For Sunday: Fallout New Vegas Trailer

Note: completely devoid of gameplay. But as long as they don't trash the main game with DLC again, I'm certainly in.

More Fallout: New Vegas News & Previews

Wow. Haven't put up a For Sunday in ages.

Do We Want Mainstream Oscars?

Over the last few years, the Oscars have tried to do more and more to appeal to the average moviegoer - who is generally the kind of person who has seen every Martin Lawrence but doesn't understand why the show spends all this time showing dead people they've never heard about.

The slow compromise has been more attention given to animations, special effects and sound effects. Then, the appeal of blockbusters started to take over - and we had what could be called "The Peter Jackson Effect". Make a movie big enough, make it pretty - and pack the audiences ... and the Oscars may just love you.

Don't get me wrong, I thought Lord of the Rings was pretty impressive movie-making, by nearly any measure. Not just special effects, but directing, screenplay and acting as well.

But this latest crop?

Avatar?
OK, it pushes the envelope in a lot of ways technically and the industry is putting hopes and dreams that it will bring in avenues of sweet 3D cash. And it was a lot of fun to watch. It was also derivative, cliche, predictable and about thirty minutes too long (if it wasn't for the effects - the length would have been very unwelcome). It was an interesting movie and a good movie, but not a great one.

Kinda like Inglourious Basterds. I haven't written a full review yet, but short version is that Tarantino may be finally hitting a stride, but that doesn't make a bombastic epic like Basterds much more than a shock film with really great sets. Again, this movie was fun - and certainly better drama than say, Kill BIll, but we're not really talking about a superior film in general. I can make similar hay out of District 9 and Up. I haven't seen The Blind Side, but ... it's a Sandra Bullock feel good movie. I'm not really planning on rushing out to do so.

The Hurt Locker is probably the one that deserves it the most that I've seen (which sadly does not include Up in the Air. Again, full review pending - but I found Hurt Locker fascinating. It had an almost horror genre mentality to war, with some really pretty great acting and impressive directing.

Usually, Oscar buzz gives rise to movies which truly deserve some attention but wouldn't normally have gotten it. I doubt Slumdog Millionaire would have been on my fast track if it hadn't gotten so much nomination hype. I think the slow degradation of that just got a massive kick in the pants. Then again, I don't have to pay for the Oscar Night extravaganza - which has seen lagging ratings year after year - but I do want to know what the industry are truly great movies ... not just truly popular ones.

TV Watch: Lost, LA X

I've had my ups and downs with Lost as seasons have gone on - but I'm really looking for to this finale season after seeing the premiere episodes. I was really worried that the bomb was going to force a repeat of the "get back to the island" concept - but what we have is far better. With the "sidebacks" looking into the alternate reality where the island is just a watery grave, we can see a great distinction between plots for how the characters have and could have developed.

The on-island reality looks like it will continue to mine the current mythology pretty well, and the writers have conveniently made an excuse for any continuity weirdness (for both realities, I suppose) by having set off a bomb literally in the past. Most importantly, though, the on-island stuff plays to the shows strengths - some mystery, some danger, some complete weirdness. I think we can safely make it to end of the show without any pitiful cabana boy story lines.

The big question, of course, is - will they explain everything? We're closing in on The Smoke Monster, but we're still pretty confused about the whispers, the lists, the misplaced items (like ... planes), etc. I assume the writers don't have a checklist of things they need to cover, which will be interesting in some points (will they explain the Adam & Eve corpses from Season 1) and not so relevant in others (OK, so they're mutant polar bears ... we can move on). I'm assuming there will be a big reveal towards the end of the show which covers at the very least the origin of the island, it's ability to heal and teleport around. What was with all the stuff about kids?

How it controls fate, though, that will be a good one. But we did get one big clue this episode, I think. Smokey Locke wants to go "home". He is bullet proof. He can read minds (or perhaps, just the memories of the deceased). He can transform into the evil smoke beast. He knows Richard when Richard was "in chains". He really has it out for Jacob, and to a certain extent - Jacob's followers. Smokey Locke and Jacob have been on the island for a long, long time. Jacob, Smokey Locke and Richard all seem to know each other - and live a long time without changes in appearance (probably because they can all change their appearance).

So my crazy theory for this week is: Jacob, Smokey Locke and Richard are all the same kind of animal. They're all Smoke Monsters. And they might well be aliens. I'd say they're just some primordial creature from out past, but Smokey Locke wants to go home - which seems rather E.T. to me.

This would be mean that any sighting of Old Smokey may or may not be Smokey Locke. Which could also explain why the creature is sometimes a big killing machine, and other times takes the kinder, gentler route.

What I don't quite get is the boundaries. Both Jacob and Richard have been seen off island. Old Smokey mostly stuck to one section of the island (possibly cordoned off by ash), and travels through the odd, mechanical sounding, vent system. But - we don't know which "monster" was which (i.e. those could be the chains of which Locke speaks).

In summary - great start to what I'm hoping will be the strongest season since the first.

Game Play: MAG

In a very singular way, MAG is fairly innovative. The schtick here, if you haven't heard, is that MAG can pit up to 256 players in large scale tactical matches with an impressive library of matchmaking and lag management. MAG is online only, except for a handful of training missions, so these tools are good because it means players can pop in the disc, pick a gametype and become part of a squad within a very large battle.

In terms of the overall gameplay, Zipper has clearly done its homework. In the main gametype, Domination, you'll find a series of objectives which directly effect gameplay. For instance, destroying the defending team's anti-aircraft guns may mean that you can send in a helicopter to use as a spawn point. There's not an overwhelming use of vehicles, which I actually find pretty refreshing, and they're generally mobile spawn points with large guns.

These objectives can be called out by your squad leader as a "fraggo", which means it will get special treatment on your HUD and also XP bonuses for getting kills, healing people and repairing things in the general vicinity. Once you get used to this - you'll realize how valuable the squad leader role really is - MAG forces tactics on you by being on such a scale that simply wandering around searching for enemies will surely be a loss for your team.

In many, many other ways - MAG is by the numbers military shooter. In fact, this is where it suffers the most ... by repeating many things from other games which really could use a tweak or three. For instance, wannabe snipers might actually look at a weapon setup other than, well, a sniper rifle. I first realized this when I kept getting out-sniped by assault rifles. You can spend XP on upgrades, and it doesn't take long to equip a decent rifle with stability and a scope that fires many more than one bullet at a time.

Another one - and this is also a pet peeve of mine, is the versatility and utter lethal nature of the combat knife. I get that it is a very cheap and easy way to determine the outcome of melee battles - first twitch wins. And perhaps sneaking up behind someone with a knife who isn't moving - I could see where a trained soldier could bring that to a quick conclusion. But simply running real fast into another player running real fast swinging a knife around randomly ... I saw a guy clean out a whole room this way. We're playing soldier here, not ninjas.

Still - these are just overall crimes of the genre, not really Zipper's personal creation. There are lots and lots of small tweaks which could be useful - better demotion of squad leaders, a HUD which more accurately describes your squad's situation rather than the large scale battle - but my only technical ding is really the occasional lag I ran into one night. Which, all things considered - the game performs pretty well even under lag and considering all the objects the server tracks, a game this early out of the game is pretty damn stable.

Comparatively, I can only hold Killzone 2 in the same general rank as MAG - with Modern Warfare 2 bumping around somewhere. But the bottom line is that MAG's trick works, and succeeds where those don't - and manages to bring decent squad mechanics to a console shooter.

Movie Watch: Avatar

I wasn't going to do an actual normal review of Avatar since I had assumed most people had already watched it, there are reviews a plenty, and it isn't really the kind of movie you watch because of reviews but because everyone else is watching it and you know it has some killer graphics.

So here's the review - it is Dances With Wolves mashed with Ferngully, minus Robin Williams but with some of the best digital graphics ever produced. I mean we're talking Weta Digital, Industrial Light & Magic, and really hot ten foot tall cat people.

So you know the movie is a visual treat and honestly, it is quite a lot of fun. Is it a good movie? Uh, well, it also features a mineral called Unobtanium (I would have preferred MacGuffinite myself), has a plot so transparent and full of leaps that - oh look, it's a three legged panther!

It's pretty standard action fare, all in all. The uninterested bits (i.e., it takes a white man to save a native tribe) are surrounded around by some rather curious elements of transhumanism in general. The most obvious, of course, being the namesake device that allows paraplegic Sully to become an ten foot tall jungle predator. In reality, though, this mostly just serves as an excuse to divide the movie more readily in between scenes requiring no human body shots and those with body shots. Don't expect any deep discourse on the nature of man (or the disabled) - it's more akin to TRON than anything else.

No, the fascinating bit is how the concept that your body is not the limit of your presence pervades across so many parts of the movie. From the avatars, to the Na'Vi's sync cable with animals and trees, to plant based neural clusters, to even motion-based mecha suits. The message is repeated over and over again - the body just isn't all that.

Anyway, it's a decent film with some truly amazing graphics. Watch in 3D, because as beachheads into the new 3D revolutions go - this is a pretty potent one. I don't know if it has convinced me that 3D is the way of the future, but it was still worth watching in 3D.

First Play: Borderlands

"First play" is a bit misleading, I hopped onto Borderlands a bit ago after finally defeating and subsequently walking away from Dragon Age with mixed feelings and a serious need to shoot something.

And if you need to shoot something, look no farther than Borderlands. One of the game's strengths is the unabashed mashup of RPG and FPS elements - but the shooter mechanics sit front and center. Deus Ex fans will feel like they're playing something familiar and yet not all together similar when it comes to the overarching design of the game. Walk, shoot, collect stuff, and in this case - earn XP and upgrade your character. Borderlands keeps things simple ... you don't manipulate stats or skills, you have a simple tree of passive bonuses which fall under a main active ability which is dependent on the character class you pick. It's refreshingly straightforward and one of those odd moments where simplicity just works really, really well.

Graphically, Borderlands has a combination of the unique and cliche, basically a cel-shaded Mad Max world with hints of futuristic decor here and there. Cliche-wise, even Borderlands can't resist the "sexy female voice whispering orders in your ear" routine, though the mystery lady only pokes up every now and then to push the overall story forward. There's actually not much real dialogue in the game, save for some introductory passages, quips from various characters and your own witty retorts. Character interaction is limited mostly to mission boards - which isn't much. Did I mention the RPG elements are very lightweight? Very lightweight.

My general dislike of random online people has kept me from trying this online so far, which is probably a shame since that is where most reviews say is where the game shines. This reason was why the game was last on my post-holiday list - but so far, it's been a very solid experience. Solo play suffers from two things - monotony and occasionally being stuck far away from a store. Enemies respawn in areas with some regularity in the game so you'll have a "been there, done that" feeling to areas quite often. This plays right into the problem of sometimes being out in the boondocks and realizing that everything behind you is respawning as you play. Thankfully the game scales some enemies - but not all, so your progress doesn't feel like all grind, yet you'll find new challenges in places as you level up.

So far, I'd say the game comes down to - how much do you like shooting skags? Skags are the de facto mutant doglike enemy in the game, and you'll spend a lot of time fending off groups of them. I'm a FPS fan, so the solid core mechanics with the RPG twist works pretty well for me, but I like shooting skags quite a lot. For players who wanted a deeper RPG experience, though, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Without factoring online play in, I give the game a soft recommendation based on the above. Look for more in the future, especially as I try online later.

My Complaint With Dragon Age: Origins

For the record, I did finish Knights of the Old Republic, so I at least thought I knew what I was getting into with Bioware's epic fantasy RPG Dragon Age.

And some spoilers here, but I'll try to keep it vague.

And Dragon Age is quite epic. It's riffs off of the general fantasy cliches pretty well, spins a pretty good story and manages to put the player into some interesting ethical and moral decisions along the way. I do, for the record, think that Dragon Age is a well done, solid game that offers a great deal to many players.

I also think there's this really odd underbelly to it that nobody is really talking about. And it is pretty core to the game mechanics.

And the basic problem is this: this is very difficult game to get right the first time through.

Why? Well, one is a basic constraint of interactive, non-linear story telling. Because you don't know where all the potential characters might potentially be ... it becomes difficult to map out your party makeup.

This wouldn't be that big of a deal ... but because NPC's auto-level unless they are in your party, by the time you find certain NPC's they may have a completely different makeup then what you need.

However, the number one cardinal sin you can do in this game is auto-level your own party. If you are own anything but Casual, you'll need to be leveling specifically to the needs of your party tactics, figuring what operations you need to manually control and adjusting the AI scripts for each character as you go.

And I tell you this - because ... nobody told me. I've auto-leveled constantly because I've only paid any attention to my own PC. And I haven't even done all that well on my own PC because I'll occasionally try out a skill or whatnot and realize it wasn't really what I needed. Or, as some people point out, you'll find an NPC eventually that can do it better. So my assassin/duelist rogue is something of crossbow firing, melee master and healer.

Which is actually still not all that bad. I'm actually not complaining here that Dragon Age has some annoying core mechanics because the game is hard. People - I've been playing games since you had to restart the game because you didn't have lives left.

Before save games. Castle of Wolfenstein hard. Get out your graph paper and map your own damn map hard. Get me? I know hard. You young ones of the Xbox generation do not get to come to me and lecture about hard.

My complaint is that Dragon Age is horribly, awfully, and rather inexcusably ... inconsistently hard. Case in point: I ransacked an entire tribe of werewolves without much problem. Then I got beset by a random gang of bandits which killed my entire party in seconds.

Or cleansing an entire mage tower with all it's demonkind. To then get ravaged outside of my camp by wolves. Oh sure, the entire battalion of darkspawn under the sloth demon's sway ... no problem. But wolves ... there's a problem. Excuse me?

See, I didn't want to read up on this game. I just wanted to play the game. And because of that, I've played it most of the way through doing many, many things wrong. And the game gave me absolutely no indication that I was doing anything wrong ... because I was winning every fight. Sure, I'd have to reload from time to time and my party - but I was accomplishing missions left and right.

So how was I supposed to know that I got 90% of the way through the underground of the Dwarven kingdom, making my way through legions of darkspawn only to get to a boss fight I could simply not mathematically defeat. At this point there was no recourse but to walk all the back out, recamp ... and try again.

Which also, did not work. And in reading up on the battle, I could see why. I hadn't invested in Area of Effect attacks. I didn't stock up on grenades. My strategy was largely melee, using my rogue to lure in groups of enemies where they'd get quickly dispatched by a wardog and a dwarf with a nasty disposition. And so when I get to a boss who can kill melee fighters with one kill and I don't have enough healing options to outlast my feeble missile options ... I was pretty much cooked.

Bioware was essentially punishing me for not showing up to a class, when I didn't even know there was a school in session. And it was really punishing. I spent hours trying to get through this fight on Normal, until I finally caved and just went to Casual. Many players may not have hit this point, just by making a few different key decisions.

The gap between casual and normal is oddly intense. There is no friendly fire (not that I cared - no AoE or grenades, remember?). You get a massive attack and defense bonus. Enemies are weaker. I've chewed through every battle since then. Sadly, it's almost boring. But since nobody at Bioware seemed to want to pay attention to pacing, to this idea that if you want to slap the player around ... rough them up a little bit before you really hit them hard - I don't think I have much choice. It's either that or restart, because this boss fight was so on the opposite end of entertainment that it was very nearly a shelf moment for me. If there was no casual mode, it would certainly have been.

And my follow up complaint is that I'm not entirely sure "micromanagement" equals "tactics". In fact, I'm pretty certain they don't. I applied many tactics during my course of playing the game - that was not my shortcoming. My shortcoming was not micromanaging nearly every aspect of every character. I wanted to a play an RPG - not one of those games where you control the roster of a soccer team.

There's a lot of great things about this game, and many other people have written about them. The uneven difficulty and the heavy emphasis of micromanagement (made even more painful in the console version) has been brought up on several smaller sites and blogs, some of the major reviews completely overlook this aspect. And it's a key flaw in the game.

So my advice to you - either read up on the game, extensively (there are even strong suggestions out there about the best order to play the area), before playing it - or suck it up and play it on casual - or at least be willing to change the difficulty before getting into a head-against-wall kind of situation that I found myself stuck in.

Good game. By far, not a great game. Actually, I'll have a whole other post on Dragon Age versus Demon's Souls which will really annoy the Dragon Age fanboys and girls of the world. But that's for a different day.

2010 Gaming Predictions

Note that my predictions are generally based on uninformed hearsay and the occasional rumormongering. So with that dash of new optimism - let us look forward.

Nintendo will throw more hardware at the problem
I would like to say "Nintendo will give third party developers what they need to succeed" ... but I just don't think they have the interest at the moment. Sad as it is, the Wii's current plight probably works for Nintendo. Worse case scenario is that sales begin to drop, but that still leaves a huge pool of people to sell crappy license titles (for which Nintendo is certainly seeing some cash) and more hardware (accessories to measure your heart rate, for instance, so that you can see just how much the console is boring you).

A new HD-enabled Wii wouldn't shock me, but I'm not calling it just yet. This is more than just tweaking a few pixels here and there, and it would be ramping up Nintendo's console schedule ... and I don't think they're losing enough cash for that. Earliest suggestions from the pundits is 2011 - which will be in time to really do battle with Sony and Microsoft's motion technology.

Which brings us to...

3D, Motion Tech will be mostly talk
Despite the big splash Microsoft and to a lesser extent Sony has made out of adding new functionality like Natal, 2010 isn't when we're going to be knee deep into it. I'd guess we'll see a near holiday release of any big changes to the hardware and 2011 is when the software will really come to play. Whether Sony makes a big push for 3D gaming is hard to say - I'm still not buying into the idea that 3D sets are going to be viable in our near future.

We start to hit the graphics ceiling
In previous generations, year to year would prove out large changes in the how games looked on consoles as better compression and data algorithms were moved from chalkboard to chips. The gains of these kinds of tricks seems to have already slowed down for at least the 360 and PS3, making one game with awesome graphics look quite like another game with awesome graphics. Take Uncharted 2 as an example - quite possibly the best graphics put on Sony's console to date, but not a generational leap like we saw with some PS2 games.

Add in the fact that developers are beginning to question if some statistics like 60 FPS will really turn out not only a better product, but also bigger returns ... and I think the next real push from developer's won't be better graphics - but better animation, lighting, visual effects in general ... i.e. - better set design.

2010: Year of the DLC
All three console makers have fully embraced downloadable content and 2009 moved us past the "Age of Horse Armor" as it were ... we're finally seeing real expansions, real content and now that the PS3 and 360 are into both Netflix and Facebook ... extending the consoles past merely grabbing game content. 2009 also saw a huge push into games we'd normally think of as disc only titles becoming available for download ... and 2010 will continue to push that envelope.

One twist for a "Wii HD" that I can think of is Nintendo not pushing their graphics hard, but release a console which a) upscales the current content and b) serves essentially as a Roku. It would be a small enough change that they could release it ahead of 2011 ... but I don't really see it happening.

MMO's come to consoles
Sony is in the lead here, with Free Realms and Sodium One - though one is a free MMO that doesn't have a publish date and the other is a Sony Home space few people seem to have heard about. Still, we also have MAG coming up, which supports a ridiculous amount of people online ... all adding up to the notion that the network and the hardware will be able to handle it. This leaves the "but my PC knows my macros" rationale ... which I doubt will be a real barrier.

Remember, DC Universe is due out early in 2010. The real breaking point for the genre will the game that charges a monthly fee.

OK, that's that for now - might have more later or at the very least a 2010 wishlist.

2009 - Games In Review

2009 was pretty good year for games. Let's hit a few of the trends and games that made it so:


PlayStation 3 finally matures
Sony said around the time the beta for Home was announced that they were done focusing on hardware and wanted to focus on software. Home itself continues to be a mixed bag (and by mixed, I don't mean an even mix) - but Sony finally delivered the goods. A strong showing from both cross-platform and exclusives means that PS3 owners aren't missing out when it comes to the top games of the year, and some like Uncharted 2 provide a damn good reason for owning the console just on their own. Next year will continue to be interesting as Sony seems poised to roll out "premium" online services (though what that will actually mean to users is a bit of a mystery).

The decline of the Wii
If there was one word to categorize the Wii's library at the end of the year it would be: shovelware. Swamped with license titles that would make George Lucas blush, the main reason to own and use a Wii remains Nintendo's own offerings. Sadly, decent titles directed at mainstream/hardcore players regularly undersold on the platform, despite its massive audience.

This hasn't really stopped Nintendo from continuing to sell a bunch of the tiny white boxes, but as not only the price of 360 and PS3 consoles decline but also HDTV's, the future of the Wii's dominance is very much uncertain. Sorry, Nintendo, but the honeymoon is officially over.

The 360 ... stays the same
What's interests me the most about the 360 is how rugged the platform remains. No, I don't mean reliability, although 2009 may be the year that Microsoft finally put to rest quality issues which have plagued the box for years. I mean its ability to continue strong sells and a solid library despite such issues, losing the HD war, not really being able to successfully upgrade the offering, etc. Microsoft clearly made the right decision when they got out early and made strong connections.

Yet next year Microsoft will clearly not be comfortable with this stance. Natal, probably new hardware configurations, even more additions to Xbox Live - 2010 promises to be good to 360 users.

Originality Continues To Pay
EA began reaping the benefits of titles like Dead Space and indie hits continued to sell well on both the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live - with stars like Flower even making several Game Of The Year lists. It's going to get weird when "indie" becomes "mainstream", but thankfully we're not quite to that level of cognitive dissonance just yet.

Just how much are we pushing those graphics?
There's an interesting juxtaposition at place with the PS3 getting a larger share of cross-platform titles as well as more exclusive titles - you have exclusive developers claiming the PS3 has plenty of room to grow ... and several cross-platform titles where the PS3 has worse (though often only slightly) graphics and/or performance. Just how much prettier are games can get is in question ... though we do have a spiritual successor to Shadow of the Colossus arriving soon.

The DS gets real competition, and it rhymes with iPhone
I gotta say, I've nearly lost all interest in my old DS now that I carry my iPhone with me. Apple's popular smartphone has proven it has the hardware chops to play fully 3D games, comes with a variety of online options, and has the industry standard for an online app store. Nintendo probably isn't sweating the sales numbers - but for the first time it is playing some catch up in the handheld arena, and not to either Microsoft or Sony.

We get some goddamn good games
People, I haven't even bought Brutal Legend or Assassin's Creed 2 and everything indicates they are quite awesome. I haven't even cracked open Borderlands. Mostly to blame are the two major time suckers - Demon's Souls and Dragon Age: Origins ... which are both some of the finest RPG's ever made.

...and some major disappointments
The Fallout 3 DLC was the biggest downer for me this year. I was extremely excited to see that it was coming to the PS3 and that excitement was met with hands down the buggiest experience I've had on any console, ever. Crashes, slowdowns, and very uneven content in general - this was a rare instance where a good game was probably better left alone.

Oh, and the No Russian thing
Some readers have wondered why I've fixated quite so much on Infinity Ward's No Russian mission within Modern Warfare 2. The scene, which everyone knows by know, depicts a lengthy and brutal slaying of civilians in an airport. When the scene was first leaked there was some condemnation and Infinity Ward told everyone to wait until the scene could be viewed in context.

Let me specific - the scene disturbs me. But Infinity Ward's response is what we should really be worried about. It was essentially two pronged, one being a completely bullshit explanation of the scene's integral role in telling a story. Modern Warfare 2 had a story that could have been written by crack addicted chimpanzees. The scene is integral only because someone had a massive yearn to depict Russians invading Burger Town and this was the best they could muster to kick that off.

The other prong being potentially far worse: it's only a game. And sure, lots of gamers will take solace in this. It was by far the most oft heard defense. As if we've been beaten down by Jack Thompson's insanity for so long that we feel like we need to remind each other that this isn't really a murder simulator and we really actually know real people aren't dying.

The problem isn't the gamer, but the game. By having a high profile title like this do something so low, so horrific, and use "it's only a game" as an excuse gives carte blanc to every other developer to do the same. Put in what you want. Story schmory. It's only a game.

Roger Ebert just got that much closer to being right - games aren't art. Not when they treat themselves like that.

So Happy New Year, Nathan Drake
I think that's long enough for the first post of the year. My favorite for the whole year is by far Uncharted 2. Naughty Dog's title is, for me, the anti-Modern Warfare. Whereas Infinity Ward couldn't must two plot points that made any sense together, Uncharted 2 was at least as good as any big budget Hollywood fare - and often much better. Great graphics, great writing and great gameplay. That's what makes game art.

Game Play: Modern Warfare 2 Single Player

I've blogged and tweeted on this quite a bit, so this will be the last word on it. I've been holding out until I could actually play the entire single player campaign and judge it as whole. After all, when the "No Russian" level was first leaked, Activision and Infinity Ward cried foul on the blogosphere because the scene wasn't being placed in context.

So now I have the context.

Let's get a few things out of the way. The single player campaign is fun in a virtual shooting gallery kind of way and has some of the best graphics put to pixels to date. Mechanics are pretty solid, though honestly the game's concept of cover is starting to feel quite dated.

Whether the single player is worth the price of admission is another story. The bottom line is that the game is a multiplayer game and if you aren't buying it for the online experience, don't buy it. Not only is the single player game incredibly short (less than a weekend easily), but it is deeply flawed. Without the multiplayer - which I can't even debate - this would be a rental at best.

The main problem is that Modern Warfare 2 is a product of Valve style storytelling - but it fails completely in actually telling a story (key problems I had with Half Life 2 I might add). It's like watching a bad Hollywood popcorn flick - you better be paying the ticket only to see the pretty explosions, because as a movie there's nothing really to see here.

Spoilers. Many of them. Beginning in ...

The rationale of every scene in the single player game is not to create a cohesive story, but to shove some kind of action sequence in front of the player. You've seen many of these by now - the vehicle chase scene, vehicle escape scene, run the gauntlet, protect the position, etc., etc., etc.

The controversial "No Russian" scene is actually quite a lynch pin moment in just how horrible the so-called storytelling of the game plays out. Army Ranger Allen is plucked from his normal duty and sent undercover to infiltrate Russian terrorist Makarov. Most readers know by now, but almost the entire mission is just watching (or participating) in a massive slaughter of civilian casualties. In the end, Makarov knew the player was a plant and shoots them for dead.

The "context" of this scene exists pretty much solely in the voice over introduction where it's explained that "you don't want to know what it took" to get the player close to Makarov. That's it. Before that, the character was in Afghanistan - and then bam ... you're shooting civilians in an airport.

What follows next is even more ridiculous. Russia invades the United States. How do people know that the shooter was an American? Nobody knows. How is it that Makarov himself isn't fingered even if the American in question was investigating him? Uh, we don't really know. What was the diplomacy following this attack? How is it the entire United States gets implicated for the actions of one guy? Never shown. How does Russia launch a massive surprise attack and becomes the first country to successfully invade U.S. soil since the Revolutionary War?

Oh, that they explain. They stole a chip.

Yeah.

A chip.

The thing is - No Russian is so emotionally draining that all of this nonsense weighs on the rest of the game. If Infinity Ward is going to have a plot where you watch a lot of innocent people get brutally murdered and then shoot you in the head ... is it really too much to ask to make it make sense? There's a lot of crap out there about how "emotionally powerful" or "deeply impactful" the scene is ... ignoring that if I snuck up behind you and beat you with a cricket bat that it would also be "emotionally powerful" and "deeply impactful" but I'm not exactly laying down a good narrative here.

Infinity Ward has a bizarre taste for the morbid, actually. I don't mean in that "Saving Private Ryan" way of showing that yes, Virginia, in a war people really do get their heads blown off. They kill off the player character not once, but twice - the second time is even more gruesome than the first. The game ends with what is a way way overwrought near death scene between three characters. The directing is very into the concept that death is edgy that much of it plays out like a film school dropout's last bad edit.

Bottom line: if you remove your frontal lobe, you might consider what happens in Modern Warfare 2 a story.

I could probably get away with this without a lobotomy if it weren't for the No Russian mission. It's not that the mission is simply offensive, which it is, rather it is that the mission is the reason for all the action that follows. So a big WTF echoes through the entire single player campaign. You can decide to not play the mission, but as I've mentioned before - this is a massive cop out on Infinity Ward's behalf. You can't have it both ways, where a scene sets up the reason for the plot and also have it be optional. Basically in an attempt to be controversial, Infinity Ward ruins what was already a pretty bad plot and in the process hangs such a large sign on how bad the plot is that it makes it pretty hard to ignore.

If you can manage to do this bit of cognitive dissonance, than yes - as I started with ... the single player is fun in a shooting gallery kind of way. It's sad that a game with a profile like this one couldn't even manage the poor storytelling which is industry standard, but rather steps all over itself just for the sake of being sensational.

Why I've made such a big deal out of this is because by largely giving Infinity Ward a pass on the single player, the gaming media has rubber stamped the myth that games can't be effective storytellers. Modern Warfare 2 embraces this notions, extends it and makes its own. Basically becoming the Microsoft of bad narratives - they've just lowered the bar for the entire genre.

Facebook's New Game Dashboard

Via VentureBeat:

Facebook is in the midst of redesigning how users find, interact with, and keep track of games on the social network. Called the “Game Dashboard,” the new feature is Facebook’s attempt to play nice with social game developers, serve the interests of gamers, and at the same time stop games from ruining the experience for everybody else.

The company is reining in the worst abuses of Facebook game companies, which have polluted the network’s communications with spam-like messages that general users have begun to ignore, such as “Joe Smith wants to thank you for chasing crows out of his pumpkin patch.” Facebook has announced that these “push notifications” will no longer be put into the stream of updates that you see on your main Facebook page, the news feed.

Hoo freakin's way. The Girl just showed me that you can specifically hide apps from the news feed, and I've been knocking them down left and right all morning. If I read about one more animal that stumbled into someone's something - I might scream.

How Stargate Universe Fails

We tried, we really tried to like the latest installment of Stargate, but they just make it so darn hard.

And look, if you're going to respond to this post with "but its all about the characters" or "the show is people!" then - well, just don't bother. I get that. In fact - that's the problem with the show. SGU is more about people than it is about science fiction. Or, sadly, storytelling in general.

Problem number one - the people just aren't very interesting. There's a very slim line between two basic types - slightly angry military types who are deeply burdened with a sense of responsibility and slightly neurotic civilians deeply burdened with a sense that they are all going to die. Tack on singular traits (geeky, cute, nervous, gay) and you have a pretty smooth curve when it comes to making characters distinct.

Which might actually work, in a slasher film kind of way, if the show had any guts about putting characters at risk. As mentioned previously, for a show about the horrible risks of venturing off into deep space - the show has about the same body count as Voyager, and so for all of the handheld camera shots ... comes off as about as vanilla and safe.

I'm still an episode behind, but let's take 'Time' as a perfect example of how the show stumbles on itself.

Spoiler alert.

So, you have this really decent sci fi premise: a time loop allowing characters to see their possible future. OK, great. However, it takes way too long to set this up because the show can't resist melodrama when melodrama might be portrayed, so we watch Eli getting annoyed with people and people getting annoyed with Eli, and all sorts of moaning and groaning shot via handycam until we get to the good stuff. Then, armed with this knowledge - we .... watch a lot more moaning and groaning until we finally get to step B of this plan which, if you take the hypothesis that the show is unwilling to risk getting its hands dirty - ends with a very predictable conclusion.

Next week? More moaning and groaning. This isn't Stargate Universe so much as it is Stargate Bitching About Space. It's the The View with teleporters.

For the show to succeed, it needs a real sense of dread - something the show it really wants to be, Battlestar Galactica managed quite well (though arguably lost it off and on).

Fans will say it is a "more human" show, which it is and if you enjoy these particular humans than this is the show for you. We'll be waiting for a show with less cliche, more dimensional and less predictable humans though.

2010 - you can do better sci fi than this.

Movie Watch: Ink

Ink is one of those rare gems of an indie movie. While it is very clearly done on a low budget, the constraints of the budget don't inject themselves into what is a fairly solid fantasy plot and manages to deliver some decent visuals as well. Many an indie film may use minimalistic sets as a bit of a crutch, but Ink seems to acknowledge its roots and make up for it with some very solid storytelling.

The plot follows opposing forces between the world of the waking and the world of dreaming as they are focused on a man and his daughter. The worlds and characters collide, there's some decent twists to it and a few quite honestly cool as hell scenes. I'd really, really like to blab about them here - but they work best when you see them and realize that some of the effects, while cheap, make a lot of sense in the frame of the story and work very, very well to deliver the movie. This is a movie that is probably better to not describe in great detail - because it is often the details that make it works so well.

We found this on Netflix Instant, highly, highly recommend.

Game Play: Braid (really wanted to love it...)

When I heard that Braid was making its way to PSN, I was rather excited to see what all the fuss was about. Blow's platformer has become something of an indie darling - and for good reasons being both artistic and financially successful.

I just can't bring myself to keep playing it. Don't get me wrong, it is a very pretty little game with an excellent sound track. The time mechanic is interesting, although not quite as intrinsic as I had originally imagined it would be. The story looks like a great mash-up of old school and new invention, but I didn't really quite get into the "row of books" delivery method. When I first jumped into the game, there seemed to be a lot of that - a good thing tinged with a slight annoyance.

That's not why I can't keep playing it, though. Braid is clearly a well constructed game. It's clearly a good game. I just, as a baseline, hate platformers. And the more old school the gameplay is - the more likely I am to hate them, and for all it's lovely graphics and music and twists to the concept - is pretty darn old school at the core. I had numerous Mario flashbacks.

I can't entirely explain why I've logged several hours of Little Big Planet but can't continue on with Braid, it may in fact be rather subconscious ... but I'm not going to go into a lengthy comparison of the two games to prove what is a completely personal opinion anyway.

However, I would offer that just because Braid has been very well reviewed - I wouldn't assume it is for everyone. If you're iffy about the genre in general, you might hold out for a demo.

Roku adding a bunch of new channels (none being Hulu)

Roku is adding a slew of 10 new channels to their lineup, notably Pandora, Flickr, Facebook photos and blip.tv. It's this kind of value add that makes me thankful we went ahead with this route rather than wait for Sony to match Microsoft's Netflix offerings. We still use the Netflix channel pretty exclusively - but this new selection looks pretty interesting.

Not that I was expecting it - but Hulu would be such a perfect marriage for the Roku device. Hulu would instantly crank up their viewership and Roku would get a swath of decent material. It would be what The Office would refer to as a win-win-win. We won't get it, of course, because the TV industry doesn't want me watching Hulu on my TV and will go to absurd lengths to stop me from doing just that.

Even though, as previously mentioned, there is absolutely no way they can stop me from doing just that. It's like stupid was raised stupid, had a kid, and that kid was really stupid and then that kid married stupid and had a stupid child. Hulu is like stupid's grandfather.

Anyway, we'll be checking out the new channels when we get a chance.