutRun. OutRun is the latest version of Yu Suzuki's venerable OutRun franchise, which started as an arcade game all the way back in 1986. OutRun made an appearance, either as a port or as part of a collection, on just about every Sega System, as well as a number of non-Sega systems, before finally getting a real sequel in the form of OutRun 2, on the original Xbox. I figured I'd write about the Trial Version, since I spent all my Microsoft Points on Rock Band songs.

So what exactly is this XBLA OutRun game? Well, from what I've read, it's sort of a stripped down version of OutRun 2006: Coast to Coast, which itself was something of an enhanced version of OutRun 2. But most importantly, it's an arcade game. And no, I don't mean it's an Xbox Live Arcade game, but an arcade arcade game. See, for the younger readers, we used to have these places called arcades, where we'd go and put tokens or quarters into these tall cabinets with screens, joysticks, and buttons, or even sometimes specialized controls like guns, steering wheels, or flight sticks. Arcade games weren't like you're modern save point-filled, cut scene-riddled, single-life multi-hour epics... they were simple games with simple objectives, often simply a high score. You'd play them for several minutes, usually until you ran out of quarters.

As such, OutRun isn't exactly in the same field as games like Need For Speed or Gran Turismo. You're not modding your car, you're not competing in a racing season, and you're not trying to work you way up in a street racing gang to find out what happened to your little brother. You're just driving your Ferrari with a blonde chick who encourages you to ignore traffic laws.

In some ways that might seem a little disappointing. Indeed, the game feels a little shallow. The demo mode mainly has you driving as far as you can before the timer runs out. If it were the actual game, making it to certain checkpoints would extend the timer, but gist would be the same. The full version also has a Heart Attack mode, in which you try to excite the blonde in your car by completing certain objectives.

Still, taken for what it is, it's easy to fall in love with the game. The courses are beautiful, and the music and presentation is classic Sega arcade, from back when they were at the top of their game. Again, the younger crowd might not remember when Sega meant anything, but for older fans, few games in modern history say "Sega" quite like OutRun. I especially love the way the blonde starts bitch-slapping you when the timer runs out.

For a meager $10, I'm inclined to say that OutRun is probably worth a purchase, especially if you can talk friends into buying it and playing online with you. But one thing I do want to caution you all on is the graphics. In an era of HD games like Project Gotham 4, where screenshots of the game and photos of cars take a bit of effort to distinguish, OutRun comes to the table with Dreamcast graphics. For some, that might add to the Sega nostalgia. And maybe old-fashioned graphics are the price you gotta pay to make a game a smaller XBLA game versus a full-sized disc-based game. But considering that the last few racing games I've played were PGR4, Burnout Paradise, and Need for Speed Undercover, the downgrade to OutRun's graphics was a bit of a shock.

Samsung Omnia i910 Review

2009-03-27T11:59:00.003-04:00

Well, it was time to renew my contract, and I was looking forward to it... my old Motorola KRZR's battery was on the way out, and it was the second battery I had for it, not to mention that it was seriously falling apart. Motorola might have some slick designs, but the QC on their phones definitely leaves something to be desired.

In any case, ever since the iPhone hit the scene, smartphones have become all the rage. You can either get one or two cruddy clamshell phones that look like something you might have bought five years ago, or you can get a slick smartphone with a touchscreen. A cruddy old phone was out, but I still had a decision to make... do I keep Verizon and buy one of their smartphones, or do I jump ship to AT&T and get an iPhone?

Well, I decided to keep Verizon. As slick as the iPhone was, it wasn't doing everything I wanted a smartphone to do (although what the iPhone does do, it does exceptionally well). I was leaning more towards a Windows Mobile phone, and right around the time I wanted to renew my contract, Verizon happened to be heavily subsidizing the Samsung Omnia. I'd owned three Samsung phones in the past, as well as some non-phone Samsung electronics, and I've always been very satisfied with them, so I decided to take the plunge on the Omnia.

I'll start by saying that every gripe I have with the phone is directly linked to Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile 6.1 is still actually Windows CE 5, which means that underneath Samsung's slick TouchWIZ interface, the phone's OS looks ancient and can be difficult to navigate with a finger, as it was meant to be used with a stylus. The Omnia does come with a stylus, BTW, but the only way to carry it with the phone is tie it to the phone (sorta like a Wii wrist strap connects to a Wiimote). The result is that it looks really feminine, so I just leave my stylus at my desk. The touch screen complaints are also due to the fact that phones like the iPhone or any Android phone use capacitive touchscreens, while Windows Mobile only supports resistive ones. That again means that it was designed to be used with a stylus, not a finger, and absolutely no multi-touch (here's hoping that Windows Mobile 7 will be a little more modern). Oh, and the best Windows Mobile web browsers are almost painful to use, and certainly don't come close to the experience that Safari offers on the iPhone.

That said, there are some pros to Windows Mobile. The biggest pro is that it's an open platform. Other phone OSes might do some things better than Windows Mobile, but Windows Mobile is ultimately more versatile. And if you don't like the default applications, chances are you can find a replacement, often for free, on the internet. For example, instead of converting my videos, which are mostly DivX/Xvid avi files, into mp4 files that are a particular resolution, I can just drag and drop the avi files I already have directly to the phone. Also, a big reason I went with Windows Mobile and the reason that I bought a Dell Axim in the past is that I have a very large collection of ebooks in the Microsoft Reader format. To read my books on an iPhone would require me to download an app for the iPhone, download an matching app for the desktop, create an account at the website associated with those apps, download an app to covert my books into a format that the other apps like, use the desktop app to upload the converted books to my web account, then use the app on the iPhone to download the book from the account and read it. With the Omnia, I installed Microsoft Reader, then drag and drop my books in a "My Books" folder on the phone.

Samsung also went out of their way to make the most out of Windows Mobile. They replaced the traditional Windows Mobile Today screen with their TouchWIZ interface. This is basically a "shelf that can be opened or closed (I usually leave mine opened) with a variety of finger-friendly apps on it. To use an app, you slide it off the shelf onto the main area. In some cases, like for Opera, this will just leave an icon on your screen that you can use to open the app (or to open a folder, in the case of the game icon). But in most cases, the icon will expand, giving you two levels of functionality. The phone book app is a great example. On the shelf, it's a box with a picture of a person. Off the shelf, it'll expand so that it says "Phonebook", and under it will be whatever pictures you assigned to four contacts. If you tap the word "Phonebook," it'll take you to a list off all your contacts, but if you touch one of the pictures, it will take you directly to that contact with four options; to call their mobile, to call their work, to call their home, or to send a text message.

As far as the hardware itself, I don't really have any complaints. One great thing is that, in addition to the 8GB of internal memory, there's a microSD slot under the battery cover, and the Omnia supports MicroSDHC cards up to 16GB, so there's plenty of room for media. The camera lacks any zoom, but it takes 5MP pictures on par with my wife's dedicated camera. There's no standard headphone jack, and Samsung had to go and give it a proprietary port instead of mini-USB, but they make up for it by throwing in a data cable, an adapter for using wired headsets, and an adapter for regular headphones that includes an FM antenna. It has an elegant black, gunmetal, and chrome design that's a little taller and thicker than an iPhone, but a little narrower and lighter than my iPod touch. There's the call and end buttons common to cell phones on the front, and on the side there's dedicated volume buttons and two buttons that you can assign different functions to. One I have set to turn on the camera if you press and hold it, or to switch from portrait to landscape mode manually if you just click it. The reason I do that is because the Omnia's motion sensor seems a little flakey and either wouldn't turn the screen when I wanted to, or would turn the screen when I didn't want it to. I don't see this as a huge problem, since most of the apps work best in portrait mode for me, and several apps like the camera or the Core Video Player will automatically switch to landscape. The only other button is a touch-sensitive device. You can either set it to work like a mouse, with a pointer on the screen, or as a button. Swiping your finger along it works as a directional button, and clicking it works as the enter button on other WinMo devices.

One thing that's big for me is that the messaging app can handle both your text messages, your MMS messages, and your email. This is big for me, because I use Yahoo mail, and a lot of apps like Windows Live Mail and Outlook don't play nice with Yahoo, but the Omnia does.

Call quality and battery life are both great. At first I was charging it every day or every other day, but I think that's just because I was playing with it a lot. Once I had it set up the way I wanted it, I'm finding that I charge it probably twice a week. Mind you, that's using it as my sole phone, so that's usually a few short calls every day, a few texts, maybe check my email once or twice, and reading for a half hour to an hour, every day.

Ultimately, it's not perfect, nor is at as user-friendly as, say, an iPhone. You will have to get apps from the net to tweak it until you have everything the way you want it. But once you do, the added versatility that Windows Mobile brings to the phone make up for the problems that Windows Mobile brings, at least in my opinion, and I find myself absolutely loving the Omnia. Unlike my previous mobile, which sat on my desk unless I went out, I carry the Omnia with me everywhere, even around the apartment.

Final score: A-

Need For Speed Carbon Review

2009-03-18T00:55:00.002-04:00

I was watching TV one night when a commercial came on for Need For Speed Undercover, and I thought to myself, "Hey, that looks pretty good!" It got me thinking about the Need For Speed series, when it occurred to me that while I'd totally ignored the original PlayStation/3D0 era of Need For Speed games, I've bought every Need For Speed since the PlayStation 2 debuted except for last year's Need For Speed Pro Street. There were reasons for that. While Hot Pursuit 2, the first of the PS2 era, had awesome exotic cars and insane tracks, and the rest of the Need for Speed series had arcade-style street racing and car customization, Pro Street was a hybrid arcade-sim racer. I loved Hot Pursuit 2, and I loved the Underground series. I really loved Most Wanted, and I even enjoyed Carbon. Something about Pro Street just didn't grab my attention.

From the commercials, though, Need For Speed Undercover seemed like a return to Need For Speed Most Wanted. And I was hungry for a racing game after all the shooters and what not I'd been playing. The reviews weren't so good, though, but my desire to play a new Need For Speed held out (I also bought Pro Street to complete the collection).

Of course, after playing for awhile on the Xbox 360, I got sidetracked by Gears of War 2, and Fallout 3, and Crysis Warhead, and so on and so forth. I wound up selling my Xbox 360 copy to buy some games, and and just now got around to playing through the PC version. But I digress.

Ultimately, I'm not sure what the reviewers are carping about. Yeah, the story is pretty lame and predictible, but do you really need a story to race fast cars? The selection of cars is great, including both the Evo IX and the Evo X (I'm a HUGE fan of the Lancer Evolution family of cars from Mitsubishi), the Shelby GT500KR (aka the new KITT on Knight Rider), Nissan's new GT-R, and the Bugatti Veyron, aka the fastest car in the world until just about a year before the game's release. The city is huge, with three distinct areas. Reviewers complained that you don't have a reason to drive around since you can jump to any event from the GPS map, but I personally think that's great, since it puts you right into the action. New race types Outrun and Highway Battle join series staples like Circuit, Sprint, and Checkpoint, although I do miss Speed Trap events.

Some of the reviewers have claimed the game is too easy, but I have to wonder if those reviewers actually finished the whole game. I found myself dominating early events, but as I scraped together enough cash to buy a car when the next tier of cars became available, I found the competition to be pretty tough until I could afford to upgrade my new purchase. Perhaps those reviewers took advantage of a new feature in Undercover: the ability to use real money to immediately purchase cars and parts that are either still locked or you don't have the in-game cash for. Not something I'd actually recommend doing, though. Especially on the PC version, when you can simply use a trainer if you're that desperate.

There are a few things to complain about. The most obvious, the one that you'll notice right away, is the ridiculous amount of lens flare. That leaves the car models too shiny to often notice the incredible amount of detail that went into the car models, and it makes the scenery run together in a big orange, brown, and blue blur. Speaking of detail, was it just me, or did the 360 version look noticably better than the PC version? Finally, I might be a minority here, but I actually don't care for the cops. Nothing was more frustrating in Most Wanted than completing all your objectives for a cop mission, only to spend the next hour trying to escape from them and ultimately getting caught. While the cop missions don't seem to be as controller-tossing frustrating as they were in Most Wanted, they do seem overly aggressive. Often I'd blow by the one chasing me, only to find another just materialize ahead of me. This is especially irritating in the middle of the game, when you have missions that require you to lose the cops AND get to a certain point in a certain time.

On really nice thing about Undercover is that it doesn't overstay its welcome. Just when you think you've seen enough of Tri-City and are starting to go through the motions, you'll find yourself doing the games final "jobs."

In any case, disregard any reviews you read except for this one, because all those "professionals" that gave the game a 5 (IGN) or some other poor score are simply full of crap. Even the 7's (Game Informer, Gamespot) are probably off-base (although one could argue about the merits of a number-based system, which is why I don't use one). Undercover might not be quite up to the excellence that Most Wanted was, but it trumps both Pro Street and Carbon, which makes it the second-best NFS game on the Xbox 360. IGN's "buy Midnight Club LA instead" doesn't even take into account that NFS and Midnight Club don't offer the same kind of experience and never has (I should mention that I'm not a huge fan of the Midnight Club series).

The bottom line is this: if you're a fan past Need For Speeds, Need For Speed Undercover is a great game and worthy addition to the series. If you're expecting Burnout, Gran Turismo, Ridge Racer, or Midnight Club, go buy Burnout, Gran Turismo, Ridge Racer, or Midnight Club, because Undercover, as the title clearly states, is a Need For Speed game.

Final Score: B

Street Fighter IV Impressions

2009-03-16T11:04:00.002-04:00

I could write a review, because I don't think there's a lot of difference between running through Arcade as Ken or running through it as Fei Long. But I'm feeling kinda lazy (even though I haven't posted here in a week), and I do want to play it a bit more before I pass final judgment.

So... as I'm sure you've heard, despite the slick new 3D character models, the game is 2D fighter. The characters cannot move in a 3D plane, and if you've played one of the previous Street Fighter games, you're actually familiar with the game mechanics of SFIV already.

Indeed, SFIV feels more like Street Fighter II than Street Fighter III. All of the characters from The World Warrior and SFII Turbo are there. Cammy and Fei Long are both unlockable, but Dee Jay and T. Hawk are gone. There are some new characters, and a few characters from the Alpha series, but aside from cameos in the characters' movies, none of the new characters from Street Fighter III.

Fans of SFIII might complain, but I think this is a good thing. For starters, the characters that were new to SFIII were, if you ask me, the least memorable in the entire series. And while SFIII had the most technical fighting, it wasn't as friendly toward beginners. Street Fighter IV has that same pick-up-and-play feeling that Street Fighter II had.

There are a few new tricks, though. The Super Combos that were introduced in Super Street Fighter II Turbo, which I don't think got a lot of play here in the US, are still a part of the game. Like Super Turbo, you have to have a full gauge to use your Super Combo. But it fills slowly. You're unlikely to fill it in one round. Indeed, you're unlikely to fill it at all, because your EX gauge energy is often better spent on EX moves. EX moves are like powered up versions of your regular special moves. They do more damage, but they eat up a quarter of your EX gauge.

Super Combos, as flashy finishers or as last-ditch attempts to get back into a fight, have largely been supplanted in SFIV with Ultra Combos. They get their enegy from the Revenge gauge, which only fills when you take hits. It fills fairly quickly, though (enough to pull off one or two ultra combos a round). Ultra combos are quite flashy, but functionally similar to Super Combos.

Another new technique is the Focus Attack. Ideally, you'd do a focus attack right before being hit. You'll take the damage, but instead of getting knocked back, you'll immediately unleash a counter. If the counter connects, you'll actually heal damage. Advanced players might find that Focus Attacks add a new layer of depth, but honestly I kind of think they're more beneficial to the CPU than most players. The problem is, the computer will pull them off perfectly at just the right time, but when I try to use them, more often then not the computer will be attacking with a combo. Which brings us to the down side of Focus Attacks... they only work for the first hit. If a combo hits with more than one attack, the Focus Attack will be canceled and you're going to eat a lot of damage.

After playing incredibly tight games like Street Fighter Alpha 3 (in my opinion, still the pinnacle of Street Fighter), SFIV also feels a bit unbalanced. I deliberately turned the difficulty down to the easiest setting, and set Arcade Mode to single-round matches so that I could quickly unlock all the characters. I found myself blasting through with Ken with almost no effort. I've even used Ken to unlock Akuma. But with those same settings, I found myself beaten and continuing almost 30 times over a 45 minute period using Dan. It was almost as bad with Balrog. Some of those defeats were perfects for the CPU. This leads me to believe that either the characters are sorely unbalanced, or that the final boss might flip out and go apeshit on you regardless of the difficulty you set it on. Either way, its an impediment to enjoying the game to the fullest. SFIV can be played online against humans for a good challenge; when I'm just trying to unlock all the characters, I don't need to be throwing my controller in frustration.

Despite these gripes, though, SFIV is a really good game. I'm having more fun with it than I have with any version of Street Fighter III or Street Fighter EX. This is the most enjoyable Street Fighter since Street Fighter Alpha 3, honestly. The presentation is updated enough that it feels slick and fresh, with fully rendered backgrounds, although some character models are better than others. But the core gameplay is classic Street Fighter through and through. Street Fighter fans and fans of 2D fighters should definitely be thining about picking this up.

Climate Change

2009-03-09T23:35:00.002-04:00

I know, I started a blog to review stuff, then occasionally write about completely different stuff. Humor me.

Anyway, a major issue in politics and the media is global warming, or global climate change if you really want to be politically correct. And if you get all your information solely from what people on the TV tell you, you either think climate change is a fact and we all have to get those little swirly light bulbs or the earth will explode. Or perhaps you're aware that there's a debate, but you think that the two sides are enlightened scientists with their facts and numbers assuring us that climate change is the result of human activities versus religious nutjobs who deny climate change entirely.

But is it really that simple?

In one sense, the facts don't lie. Average global temperatures have indeed increased since the 1800's, when people started to keep detailed records. But consider also, that we're talking about temperatures over a span of 100-200 years... a mere moment to our 4 billion year old planet. And when we look back over thousands or millions of years, there's evidence of plenty of climate change. We have evidence that the Earth was actually warmer than it is now during the time of the dinosaurs. And we also have evidence of at least four major ice ages, the most recent about 20,000 years ago. Clearly, the Earth has gone through periods of heating and cooling before the rise of mankind, and long before the Industrial Revolution.

Indeed, while we've seen an overall trend in warming over the last 100+ years, it's worth noting that global temperatures actually dropped in 2007, then again in 2008. In the past month, I've heard both that global warming is going to be way worse than we though, and that the global warming trend is slowing.

Now, consider this: the famous Great Red Spot on Jupiter is shrinking. Nearby, a second red spot is growing, and it might actually become larger than the original. Apparently, Jupiter is also going through a period of climate change. I think it's safe to say that mankind can't be blamed for that one.

Mankind's effect on the global climate here on Earth is debatable. I've already mentioned that the earth has gone through periods of warming and cooling. We all learned in school that the four seasons on Earth are caused by the fact that the Earth is tilted in relation to the sun. If you imagine a flat surface radiating out from the Sun's equator (called the ecliptic), and a physical pole running from the Earth's north pole right through its south pole, that pole would currently be tilted about 23.4 degrees from the ecliptic. As the Earth rotates, it wobbles like a top that's starting to slow down. The Earth's title relative to the ecliptic ranges from about 22 degrees to 24.5 degrees in a phenomenon known as obliquity. Obliquity relates to another phenomenon known as procession. Procession is a combination of obliquity and the Earth's movement around the Sun and considers how much the Earth is tilted towards or away from the face of the Sun.

One other important factor in the Earth's motion is eccentricity. By now, I should think that anyone reading this knows that the Earth revolves around the sun. Most of you also probably know that the Earth's orbit around the sun isn't a perfect circle, but actually an ellipse. Eccentricity describes how far away the ellipse is from being a perfect circle. What you probably don't know is that the eccentricity of Earth's orbit is not constant. When given numerical values, Earth's eccentricity ranges from a nearly circular 0.005 to a high of 0.058.

Lastly, the Earth doesn't just fly in a simple loop around the sun like NASCAR drivers around a track. The Earth actually drifts up and down relative to the ecliptic, like a horse on a merry-go-round. This phenomenon is known as orbital inclination.

The period of time between maximum and minimum values for obliquity, procession, eccentricity, and inclination can be estimated and predicted. And scientists have noted some evidence of connections between these mechanics and periods of climate change on Earth.

This isn't to say that mankind is or isn't responsible for the warming trend, but I would suggest that mankind may not be the sole factor. So this begs the question: what do we do about global climate change? The Kyoto treaty has been estimated to cost the U.S. as much as 20% of our entire GDP. If human activities are only part of the cause, what do we expect to achieve with Kyoto? Indeed, any benefits from Kyoto are further mitigated by the fact that Kyoto has exemptions for "developing" countries like China and India.

Global Warming might not even be all that bad. Statistically, people get sick less in the winter. A shorter, warmer winter also means less heart attacks and muscle injuries from shoveling snow, less injuries from falls on icy surfaces, and less automobile accidents from poor road conditions. Also, warmer weather would mean more usable land, longer growing seasons, and more crops. Global warming could actually be an ally in the fight to end world hunger.

At the end of the day, I'm not saying that we can't or shouldn't be a little more green. We all want clean land, clean air, and clean water. Making an effort to use less electricity isn't just good for the environment, it can save you money. And investing in alternative fuels will help break our dependence on foreign oil as much as reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But I am suggesting that the global warming hysteria has to stop. The alarmism is used by scientists to get more money from governments, and it's used to scare up votes for politicians promising to do something about it. We're not all going to die in 10 years. We don't need to (further) wreck our economy over it, and we certainly don't need to strap machines on cows in an effort to keep their farts out of the atmosphere.

Mike Reviews The Watchmen

2009-03-08T00:51:00.002-05:00

What do the following items have in common?

The Watchmen
From Hell
V For Vendetta
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Answer: they're all crappy movies based on the works of Alan Moore. And while I haven't read any of the comics they're based on, I'm not letting Moore off the hook for the movies; I did read his run on WildC.A.T.s back in the '90s, and Jim Lee's creation is, to this day, trying to recover from the garbage that Moore wrote into it in the name of making it more "relevant" and "thoughtful." If Alan Moore would shave, get a hair cut, and never write again, the world would be a more magical place.

Of course, I'm not reviewing Alan Moore. I'm supposed to be reviewing the Watchmen. So on to it.

In an alternate timeline, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union are running hot because the god-like Doctor Manhattan almost single-handedly won the the Vietnam war for the U.S, Nixon is on his fifth term as President, and costumed vigilantes are outlawed. The aforementioned Doctor Manhattan and former Watchman Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias are working on an alternative, unlimted energy source. Meanwhile, another former Watchman, the Comedian, is murdered. This leads the slightly psychotic Rorschach to try to reunite the old team on the suspicion that the killer might deliberately be targeting them. Sounds simple enough, right?

It could have been, if the plot wasn't so meandering. Perhaps you have room to write in a 12-issue comic book series that you don't on the silver screen, but the Watchmen just dragged on and on. The character of the Comedian is explored in a series of flashbacks other characters have of him, ultimately culminating in a revelation that may have served some point Moore was trying to make about human nature, but really drags what could have been a movie of a little more than an hour into a three hour nightmare, because aside from fleshing out the backstories of characters that you still don't give two craps about, it does NOTHING to advance the plot.

The movie had way too much of one other thing... glowing blue dicks. You see, Doctor Manhattan, one of the only two remotely interesting characters in the entire film, was turned into a blue god-like being during the cliche scientific experiment gone awry. He can teleport, he can see his past and future, and he can alter matter on a whim. Now, as time goes by, he becomes more and more out of touch with humanity, and Moore thought a great way to illustrate that in the comics would be to start him with a bunch of human habits that he would eventually lose, along with his clothing. Now, you see that tiny, almost understated package he was drawn with in the above picture? Doesn't work as well when you've got several inches of live action cock flopping around in a movie. Instead of noticing how he's given up wearing clothing as a sign of his deteriorating connection to humanity, you find yourself thinking, "Guy's got nearly unlimited power, so why can't he put some damn pants on"?

The other interesting character was Rorschach. Rorschach is interesting because he's a man who follows his own moral code unerringly, without concern for whether or not his moral code conflicts with societies. When the movie takes the time to explore the events in his life that shaped his character, you find yourself empathizing with him... which is apparently the opposite of what Moore wanted. To hairy, hippy Moore, Rorschach is simply supposed to represent the violent ultra right-winger.

Sadly, the movie spends a lot of time trying to explain to us who the other characters are, but sadly, despite their pivotal roles in the story, the movie completely fails to make any of them even remotely interesting.

Ultimately, I would have to read the comics that the movie is based on before I feel free to critic the story. But I feel qualified to tell you that if it was any good, it didn't translate to this train wreck of a film. A train wreck, I might add, with BLUE GLOWING DICKS.

Final Score: D

More Twitter stuff

2009-03-02T17:41:00.002-05:00

I know some people check this blog fairly often, and I know I update like once, maybe twice a week. For those of you who check this site often, but are too lazy to read my Twitter stuff, I've now set things up so that you can read my last three Twitter posts from this site. Now, I'm viewing this site with a 1680x1050 resolution, and I can see it without scrolling, but I'm sure there are a lot of you using 1200x900 or 1024x768, and you guys might have to scroll down to see it. So, I'm writing this post so you don't miss it! It's right over there on the right, just under the "About Me" section, just above the "People Who Care What I Think" section.

F.E.A.R. 2 Review

2009-02-26T23:19:00.004-05:00

As you might have noticed from some of my earlier posting, I loved the original F.E.A.R. And although they weren't as good, I even had some fun with the two F.E.A.R. expansions, Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate. So if there was one game I was really excited for this year, it's F.E.A.R. 2. So how does it stack up?

In short, very well, but it's not without its flaws.

F.E.A.R. 2 begins close to the ending of the original F.E.A.R, and since the expansions weren't created by Monolith, they're tossed out of F.E.A.R. canon. You take on the role of Michael Beckett, a special forces-type on a mission with your buddies to retrieve Genevieve Aristide, the president of Armacham Technology Corporation. Those of you who played the first game will remember that Armacham is the company responsible for creating the Replica soldiers you spent so much time shooting at in the first one, the company responsible for making Paxton Fettel their psychic commander, and the company responsible for taking a little girl named Alma, locking her away, getting her pregnant, taking her babies away for projects, locking her back up, then throwing away the key and terminating her life support. You may also recall from the first one that, whether she's truly alive or dead, Alma's pretty pissed.

Although the game doesn't really require you to have played F.E.A.R. and know all the details, the story does suffer a little bit in that it does expect you to know enough about Alma. Remember, the first F.E.A.R, while it did make you jump, didn't rely on it. It was about the atmosphere generated by seeing creepy visions without knowing the meaning and piecing together Alma's story while chasing Fettel. In F.E.A.R. 2, the cat's already out of the bag (or the undead psychic is already out of the Vault, as it were).

While this does take away some of the mystery, F.E.A.R. 2 makes up for it by ramping up on the atmosphere. Basically, F.E.A.R. 2 is scarier than the first game. The game makes better use of its environments, including a creepy elementary school. The music is creepier. It adds new enemies, including ghosts, Armacham experiments gone awry, and perhaps scariest of all, a kind of zombie that animates dead bodies. And while, in the first game, you eventually learned that Alma really didn't do anything besides show you creepy visions, Alma will actually attack in this one.

There are other improvements as well. You can carry four weapons now instead of three, and just like the first game, all of the weapons have a visceral sense of lethality to them. The AI is smarter, and enemies will use cover better, attempt to flank you, and accurately toss grenades to flush you out from your own cover. Naturally, the graphics are greatly improved from the original. There's a lot more variety in the levels than the endless basements of the original game. And information isn't from answering machines. This time, you find bits of info you can read, and your HUD will highlight them if you're close enough to them, so you won't miss too many.

There are some things in the game that other reviewers seem to have had issues with. Yes, there is a certain amount of head-bob in the game. It was barely noticeable to me. Yes, you do drive a big mecha. I don't know where the big gripe is here... there were enemies with mecha in the first game; why shouldn't you be able to drive one? Yes, it's true that the game isn't really scary when you're driving one, but that's not a bad thing. It doesn't make the game less scary, it gives you a break. The two (and only two) brief times you drive the mecha, the mecha is like a sanctuary, and leaving it to go inside a dark and crumbing building, knowing that you're leaving that safety behind, adds to the experience. And yes, there are quick-time events. But they're hardly the big deal that they're made out to be. Unless you count mashing the melee button to shake an enemy off of you a QTE (which I don't), there are only two in the entire game, and both are actually pretty memorable "boss" fights. And even those two aren't timed sequences of buttons, but more like mashing a button until you're in the right position, then hitting another button.

While I don't consider those gripes to be flaws, there are some issues I do want to mention. I've already mentioned that the story is weaker (although the ending totally makes up for it). At times, the music would change sharply and I'd get that radio static that meant something supernatural was happening, but I missed it because I was looking in the wrong direction. The game is also a lot easier. Armor is everywhere, and it seems to take more punishment so that your health rarely goes down. You can carry less health packs, but often when you're hurt and enemy with drop a health injector that instantly refill some health. The extra weapon slot wasn't that useful... for most of the game, I still used the assault rifle or a shotgun. I took the Hammerhead (the successor to the Penetrator from the first game) in another, since the Penetrator was my weapon of choice against more heavily-armored foes in the first one, but I could have finished the game without firing it, since I usually took a heavy weapon like a laser or rocket launcher in the fourth slot, to be used on the heavies in this game. The on deviation from that was when I would occasionally swap an mostly empty heavy weapon for one of the areas with snipers, as a sniper rifle was pretty much necessary to take them out. After avoiding it for so long, I was a little bummed that the PC version required me to install Steam, register the game with Steam, and be online to play it, even though my copy is a retail box copy. And lastly, you can tell it's a console port. Leaning, a move from the first F.E.A.R, is gone in F.E.A.R. 2 because there's nowhere to map it on the 360's controller... which you can use on the PC version, as it falls under the Games for Windows banner. The most telling sign that it was developed for consoles first, though, is that the game only displays in 16:9 widescreen. If you have a 4:3 monitor, the game is confined to a band about one third the size of the entire screen. Even if you have a 16:10 monitor (which most widescreen LCD computer monitors are), there's a little bit of empty black space at the top and the bottom.

In the long run, these complaints are minor nuisances that keep a great game from being perfect. Like the previous F.E.A.R. games, F.E.A.R. 2 is a competent enough game that the shooting alone would make it a solid game. If you take the time to sink into it's atmosphere, though, it becomes a game that's scarier, if not quite as good overall, as the original.

Final Score: A

Is Blogger broke?

2009-02-22T22:10:00.002-05:00

I guess not. At least, not anymore.

Mike Reviews the Samsung ToC T220.

2009-02-21T00:28:00.004-05:00

One of the things I like about this monitor is that, in addition to it being fast, having a good resolution, vibrant color, yada yada yada, is that it's pretty stylish. It's sort of a solid black that fades to translucent red near the bottom, under another clear part to make it extra shiny (like a PSP, sort of). There's five control buttons on the right side of the monitor, behind the clear panel and out of sight. The power button isn't even a button. There's just a spot on the screen you can touch to turn it on and off. When it's on, there's a reddish glow underneath that spot that you can almost see in the previous post. Another nice thing is that there's a plastic clip that holds the power, DVI, and center speaker cable neatly behind the monitor's stand. Too bad, the cables going back up to the computer aren't tucked away as neatly. For the most part, those details are lost in the other picture, because of the light from the monitor. So, I decided to post another picture.

I'm not going to write a long review. More technical details can be found in the previous post. I will say that you can't see from my pictures how nice the picture is on this thing. It really has to be seen to be believed.

Bottom line, this is the absolute best monitor on the market under $300.

Final Score: A+

Mike Reviews His PC Gaming Setup

2009-02-20T23:12:00.004-05:00

Reviewing, bragging... what's the difference?

Okay, a little backstory here. When I built my computer, I only had a handful of PC games, as I'd considered myself a console gamer. I was just setting out to build a powerful computer in case I wanted to play a game, because my previous computer was five years old, not that great, and couldn't really handle one of the few games I did have.

Having built the computer, I kinda wanted to put it through the paces, so to speak. Around the same time, a Half Price Books opened nearby, and they actually had a pretty good collection of older games. So, it started with the original Call of Duty, which I'd got cheap, and Crysis, which I'd got new. After playing those, I was getting the hang of playing with a mouse and keyboard, and I was adding new cheap games to my collection left and right. It was convenient... I'd bought a laptop for my wife before I built my computer, and she was enjoying surfing the net while watching TV, and playing games in my computer corner meant that we weren't going to argue over who got to use the TV. I came to prefer gaming on my computer.

When Gamestop started taking reserves for F.E.A.R. 2, I reserved the PC version without thinking twice. After all, I'd already bought, beat, and loved the original F.E.A.R. on PC. But I downloaded the demo on Xbox Live, and the demo got me thinking that for a game like F.E.A.R, directional sound is probably a big deal. So I had to get new speakers. And when the game turned out to be widescreen only, giving me naught but a little band of game across the middle of my aging 17" 4:3 monitor, I had to upgrade the monitor, too. Which brings us to the total.

A quick breakdown:

The computer, seen on the left, is a totally home-built system. It's in a full-size (and very heavy) Antec P182 case. Inside the case is a DFI Lanparty P35 Dark motherboard, a 3.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 "Wolfdale" processor, and 3GB of PC2 6400 Kingston Hyper-X RAM with heat spreaders. A 650 watt Antec TruPower Trio helps pump out enough juice to run a BFG GeForce 9800GTX+ Overclocked Edition NVIDIA graphics card.

The monitor, seen in the middle, is a Samsung Touch of Color T220 22" widescreen LCD monitor. Samsung advertises a 20,000:1 contrast ratio, although what defines those numbers is hardly standardized. What is standard, and important for a gamer, is the 2ms response time. Response time, for those of you who aren't familiar, is the time it takes for a monitor to receive instructions on what to display from the computer to the time the monitor actually displays the information. The lower the number, the faster the monitor. While this isn't going to be a big deal for most people who just browse the internet or type documents into Microsoft Word, response time is important for gamers. At 2ms, this monitor is a little over twice as fast as most modern LCD monitors, which usually clock in around 5ms. The monitor supports a 1680x1050 resolution. Images and text are very sharp, and colors are vibrant and rich.

The speakers, seen to the left, right, and clipped to the top of the monitor, are just part of the sound story. There's a pair of speakers for rear channels, and a subwoofer under the desk. Combined, they're the Logitech X-540 speaker system. At 70 watts, it's not going to outperform most home theater setups, but considering that those are for whole rooms and the X-540 is just for my desk area, they do the job. Highs are a little tinny for music, but the midrange and low sounds are great, and the overall effect is a very full sound that's great for gaming. The remote (the source of the green light to the bottom left of the monitor) is also nice too... while it is tethered to the subwoofer, it provides easy access to the volume and bass knobs, the power key, and a headphone jack. It also has a button to turn on matrix mode. Matrix mode takes a stereo source and plays it over all five speakers, sort of like Dolby Pro Logic. I almost never use it, though, as I think that music that's recorded in stereo sounds the most natural when it's played in stereo.

The mouse and keyboard aren't anything fancy. It's just a Microsoft Wireless Desktop Elite Keyboard and a Microsoft Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0. The keyboard's target audience is the web-browsing, Office-using, media-playing average user. There are media keys, internet shortcut keys, and Office shortcut keys. Nothing special for gaming, but gaming keyboards are expensive. And really, as long as it's got WASD keys (plus R for reloading, C for crouching, space for jumping, F for interactions, and numbers across the top for switching weapons) it's got everything I could want. As for the mouse, the handy thing with it is the two small buttons near where my thumb rests on it. I can't even recall what function Microsoft suggests for them, but I simply mapped them so the one in the front is G and the one behind it is V. Then I always set my shooters so that the right mouse button is for aiming down the sight, G tosses grenades, and V performs a melee attack. I find that handy, because my right hand can take care of any attacks I need to make, while my left hand can concentrate on movement without fumbling for keys too far from the WASD keys.

Also not shown is my desk chair. It's a comfy padded-leather executive chair. Not much more to say than that.

I could find some flaws with my setup. I could have used a quad-core processor, or an SLI-compatible motherboard. But the fact is, by the time there are enough applications that can actually take advantage of more than two cores, I might be thinking of replacing this entire computer with one centered around a Core i7 processor. In the mean time, instead of buying a second 9800GTX+, I could just replace the card with a single GTX 2-series card. I saved $100 by sticking with the Core 2 Duo, and $200 versus a comparable SLI capable motherboard, and given that the only games that have come close to stressing my system are Crysis and Crysis Warhead, it was a pretty fair cost/benefit trade-off. And frankly, even Crysis with the settings tweaked to give me 30 frames per second looks better than any games I've played on either my Xbox 360 or my PlayStation 3. And sure, I could have hooked it up to a beefier sound system, or hooked it all up to a bigger monitor that supports an even higher resolution. But I don't need beefier sound for my little computer corner, and 22" is more than enough for as close as I sit to it. The biggest thing that could use some improvement would probably be the mouse and keyboard, but the ones I have still do the job. So really, pointing out what could be improved (or in some cases, upgraded down the line) is really less about genuine flaws and more like nitpicking.

Bottom line: I can walk into a store, pick up any game off the shelf, take it home and install it on my computer without even looking at the system requirements, and run that game at or near the maximum settings, on a simply gorgeous display with surround sound. People who just use their computers for the internet might not see what all the fuss is about, and kids with more (of their parents') money than brains might brag about how they built a computer with a Core i7 processor and a trio of Radeon HD 4870s Crossfired and look down on my setup, but the simple fact is my setup is elegant, functional, more than enough for what's out there now, and upgradeable for when I do encounter a game it can't handle, which is all most PC gamers could ask for.

Final Score: A

Blacksite: Area 51 Review

2009-02-17T17:07:00.002-05:00

A few years back, you might remember an Area 51 game, released by Midway, for original Xbox, PlayStation 2, and PC. No? Seriously, it had David Duchovny and Marilyn Manson doing the voices for two of the characters?

Well, it's probably okay that you don't remember it, because despite being developed by the same guys, there's almost nothing connecting the two games. In fact, Blacksite starts about as far from Area 51 as you could imagine... in Iraq.

Indeed, the developers did their very best to cram an anti-war, anti-military message into the game. You hardly fight any actual aliens... the majority of the enemy are the "Reborn," soldiers who were tortured an experimented on by the government, who are now rebelling. One might suggest that a game like Blacksite was hardly the best soap box for the developers to preach from, though. But I digress. Whatever your personal politics, you can probably overlook the message if the game is good, right? So is Blacksite a good game?

Not exactly.

For the most part, it's a fairly average shooter. The staples are all there... shoot guns, aim down the site, melee if the enemy gets in your face, and toss an occasional grenade. Health is handled in the now-standard vision-turning-red-until-you-get-cover-and-heal-to-full. You hardly even need to switch weapons; aside from a few instances when you need a rocket launcher or a sniper rifle, you can just keep at it with the standard assault rifle. There's plenty of ammo scattered about for it, after all. Toss in some basic vehicle bits and some extra basic squad mechanics, and you get the idea. The key thing here is that while Blacksite doesn't screw any of these mechanics up, it doesn't really do anything to excel at them either. It's totally average. Yes, you can have fun playing it, but there are better games on the market.

Not only is the game average, it's short. I'm talking shorter than Crysis Warhead, which at least justifies its lack of length by being an expansion instead of a full game. I finished the game in three sessions, and none of those sessions were lengthy ones. It seemed like just when the game really started to get going, it was over.

The plot, aside from being political, is poor even by first-person shooter standards. While on a mission looking for WMDs in Iraq, you and your squad find some sort of alien artifact. So you leave. Years later, there's a situation. Apparently, Uncle Sam has reinstated the draft, and some people decided to band together because they didn't want to go. But it turns out that they're not some draft-dodging hippies, they're the Reborn. The Reborn have some tenuous connection to Area 51, so you go there to kill them all. The end. Seriously.

I'm honestly not surprised that the game hasn't got the best reviews (a Metacritic score of 60 for the PC version, which is the version I played). Even if the gameplay was great, I'd probably have taken a few points off for the length. But it all fairness, Blacksite isn't a bad game. It's just a short, average one. And if you don't expect too much from it, it's probably worth a rental, or a purchase from a bargain bin (I got my copy for $7.95).

Final Score: C

X-Blades Impressions

2009-02-16T18:14:00.002-05:00

If there's one thing that's true in life, it's that sex sells. For example, most men will not pay to look a girl, but most men will pay to see that same girl naked.

X-Blades seems to be banking on selling the sex. The heroine of the game, Ayumi, has some odd belts and buckles to give her more of a "costumed" look, but it doesn't change the fact that her main ensemble appears to be a bikini top and a g-string.

Let's get something out of the way here... X-Blades isn't a bad game. It's a pretty-simple hack-n'-slash sort of game, with a few interesting ideas thrown in. In addition to shooting her gunblades, or chopping with her gunblades, Ayumi has a variety of magic attacks she can do when she has enough rage. The rage meter fills when Ayumi takes hits, or when she slices into enemies. The meter fills quickly, but just a few attacks can deplete it. As Ayumi battles, she can collect souls that she can use to unlock more magical attacks.

The problems stem from the fact that these ideas are executed in the most mediocre fashion. The entire game takes place on some island, where the architecture is pretty much the same throughout. This leads to bland, uninspired levels, many of which you revisit at different times. The plot is a paper thin one; Ayumi tells you she's a treasure hunter, and she tells you she found a map that lead her to the island. Once there, she nicks an artifact and finds herself cursed. Desperate to remove the curse, she immediately begins chopping bad guys. Speaking of chopping bad guys, most enemies will either swarm you or stand still and shoot at you. Combat consists of chopping and taking damage until you can spam a magic attack, then starting over. The magic attacks boil down to the same three spells, just with different elemental variations. There's your ranged attack, a magic that adds elemental damage to your melee strikes, and an area of effect attack. "Levels" consist of going into a room, breaking things to look for souls or combat enhancing artifacts, and killing enemies until they open the door to the next room. This sort of thing gets boring after awhile, so if I don't review it, it's because I got bored and didn't finish it.

Ultimately, X-Blades plays like a budget game. There's some simple hack-n'-slash fun to be had, but the emphasis is on simple. The problem is that they're charging full price for it, apparently because you look at Ayumi's bum the whole game. And while I might say X-Blades is worth renting or checking out if it was budget-priced, there's simply no way I can recommend it at full price.

F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate Review

2009-02-09T21:27:00.002-05:00

Just in time for the release of F.E.A.R. 2, I present my review of Perseus Mandate, the last expansion to the original F.E.A.R. game, and if the aggregate reviews at Game Rankings are to be believed, the worst.

Well, dear readers (all, what, six of you?), it pleases me to to tell you that IGN, Gamespot, PC Gamer... they're all full of crap. While not quite up to the original F.E.A.R. in terms of scares and story, Perseus Mandate is a huge step up from Extraction Point.

Perseus Mandate is a standalone expansion, meaning that it doesn't require the original F.E.A.R. for you to install and play it (on the Xbox 360 and PS3, it's part of F.E.A.R. Files). Rather than being a short extra few levels tacked onto the end of the original game, Perseus Mandate is a longer game that takes place during the events of the first game. You play the role of an unnamed sergeant in a second F.E.A.R. team sent in to investigate Armacham just after the murder of Aldus Bishop in the first game.

Perseus Mandate gets big credit for trying to mix up the environments a little. The sergeant's adventures take him through some sewers, an Armacham office, the subway, and a forgotten part of the city buried and built over years ago. And while F.E.A.R. and Extraction Point certainly had their share of big time shootouts, Perseus Mandate introduces a new faction, the Nightcrawlers, and ratchets up the action with more enemies and more weapons to pick up.

In fact, the game seemed almost all action. My biggest complaint was that, while you do see a few supernatural visions, for the first half of the game, they're few and far between, and really not that scary. But the second half of the game takes place after the explosion at the Origin facility, after which the action dials back a bit and the supernatural scares start to take over. And since there are three different types of ghosts as enemies, that shadow that makes you jump might not just be there to startle you.

The story, sadly, doesn't make much more sense than Extraction Point. There's no reason why the sergeant should have the Point Man's enhanced reflexes or psychic visions. And a lot of those visions are of Fettel, who's death and subsequent reactivation of the Replica forces didn't make was an issue in Extraction Point as well. There's also the whole race to the secret Armacham facility that's NOT the Vault, but is A vault, and somehow has a sample of Alma's DNA. It's really a shame that there's these little loopholes, though, because the bit with the Nightcrawlers and a government conspiracy makes for material.

On the whole, if you liked F.E.A.R, go ahead and give Perseus Mandate a try. It might not be quite as good, and it has no bearing on the official F.E.A.R. story, but it's still a competent shooter with an interesting, what-if sort of take on the events from the first game.

Final Score, B+

F.E.A.R. Extraction Point Review

2009-02-04T12:06:00.002-05:00

F.E.A.R. Extraction Point is the first of two expansions for F.E.A.R, sold by itself, as part of the F.E.A.R. Gold Edition, and the F.E.A.R. Platinum edition for PC and as part of F.E.A.R. files for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Unlike the original game, though, Extraction Point was developed by Timegate, since the original developer, Monolith, had already been bought by Time Warner. So, how did Timegate do?

As the kind of expansion that requires the original game, Extraction Point is a short little addendum to the original game, with about four hours or so of play time. The plot picks up where the original game left off. A helicopter crash leaves the F.E.A.R team stuck in Auburn, with the Point Man separated from the rest of the group. The ultimate goal of the game is to get to the titular extraction point for a new ride out of Auburn. Of course, it'd be an awfully boring game if getting to the extraction point was easy. That's when Paxton Fettel shows up. The Replicas reactivate, and the game stops making sense, because Fettel died in the orignal F.E.A.R. At least he has the decency to acknowledge this information in-game. Needless to say, Monolith doesn't consider Extraction Point (or the other expansion, Perseus Mandate) to be a canon part of the F.E.A.R. story.

The plot isn't the only problem. The team at Timegate has no real sense of pacing or subtlety. As a result, they throw lots of stuff at the beginning to try to scare you, but it's so gratuitous that it fails entirely. Extraction Point doesn't really get scary until the last level of the game. Worse, all of the environments are totally recycled from the first game. Even the church at the beginning quickly devolves into an office building reminiscent of the Armacham building. If one of the few complaints I had about the first game is that the environments were kind of bland and the same, recycling them was hardly a bright move.

Oh, and the answering machine messages are back too. Except this time they serve no purpose whatsoever.

Extraction Point is at it's best when you're having a big shoot out with Replica forces. The enemies are as smart as ever, and some of the battles will be quite memorable (I'm looking at you, parking garage). And Timegate solved the weapon-hording problem by simply having you run low on ammo. Whenever you'd fine a cool new weapon, chances are you had one that was low on ammo to dump.

It's hard to really recommend Extraction Point. If you got it with the F.E.A.R. Gold or F.E.A.R. Platinum collections, it's short and there's a few fun fights that might make it worth playing. But to pay full retail for it or F.E.A.R. Files, the game is too short and bland to get your money's worth.

Final Score: C

F.E.A.R. Review

2009-02-02T11:33:00.002-05:00

With the sequel coming out in just about a week, and since I mentioned it in my "5PC Games You Should Play" post, we're going to get a little retro and talk about F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R, or "First Encounter Assault Recon," is a special military unit created to deal with paranormal threats. And when the mysterious Paxton Fettel telepathically takes command of an army of genetically-clone super-soldiers, then starts killing and partially eating employees of Armacham Technology Corporation, well, that falls a little outside the scope of local law enforcement or your run-of-the-mill military types. You take the roll of the F.E.A.R. team's "Point Man," a man who's past and even his true identity are a mystery.

As the Point Man tracks Fettel, he has strange, often terrifying visions, often including a little girl in a red dress, whom he eventually learns to be named Alma. And when others around him are violently killed by a paranormal force, solving the mystery of Alma and how she relates to Fettel
isn't just necessary for his mission, but for his survival.

At first glance, F.E.A.R. might seem like any other first-person shooter. Sure, the Point Man has a slow-mo gimmick, which might not be ubiquitous in FPS games, but it's certainly not a new concept. Encounters are generally very satisfying, though. Every gun in the game, from lowliest pistol to the trusty shotgun, radiates a sense of lethal power. Enemies jerk when hit, bits of scenery will chip off and fly away, gas canisters will explode and shower the area around it with flames, and dust will leave the battlefield covered in a haze. Enemy AI is smart, and will look for cover, lob grenades at you before moving up, and attempt to flank you.

While this would be enough to make for a good shooter, it's the horror elements that truly make F.E.A.R. stand out. Little is explained to you at the beginning of the game, so when you start having visions, they make little sense and leave you wondering what the hell is going on. The environments are broken into open areas for massive gunfights, combined with narrow, poorly lit corridors that leave you wondering when something is going to happen. Developer Monolith does a wonderful job of subtlety. Very overt instances of supernatural events are few, and the more minor ones are spaced out just enough that you don't get used to them, but you don't relax either. Combined with the often very dark levels, you'll really start to wonder if something actually happened, or if your mind was just playing tricks on you.

F.E.A.R. does have it's flaws, although they can be easily overlooked. For one, you can only carry three weapons. This means that you'll settle on three fairly early on, and you'll be inclined to ignore other weapons you find in favor of keeping the ones you already know are effective and you already have ammo for. For me, this was an assault rifle, a shotgun, and the Penetrator, a wonderful gun that shoots spikes that can penetrate armor on stronger foes and pin weaker ones to the environment. Speaking of environments, although the game takes place in a few different areas, you'll hardly know the difference. There's really only two types of environment in this game: dark mazes of basements, and creepy abandoned office building at night. Finally, while not having a clue what's going on adds to the tension, most of the story information comes from hacking laptops you find, or from messages left on answering machines in the buildings you're tracking Fettel through. This often leads to the player not really knowing who people are, why they're supposed to care, or what's going on even after the game is over. It's worth taking the time to find out, though, because once you know, the story's actually pretty good, and the game's ending is great.

Fans of first-person shooters will enjoy F.E.A.R. Fans of horror games or Asian-style horror movies like The Ring will also enjoy F.E.A.R. Fans of both will find F.E.A.R. to be an instant classic.

Final Score: A

Crysis Warhead Review

2009-01-31T11:18:00.004-05:00

For many PC gamers, Crysis is still a benchmark, despite being over a year old. You either have a computer that can run it, or you don't. For those that don't, maybe they're content, or maybe they're thinking about upgrade. Those who have computers that can run Crysis are satisfied in the knowledge that they can go to a store, pick up a game off the shelf without looking at the system requirements, buy it, install it, and play it with the graphics turned up.

More recently, the Crytek people have delivered us Crysis Warhead, a game that's billed not as a sequel but as a standalone expansion. Warhead uses the same engine, is shorter than Crysis, and the story takes place during Crysis. However, Warhead does not require Crysis to run.

To give a quick recap, an alien spacecraft was discovered on some island, and both the Americans and the North Koreans are after it. Raptor team, a special Delta Force unit equipped with special "nano muscle suits," was sent in to rescue some scientists that the North Koreans had kidnapped. The team is scattered pretty much from the moment you start playing, and the original Crysis focuses on the faceless soldier with the call sign "Nomad." Warhead tells the tale of Sergeant Michael "Psycho" Sykes, one of the more memorable characters from the first Crysis, who apparently had some adventures of his own while Nomad was doing his thing.

The gameplay in Warhead is identical to the first Crysis. Psycho has the same nano muscle suit that Nomad does. The suit has its own energy bar above your health bar, and it has four modes of operation:

-Maximum Armor: The default mode, which uses the suit's energy to absorb damage. The suit's energy will be depleted before your health is, and as long as you're not getting hit the suit's armor will recharge.

-Maximum Speed: Probably the least useful ability in my opinion. With this ability, you can run really fast, but the suit's energy drops pretty fast in this mode. When it runs out, you're back to normal speed, and the suit's energy will recharge. It recharges at a moderate speed if you hold still, but if you're still moving, it recharges at a trickle, meaning this ability is only good for very short bursts.

-Maximum Strength: In this mode, you have increased melee damage, can lift heavier objects, and can throw objects farther. All you'll really use it for, though, is to jump higher and take less damage from high falls.

-Cloak: With the cloak, you can become invisible. The energy gauge will constantly drain in this mode; just a little if you're still, but at a more moderate rate if you're moving. You'll almost constantly shift between Maximum Armor and Cloak. The Cloak is great for moving undetected from cover to cover, or getting the drop on unsuspecting enemies.

The original Crysis moves at a better pace. You spend a lot of the game looking for the scientists and fighting Koreans, but you eventually move through the aforementioned alien spacecraft, after which you're pretty much done fighting Koreans and shift to aliens (I don't think I'm spoiling anything here, since the aliens are on a screenshot on the back of the box). By the time you fight the aliens, you're tired of fighting Koreans on a tropical island, and by the time you finish the game, you realize that fighting Koreans is more fun than fighting aliens.

Due to the fact that Warhead takes place in the middle of Crysis, on a different part of the island, the aliens are introduced much sooner, and you'll often find yourself alternating between fighting aliens and fighting Koreans. This serves to annoy you with aliens much sooner, but also keeps the alien encounters to a minimum. Combining the much earlier annoyance with a shorter game that has fewer distinct environments makes Warhead less entertaining, although still good.

One thing Warhead was touting over the original Crysis is its ability to be run on more hardware than the original. Generally, I found that to be not necessarily true. Basically, they just changed the names of the settings, so that instead of "Highest" you have "Enthusiast" and instead of "Medium" you have "Mainstream." Now, maybe the engine's been optimized so that Warhead on Mainstream looks better than Crysis on Medium. But I played the original with all settings on a mixture of High and Highest, and Crysis ran fine for me until the snow level, at which point the particle effects dragged my frame rate down until I turned things down to Medium, and I played Warhead with all settings on a mixture of Enthusiast and Gamer until, again, I ran into snow and had to turn things down to Mainstream. To me, that's pretty much the same results for both games. In any case, both games have the same minimum requirements.

Ultimately, Crysis Warhead is a competent and fun shooter, that's a bit weaker than the original due to pacing issues and a story that's reliant on knowledge of the previous game. Fans of the original Crysis should definitely check it out, but if you haven't played Crysis you're better off playing the original first... if your computer can handle it.

Final Score: B-

5 PC Games You Should Play

2009-01-30T21:51:00.002-05:00

Since I haven't finished anything to review lately, I figured I'd talk about games I've played in the past, and maybe expand it to cover different gaming platforms. And everyone can feel free to list their own five games in the comments (although I'd hold off on picking five games for other systems until I get around to it).

Without further adieu...

1. Neverwinter Nights - Bioware's original Neverwinter Nights is simply the best computer-game version of Dungeons & Dragons ever conceived, even over Obsidian's sequel. Sure, Planescape or Baldur's Gate might have Neverwinter Nights trumped on story (although NN's is nothing to sneeze at, especially the Hordes of the Underdark expansion), but NN uses D&D's 3rd Edition rules. And while the graphics are primitive by a lot of modern games, the Aurora engine holds up better than the Infinity engine that powered those older games. NN's age means that if you own a computer, you can probably play it, and the Diamond version (Neverwinter Nights plus its three retail expansions) can be found easily for $19.99, which is a steal because the expansions are as good as the main game, and nearly as long.

2. Portal - No, not Half-Life 2, and no, not Orange Box. Honestly, for a game as highly praised as Half-Life 2, I though that it was a boring mess of crawling through sewers and stacking boxes, bragging about its physics engine instead of being a fun shooter. Portal, on the other hand, is sheer brilliance. While it controls like a typical first-person shooter, it's actually a puzzle game. It starts off easy enough, but later levels require intense though and careful placement of portals. That kind of gameplay alone might have carried the game, but the game's dark humor and the impressive personality of GLaDOS, a computer who's the only character with dialog in the game, elevate Portal to must-play status. For $9.99, you really have no excuse not to.

3. Fallout 3 - My choice for Game of the Year 2008. Bethesda managed a miracle... retaining the dark humor of the previous Fallout games, porting the top-down isometric gameplay of those Fallout games to Oblivion's engine, and actually make it more fun than Oblivion. An instant classic... just as I'm still playing Neverwinter Nights nearly 7 years after it was first released, I hope to be playing Fallout 3 in 2016. For now, though, Fallout 3's a modern game, so while older hardware might run it, you'll want modern gear (or an Xbox 360) to really make the most of it. Also, due to its relative newness, Fallout 3 still retails for $49.99 (PC... Xbox 360 and PS3 users can still expect that $10 "next-gen" surcharge).

4. Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords - Take a cookie-cutter RPG story involving the return of an ancient evil, retain the stat-building, leveling, and item collection of most RPG games, but ditch your average system for RPG combat, and replace it with Bejeweled. What you'll end up with Puzzle Quest. While that might (or might not) sound lame on paper, the RPG elements create a cohesion that transforms the Bejeweled gameplay from timekiller to obsession. As a plus, if your computer can run Bejeweled (if it can't it's time to stop using Windows 98 and upgrade already), your computer can run Puzzle Quest, which can be had for $19.99.

5. F.E.A.R. - Lame acronym aside, F.E.A.R might at first seem to be just another first person shooter in a market already over-saturated with first person shooters. A few minutes with the game will reveal it to be one of the better ones... it avoids the cliche space marines vs. aliens and Allies vs. Nazis that make up 75% of the genre, the AI is smart, and each gun, even the pistol, provides a sense of lethal power as bits of the environment fly apart under a hail of your gunfire. But what really moves F.E.A.R to the head of the pack is the way it blends its excellent gunplay with horror elements. Inspired by Japanese horror films like the Ring, F.E.A.R is a wonderfully psychological game. You will have visions of a little girl, and you will see the results of her supernatural handy work... but they're spread out just enough that they don't wear thin, but at the same time keep you on edge. As you wander a dark an empty office building, you'll start to wonder if that movement you saw was actually in the game or your mind playing tricks on you, so when you finally walk into an enemy ambush, you're actually glad for it, because in that moment guys with big guns trying to shoot you is all you have to worry about. While F.E.A.R was considered, like Doom 3, to be a graphically demanding benchmark sort of game when it was released, it's relative age is catching up to it, so even modest hardware (like a GeForce 6 series) can handle it pretty well. The Platinum Edition can be had for $19.99, which includes the original game plus the two expansions. The expansions aren't that great as they were outsourced to another developer, and are considered non-canon as far as Monolith (who developed the main game) is concerned, but for $19.99 the main game alone is worth it.

Mike Reviews Twitter

2009-01-27T16:52:00.005-05:00

I guess I'm Tweeting now? I blame the peer pressure.

This means you have to avenues to access my thoughts via the web: here, and my new Twitter account.

Why have both? Again, I blame the peer pressure. But, I suppose it'll go like this. This blog is for reviews. If I want to talk about whether or not I like something, so that you may benefit from my experience, I'll write something detailed and cohesive here. Twitter will be for short, random, and possibly pointless posts based on whatever happens to be in my head at the moment. Also, when I get around to putting up a new (and often infrequent) post, I'll link it on Twitter, for those of you who find checking two separate sites a little too strenuous.

Anyway, you can check out my Twitter here:
http://twitter.com/mikeszekely

Oh, yeah, and I said I'd review Twitter. Well, while I think my blog is useful, I'm not sure why anyone would care if I was hungry or not. But people seem to like it, so...?

Final Score: C. I guess.

Windows 7 Beta Watch

2009-01-16T17:41:00.003-05:00

In the whole scheme of "I'm a Mac" vs. "I'm a PC" people, I guess I'd have to say that I'm a PC. Sure, I play with different Linux distros sometimes, and I'll admit that some of them are quite good (my favorite is Kubuntu 8.04). And yeah, I've even flirted with the whole Mac thing. I bought a MacBook when they first came out with the Intel processors, and later I even upgraded it Tiger to Leopard. I even think that, for most day-to-day net surfing and what not, Mac OS X beats Windows in a lot of ways.

But I keep finding myself coming back to Windows. Part of it might be familiarity... I've been using Windows since Windows 95. Part of it might be the fact that I like to build my own desktops, and you can't really do that with Macs. And part of it is definitely gaming.

Whatever the reason, I use Windows, and I've kept Windows pretty modern. I felt like I squeezed all I could out of XP, and I did migrate to Vista. Sure, Vista has suffered a lot of (often justified) criticism, but I'm at a point where XP is just too primitive for my tastes.

Naturally, I've been following Microsoft's news of Windows 7 with some interest then. Microsoft has been very keen on promoting the fact that it has a lot of the best features of Windows Vista, but they're also quick to point out how well they've trimmed the fat. They also like to point out the new taskbar, which I personally think they've included so that Windows 7 has an obvious visual difference from Vista, but I digress. The end result, they said, would be a shiny and modern operating system that would be so much more efficient than Vista that even a netbook could run it.

When the beta went public, I downloaded it and tried it on my spare desktop. And, unfortunately, I had issues. Whenever I tried to use the graphics card I'd installed in it, Windows would crash, even in the installation period. It installed and ran if I used the integrated graphics, though. After installation, it seemed mostly okay, but I had no sound (even though Windows thought everything was fine in that area), and my wi-fi adapter didn't work.

I don't use my spare much, but I remembered Microsoft's promise that it would run on netbooks. And while I use my main desktop for 95% of my computing, I do use an Asus Eee PC 900HA every day, if only to run my instant messenger client (I use Pidgin, if you're curious) to chat with my buddy who uses Google Talk at work. Having my IM client running on the netbook frees up the desktop for gaming, after all. And it's always irked me that I've moved on to Vista for my computer, my wife's laptop, and my HTPC, but I was still stuck with XP on the netbook.

So, to save myself some time down the road, I partitioned the hard drive on the netbook to keep a small portion for XP, so I could go back to it easily, and installed Windows 7 on the other partition. And I must say, it's a much better experience than on the desktop.

For starters, pretty much everything worked from a clean install. The touchpad works, even for multi-touch things like scrolling. Windows thought it was an ordinary mouse, though, so I had to get software from Asus' website to control the touchpad's features. Windows also reports that the Ethernet port isn't working. Asus has drivers for that, but I didn't bother with them, simply because the built-in wi-fi adapter works fine. Other built-in features, like the SD card slot and the built-in webcam, are also working fine. Windows does report that there's an unknown device connected... at the moment, I have no idea what it is or what it's for, but the netbook seems to be functioning perfectly.

Performance-wise, I thought maybe the netbook was a little slow. I think this is because I'm used to doing my computer activities on a desktop I built for gaming. The netbook runs XP just as slow as it does Windows 7, if not slower. And while Engadget might be reporting that Sony's new VAIO P netbook doesn't run Aero, and Gizmodo might be saying that a Dell Mini 12 doesn't run Aero, but my Eee PC runs Aero fine... and I still plan to upgrade the RAM later.

For software labeled "beta," Windows 7 seems very stable. So much so, that I expect that it'll be pre-installed on computers in time for the back-to-school sales in August, rather than the late-December/early-January date that mark's Vista's anniversary. For day-to-day surfing the internet and office work, most people could use Windows 7 without an issue. For power users, there's a few hardware issues that need to be worked out yet, and probably some software compatibility issues too (although those should be minimized, since Windows 7 uses Vista's core kernel).

All-in-all, Microsoft is well on their way to keeping their promise. Windows 7 is delivering the best of Vista with more polish, less headaches, and less bloat, and it does indeed run on netbooks. Whether you've been using Vista since launch, or whether you've been clinging desperately to XP after hearing about Vista's bad press, Windows 7 is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Folie à Deux Review

2009-01-14T10:31:00.005-05:00

Bear with me, since I've never written a music review before. And it seems inherently more difficult... with a movie you can talk about the plot and the acting. With a game, you can talk about mechanics and gameplay. Music seems to come down to "I like it" or "I don't like it" for nebulous reasons like "it's too whiny" or "it sucks."

Fall Out Boy's new album, Folie à Deux, does not suck, though. I'd actually say that it's quite good.

I've been told that it doesn't sound like Fall Out Boy. I don't think that's entirely accurate, though. When you compared their previous works, like Infinity On High to From Under the Cork Tree, Infinity On High sounded quite different. And it is true that Folie à Deux sounds a little bit different from either album. The difference, though, is less jarring than Panic at the Disco's transition from music people their age would listen to to music their parents would listen to. I don't think Fall Out Boy is switching genres on us or anything like that. I would suggest that they're growing as musicians and becoming a little more versatile, and in doing so setting them apart from every other high-school pop-punk/emo band flooding the market these days.

And for the most part, they're successful in their attempt. Most of the songs on the CD have a sound and style that's unique from any of the other songs on the CD, and they run the gamut from 70's style rock to synth rock to aping Panic at the Disco's 60's sound. Yet, even as they experiment with these different styles, they never stop sounding like Fall Out Boy. The end result is a CD that might not be as good as Infinity on High was, but is definitely close. In fact, if I had to find any faults, it's that the Deluxe Edition bonus track "Pavlove" is really good and I wish it were on the actual CD, and that if Pete Wentz can get married, have a baby, and write more mature songs, then he should really drop that stupid emo look.

Songs I'd really recommend from Folie à Deux:
"I Don't Care"
"Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown on a Bad Bet"
"Tiffany Blews"
"w.a.m.s."

Final Score: A+

Gundam Battle Universe Review

2009-01-13T13:14:00.003-05:00

Not long after the PSP was released, Bandai was quick to start bringing Gundam games to Sony's new handheld. The thing to remember here is that Gundam in Japan is as big, or bigger, than Star Wars is here in America, so just like Star Wars games sell here regardless of quality, Gundam games usually spend some time on Japanese best-sellers lists, even if they stink.

One of the earliest Gundam games on the PSP was Gundam Battle Tactics, and it actually wasn't too bad, and the game enjoyed three sequels: Gundam Battle Royale, Gundam Battle Chronicle, and Gundam Battle Universe, each a little better than the previous.

Unfortunately, Namco Bandai USA has so far ignored the Gundam Battle series, instead bringing us the extra terrible PS3 launch title Gundam Crossfire. No wonder Gundam doesn't catch on in America! Luckily, the gameplay is pretty simple, and overall the game is fairly import-friendly.

When you start a new campaign in Gundam Battle Universe, you first choose a side, either the Earth Federation Space Force, or the Principality of Zeon. After you create your pilot, choose an operator, and create a wingman, you're taken to the campaign selection screen. To build up your pilot properly, and for the sake of doing everything chronologically, it's best to start with the original Gundam series. At this point, you'll be able to select from Training, or 77, which refers to the year 0077 in which the One Year War takes place. Missions here will be from first Gundam, the 08th MS Team, and War in the Pocket. As you complete missions, you'll unlock more pilots, missions, and mobile suits. After you finish the a year's campaign, you'll be able to select new ones. Each time you select another campaign, you'll have to select a new force and operator, but you'll use the same pilot and wingman. Eventually, you'll unlock 83 (Stardust Memory), 87 (Z Gundam), 88 (ZZ Gundam), 93 (Char's Counterattack), and Extra. Extra contains a variety of extra missions that don't require a faction.

The game has a ton of stuff to unlock, too. To get it all, you'll have to finish 77-93 three times so that you've used all the factions, as well as get S-ranks on all the missions, then finish all the Extra missions at least once. This will do things like unlock simulation mode (which allows you to use Earth-only suits in space or space only suits on Earth), unlock pilot restrictions (let's you use non-newtypes in newtype-only suits and vice versa), and unlock era restrictions (let's you go back and use your 93-era suits back in 77, etc), hunting mode (gives you a chance to capture and use an enemy mobile suit), etc. Counting mobile suits you can get in Extra mode, there's a ton of suits from the original Gundam show all the way to Gundam F91, including variations, manga, novel, and other side-story suits like the ones from Gundam Sentinel or Hathaway's Flash.

Missions themselves are pretty simple. You pick a suit, pick a suit for your partner (or opt to have your partner sit it out), then you're placed onto a map with an objective. Sometimes the objective is to destroy all the enemy mobile suits, to get to a certain point, to defend a certain target, or to collect boxes and deposit them in a marked location. The action is pretty straightforward. You have a variety of main weapons you can cycle between, one sub weapon, and a melee attack. You move my pressing a direction the d-pad. "Jumping" is done with the X button, and double-tapping a direction will do a short dash in that direction. You can block with the R trigger, and the L trigger locks onto a target. The analog stick can cycle between targets of an equal level by pushing left or right, or change levels by pressing up and down (mobile suits are average level targets, buildings, tanks, and boxes are low level targets, and capitol ships are high level targets). By pressing an attack while blocking, you'll execute a charge attack, which uses some of your special meter, or by pressing your main attack with your melee attack, each mobile suit can unleash a devastating special attack that uses an entire special meter. Every time you complete a mission with a mobile suit, that mobile suit will earn points that can be spent to upgrade it between missions. Most missions only take a few minutes to complete, which perfectly suits a portable device like the PSP, but the large total number of missions for each faction, plus replaying the missions for S-ranks, means you'll actually be playing Gundam Battle Universe for a long time before you've completed everything.

Gundam Battle Universe isn't perfect, though. The first Gundam Battle game was solely set in 77. The second one added added 83, and a few bonus 87 missions. The third added a full 87 campaign, and teased at 88 and 93 with the Extra missions. GBU gave us the full 88 and 83 campaigns, then teased us with Hathaway's Flash and F91. They need to just get it over with, and add campaigns for the rest of the Universal Century (Gundam Unicorn, Hathaway's Flash, F90/F91, Crossbone Gundam, and Victory Gundam), with Extra missions being reserved for the alternate universe Gundam series (G Gundam, Gundam W, Gundam X, Turn A Gundam, Gundam SEED/SEED Destiny, Gundam 00).

The second, and more major complaint, is that the 77, 83, and 87 campaigns in Gundam Battle Universe are cut and pasted from Gundam Battle Chronicle. This makes Gundam Battle Universe feel more like an expansion, since those of us that played Chronicle have played more than half the game already. The 88 and 93 campaigns, and the extra pilots and mobile suits they add, still make Gundam Battle Universe the definitive Gundam game, on any system... at least until the next Gundam Battle game.

Final Score: A-

Luxor 4: Quest for the Afterlife Review

2009-01-08T15:38:00.004-05:00

I'm sure most of you, at some point, have heard of Zuma? The casual puzzle game had a stone frog that shot colored balls out of its mouth, and matching with other colored balls caused them to disappear. It was something of a phenomenon for awhile. I personally never cared for it, having only played it a few times, but my wife was really into it at the time.

While not the first game of this genre (that'd probably be Puzz Loop, aka Ballistic), it and games like Bejeweled ignited something a of a casual games renaissance (no doubt spurred along by new platforms for casual games, including iPods, the Xbox Live Arcade, and the Nintendo DS). And given Zuma's popularity, it was bound to inspire a few similar games.

One such game was Luxor. Luxor traded Zuma's Incan inspiration for an Egyptian one. And while both games are played by shooting colored balls at a track of colored balls to make matches and eliminated all the balls on the track before the balls get to a certain point, Luxor made one big change. In Zuma, the frog is fixed to a certain point on the board, and rotates to aim a shot. In Luxor, the shooter is always at the bottom of the screen and always shoots straight up, but the shooter can move left or right across the entire screen. The difference is subtle, to be sure, but in my opinion made Luxor a much more fun game. Still, casual games have never really been my thing, so I was content to play them on my laptops, which couldn't run serious games, whenever I found myself stuck with a bit of time to kill.

Since the first Luxor game, we've had numbered and unnumbered sequels, Xbox Live Arcade, PS2, PSP, and Nintendo DS versions, and a Mahjong spin-off. The most recent Luxor, Quest for the Afterlife, is the first one to make me take the series seriously.

The basic gameplay is identical to the previous Luxor games. Perhaps taking a cue from the successful game Puzzle Quest, though, Quest for the Afterlife ties the gameplay together with a simple store with simple goals.

Nefertiti and her husband, Akhenaten, are historically known for changing Egyptian religion from a polytheistic one to the monotheistic worship one Aten. The game's plot centers around priests of the old gods stealing some of Nefertiti's artifacts, as well as the canopic jars containing the remains of Akhenaten, and then scattering all over the world. Nefertiti charges the player with reclaiming the jars to secure Akhenaten's place in the afterlife. There is a map of the world, and the player travels from city to city, playing tradition Luxor puzzles along the way. Regaining Nefertiti's artifacts give the player abilities (like instant travel to other cities, or double points).

The story is enough to motivate me to play, but Quest for the Afterlife is still, ultimately, a casual game. While not the kind of game I'll sit for hours and really get into, it's fun enough that I'll play a few rounds when I want to have a little fun but lack the time to play a more serious game.

Final Score: B-