Online Gaming: It’s not you, it’s me!

BEHOLD. The powerful tool of multiplayer gaming in 1994.

Remember the time when multiplayer gaming was an enormous hassle?  I recall renting a SNES multitap adapter ; a magical device that let four controllers be connected to one system.  Fire up some Super Bomberman, get some friends to bring their controllers, and the fun would last for hours.  Sure it might SOUND crazy for you and two buddies to drive to a friend’s house, whose not even home, and accost his mother to borrow a gamecube controller, but back before the internet was an important part of any console (except the Wii because Nintendo set sail for fail on that one) these were the kinds of things that had to happen to truly experience a game with friends.  The present day is a different beast of course.  Friends lists are one of the most important features on Xbox or PS3.  However, even more so, the ability to just randomly jump into a game and shoot strangers in the ass, then virtually teabag them, is to me still a relatively new, strange, and completely horrifying experience.  The ability to connect to the masses to play games is for me not quite as an awesome prospect as it probably should be.  I wonder:  am I the problem or is everybody else?

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

I am not a car guy.  As long as my car gets me from point A to point B without losing parts on the way, I’m pretty happy.  So when a game like Gran Turismo 5 comes out, my reaction is pretty meh.  I know there are tons of gear heads out there that want to adjust the torque or over inflate the tires or upgrade the johnson rod to eek out that last few horsepower on their virtual dream machine.  That does nothing for me.  Sounds suspiciously like math, so f that.  What I want from a driving game isn’t amazingly accurate real world handling.  I want total insanity.  I want cars doing things that would destroy them in real life.  Now, for those of you out there like me, forget Gran Turismo with its fancy PHYSICS and REALITY.  Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is our over the top salvation.

Call of Duty: Black Ops OR How Activision prints money

So ok, everybody hates Activision, we get it.  They’ve gouged us on map packs, probably screwed over original Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward, and are generally just a giant corporation hell on bent on making money at the expense of the little guy.  Since Call of Duty is so huge we have the expected backlash of “oh it’s a terrible game only morons buy it”!  But let us be honest for a second, dear readers.  If Call of Duty, as a game, truly sucked, it would not sell over 5.6 million copies on the first day it was released.  Yes, you read that right.  Treyarch, who was kind of the “off-year” CoD developer and most recently made the precursor to Modern Warfare 2, World at War, had the helm for Black Ops.  Considering the state of Infinity Ward at the moment, Treyarch has suddenly been thrust into the alpha dog position for the biggest franchise in gaming.  So, how did they do?  Forgetting all the money and hype and myriad of opinions about the idea of Call of Duty, we do have a game in front of us here.  Treyarch hasn’t done anything drastically different but they deliver a very slickly produced game that delivers on its promises.  An engaging single player, absolutely insanely large multiplayer, and even the return of ZOMBIE MODE (ooooooo scary) make Black Ops an excellent addition to ye olde game library.

Bayonetta: Because Kratos isn’t a hot chick

Many games out there aim for realism now a days.  Not real in setting or story, but take a look around any FPS and “dark and gritty” is going to be pretty much the norm.  Bayonetta is not such a game.  Bayonetta looks reality in its stupid face and then uses a giant bird hair demon to poke out its eyes.  It is this embrace of the insane that makes the game worth playing.  Sure, you might not know what the hell is going on but the game presents such a sexy and stylized world to play around in that the total lunacy becomes charming instead of annoying.

Arkham Asylum: It’s Batman time

I was at work today, minding my own business and thus proving just how awful of a reporter I am when my boss came into my office and dropped off the most recent page he had been working on.  It was the obit page, also known as the dead page, what with all the people who are on there who have allegedly kicked the bucket.  Sometimes, along with their life histories, we have a picture to go with the brief article.

Today I found myself staring into the face of Ras Al Ghul, brilliant genius and enemy of Batman.  From reading the man’s history, I found no traces that he had dedicated most of his long life to the study of thwarting death with the use of the Lazarus pits, nor any word that he had clashed with the bat often during his wheelings and dealings in the modern world.  This made sense to me since here, in reality, Batman rarely fights with anyone in hand to hand combat at all.

The Force Unleashed OR What you wish Obi-wan did to that jerk in the Cantina

There is a sad sad history of games based on movies being terrible.  The Last Airbender? Yuck (although, apparently, better than the movie!). Iron Man? Yuck. One good movie, two bad games. Luckily for us gamers in recent times the trend has started to get a little better. Star Wars lends itself quite well to video game land and the franchise has spawned enough games to have some hits and misses. With Bioware hard at work on The Old Republic, the potentially awesome Star Wars MMO we’ve been waiting for, I decided to revisit another part of the Star Wars universe via Xbox360 in the Force Unleashed.

Red Dead Redemption: City slickers need not apply

Actually, this game is great for city slickers and range riders alike. But still! The co-op missions come out tomorrow, so I thought it high time I weigh in on the game that made rdr cougar an internet meme.

I feel that I am more qualified than my counterparts Elrood and Tophat to discuss this game because I actually played Gun three years ago. Nobody else knows what that game was, but believe me when I say it shared a lot of similarities with RDR. I’m a big fan of sandbox games and running around on a horse brandishing a six-shooter is ridiculously appealing to me. That being said, buying RDR had not occurred to me until the Monday before launch. Elrood, Tophat and I were playing a little MW2 or Borderlands that night, I forget which, when a mutual friend joined our party exploding with excitement about the midnight release of RDR. The buzzword for the evening quickly became posse and in no time I was making plans to drive to Best Buy the next day. As I went to bed with thoughts of train robberies duels with my friends galloping through my head, the planets were aligning to ensure my disappointment.

Modern Warfare 2: Whaaaaaaat.

Okay, I suppose I’ll get this out there early, since I know how the first person shooter crowd usually goes.  I am bad at Modern Warfare 2.  It’s the truth, plain and simple.  On XBox Live I am no xXDarkAssassinXx, NoobPwner49, or SniperSaurusRex.  Though, come to think of it, that last one it pretty awesome.  How would the dinosaur use a sniper rifle with its tiny, ineffectual dino-claws?  Also, what would a dinosaur even need to assassinate in the first place?  Hmmm.

Why the Ending of Heavy Rain Fails

Editors Note – Two things! First, the following are my thoughts on the ending of Heavy Rain. There are MASSIVE SPOILERS that start almost immediately. Stay away if your planning to play the game and haven’t yet. My review of Heavy Rain is spoiler free, and is actually the second thing I want to mention. If your someone who doesn’t care about the spoilers but is not familiar with the story of Heavy Rain, the review gives you a basic outline that will help you greatly in understanding whats below. So check that out first.

Heavy Rain plants the idea of a playable character being the villain very early on. Main character Ethan Mars has blackouts. They start following an incident in which he and one of his two sons are hit by a car, resulting in death for his son and a massive head injury for him. He will sometimes find himself coming too in the middle of a street, holding an origami figure in his hand. The “Origami Killer” whose identity at this point is a mystery, has been kidnapping and eventually drowning young boys.

I don’t need to break out any fancy charts and graphs for you to see where this is going. OMG! ETHAN IS THE KILLER! Of course he isn’t. It’s too obvious. The game, wisely I think, uses this to build drama in the character of Ethan. While we as video game nerds see past this easy solution, it’s understandable we as Ethan can’t. When Ethan’s other son goes missing it enables the game to deliver some powerful scenes of Ethan questioning whether any part of himself, even ones he has no control over, can harm the son he loves so much.

Heavy Rain (Fighting Crime with Jerky Controller Motions)

The problem is choice. Remember when The Matrix movies said that and it felt pretty deep in the theater, but then later you realized it mostly pretentious mumbo jumbo and you wished there was less talking and more upside down Kung Fu? It turns out that the mumbo jumbo part was mostly spot on, but choice is the core concept of Heavy Rain.

Heavy Rain calls itself an “interactive drama”. The game involves controlling one of four characters at a time using contextual controls, which is the first departure from tradition. There is no control scheme that you can memorize. The X button might be making you drink orange juice, put a car in gear, throw a punch, pull a trigger, or shoot a basketball. Heavy Rain also makes what is probably the most intuitive use of the PS3′s six-axis motion controls in the consoles lifespan thus far. Pushing open a window? Shove the controller forward. Swinging a two by four at somebody’s head? Quick left! While initially the entire control system can be confusing, by the time the action really starts rolling your comfortable enough to be able to handle it. The situation onscreen dictates how the controller will be used (or not used, in some cases) and changes in practically every scene of the game.