New MAG Patch (v1.03)

Zipper is issuing a rather large patch to their online shooter MAG, here are some highlights:

• Improved speed of weapon and gear swapping by approximately 500 milliseconds.
  
  I'm hoping this will be huzzah. I've been killed many times while juggling gear, annoyingly and especially switching to grenades.
  
  
• Changed resuscitated player’s camera orientation to match the last camera direction used while incapacitated instead of the pre-harm camera.
  
  Nice. I've noticed this more recently, where I get revived and am facing an unexpected direction. Bad when the enemy is baring down on you.
  
  
• Players no longer lose XP if a teammate is killed by an objective explosion caused by a charge they planted.
  
  Big, big freaking yay! Here. I doubt anyone was ever trying to grief that random guy running past a charge. I'm hoping (and have asked Zipper) this includes if you were a turret gunner, and someone gets killed when the turret explodes.
  
  
• Respec Point requirements in Barracks have been changed from 3K, 5K, 10K, 17K, 26K, and 26K-Repeat to 1K, 2K, 3K, and 3K-Repeat.
  
  I'm not sure what they are now, but that almost sounds like a larger gap for respecs. If so: Boo. If not: - but it looks like cheaper respecs so ... yay! I still vote for a free respec off that bat, and the ability to more frequent respecs in general.
  
  

Now the really interesting stuff. They're rebalancing weapons. Check the link at the bottom for specifics - but short version is that you shouldn't be able to snipe with non-sniper rifles any more (remember when I said the LMG could do anything plus the tango, apparently not so much now), shotties and SMG are more fixed to medium range, from the hip recoil increased and the battle rifles and rockets launchers are made more effective.

Or short short version: weapons are going to behave more like one might originally expect. From the description, I give the whole range of updates a thumbs up ... and congrats to Zipper for doing it. But I wish them well in not having a subset of players who get really annoyed with the fact that they can't do everything with their LMG builds anymore. I kept a solid LMG build in hand myself, just because it is so versatile. Maybe the assault rifle will become the better middle ground now?

Full details over at the MAG Blog, and the patch is due out this Thursday.

Update: It's out, and it is good. Very solid balancing without feeling like nerfing. Weapons feel more "proper" now, the other tweaks make for a more solid experience. Thumbs up, Zipper.

Game Play: Bioshock 2

Personally, the Bioshock franchise is an odd measure of the change in my gaming habits. The first game was one of the last games I played on the PC, that my PC at the time could handle well and yet I still spent a lot of time trying to fiddle with the resolution on the damn thing to make sure I was getting the prettiest darn experience possible.

This game - I just popped it into the PlayStation 3 and moved on. Not only did getting the PC not occur to me, I don't even have a PC to play it on anymore. This isn't really meant to be yet another nudge at the PC market, just a footnote that whether the genre is dying or not, it's somewhat dead to me.

Anyway - the game itself. Bioshock 2 takes the player back to Rapture. If you haven't played the first one, you won't be totally lost ... but you will be missing out on a quite a bit of detail as the story of the second game builds heavily on the first. And once again, Bioshock 2 succeeds in storytelling to a point well past most shooter's benchmarks. There are very few non-interactive cut scenes, and far better character interaction than most games. This goes well past "hey, aren't you Gordon Freeman" to - "I just totally tried to kill you, what are you going to do about it?". While it's not exactly deep character development, it does allow players to literally go past the "glass wall", such as the ones Matt and I noted in our Dead Space conversation.

Mechanically speaking, the game is nearly identical to the first game, which is good - we're talking about a shooter with a rich heritage here and it shows. My favorite addition is the more free-form moments where you need to defend a little sister. Some of the fights got very dynamic and fluid, which is getting more and more rare in the shooter world, as the "virtual shooting gallery" has become more common. There are scenes which are clearly staged, but much of the world of Rapture feels organic and connected, not a series of artificial scenes stitched together.

Finally, I think the ending is much, much improved over the original. Oh sure, there are logical inconsistencies you can drive a truck through - but at least it felt like a consistent, coherent narrative ... and not a end animation tacked on to be done with it. This time I was careful to save every little sister ... so I don't know if the "harvest one, and you get the bad ending" rule is still in effect.

I have not tried the multiplayer yet, I'll give it a go this week and report later. The total game play was probably about 20 or so hours ... you can finish it in a week or so without too much trouble. The summation is what one would expect - if any game similar to Bioshock (Bioshock itself, System Shock, Deus Ex, etc.) has ever entertainted you, Bioshock 2 will not dissapoint. All in all, well recommended.

I will have an upcoming post, though, about how the shooter genre needs to evolve. This is a footnote on the genre, not on Bioshock 2, but in the same way this game book ends my PC gaming experience, I think it also bookends - along with many other titles like Modern Warfare 2, my welcome mat for some tired and true FPS concepts.

But, that's for another time.

MAG: What Isn't A Kickable Offense

MAG's large scale combat relies heavily on leaders communicating with each other, setting objectives, trying to move the game forward, etc. Without solid objectives, players lose out on experience and have a tendency to just wander off trying to kill things.

If you're not a squad leader, you chances of getting kicked off the squad are pretty slim. You'd need to gack the hell out of people repeatedly, and honestly people are pretty understanding of getting shot accidentally in the back (though if you can revive them shortly thereafter, it helps a lot).

If you are a squad leader - congratulations! You're chances of getting kicked off the squad just went up considerably. Well, not too considerably because it still takes a majority vote to kick you off and most players don't know where the kick vote button is hidden (start button, select player, vote to kick, btw). However - you're uniform just arrived with a bullseye on your back.

So far my track record as squad leader is fairly even and I can say we've won a few hard matches we probably would not have without the proper coordination. My collateral damage rate is pretty low, and I will admit that I really, really enjoy raining fiery death on the enemy.

What I don't enjoy is repeated attempts to be kicked. If I deserve it, fine. But here is a quick list of things that don't deserve it.

You don't like the sound of my voice
I haven't had this happen yet, although I nearly harassed a random squad leader last night who found the voice changer setting on the PS3 a bit too useful. In reading around the forums, though, this seem to be a common complaint. To which I can only say ... really? If you're that sensitive about online gaming - you might stay offline.

You don't like my FRAGO
Most experienced players have specific routes/order of objectives that they like to take down. Which is fine, but if you aren't squad leader then well, um, stuff it. Speak up by all means if you think there's a better objective, but if the squad leader disagrees - then well, um. Yeah, stuff it and get running. I've been in many matches with players yelling objectives which would have easily lost the match (usually retreating to the back flank too soon or ignoring key points like anti-air). This could also be summed up as:

You didn't get squad leader
You know what: boo freakin' hoo. Stop with the backseat general crap and fight. When kick votes occur as soon as the game starts, it's a pretty good sign that it isn't about job performance. Though that brings up...

We're losing
Guess what - we're not going to win every match. And sometimes there is only so much that the squad leader can do. Last night we had 11 minutes to get one letter on Domination, but we just couldn't through the defense. I was trying to bomb their back flank, get people to rush, etc. The opposing team just had a hardened group with a lot LMG's. Two clan members kept voting to kick. If you think about it, this is pretty stupid - because you're taking a squad already down and reducing the number. Oh, except they probably had a clan member waiting to join. Which brings me to:

I'm not in your clan
This is the biggest FU one on the list, I think, though it seems to usually go hand in hand with "You didn't get squad leader". If I'm squad leader and there are more than a couple people in the same clan who spend most of the time talking to each other, I know I'm trouble - no matter how well we're doing. There are plenty of posts on the forums about how a clan with a majority number in a squad will just eject the other players to get their clan members in - but most also take the leader role. It's pretty loathsome behavior, and makes players simply not want to be squad leaders so that they can avoid being targets.

I don't have a mic
This one, I'll admit, is a bit of a grey zone. If a squad leader can't communicate with the squad, they might get in trouble - and there are occasions (like when the CNI is jammed or calling out secondary goals) that the only way to coordinate is via a mic. But honestly, if a squad leader is setting FRAGOs and using their command abilities - the squad is often most of the way there. Plus, you can't be sure you're kicking one squad leader off to get one *with* a mic, or will even do any better. Short version - a mic-less leader might not be the best, but it doesn't mean they'll be bad.

I didn't bomb something when you wanted me to
Um, squad leaders can't bomb everything all the time. Sorry. If we could, we would never move. We'd just sit there bombing everything.

So what is a kickable offense? There are really two big ones: not using the CNI (setting goals, using command abilities) and bombing your own team. One match last night started with the squad leader bombing our own bunker ... and then doing nothing else for the rest of the game. That, my friends, is a squad leader you should kick.

The related note here is that the kick system doesn't really work so well. This is only a minor rant because I've never been successfully kicked (I suspect, though, that this is usually because there haven't been enough of the same clan on at one time). And I've actually not seen truly bad squad leaders kicked, including Mr. Bombs Our Bunker there. Zipper would do better to institute a grief/demotion system for squad leaders - some kind of automatic penalty/reward system based on performance, and not the whim of the mob.

On the flip side, I'd love it if squad leaders could see who was voting to kick them. Many of these are silent votes, and last night on the Domination match my requests to tell me what we should do different were ignored.

Like I said on the recent posts, if you don't like the squad leader - leave. Or at the very least be vocal in a constructive way. But just repeatedly trying to oust the leader is pointless and annoying.

TV Watch: Lost, The Substitute

I think a rule for this season will be: we need Evil Locke in it. Last episode was mostly Locke-less and mostly boiled down to a "getting to know Kate" concept and didn't move much of the island mythology forward, with the possible exception of a few pointed facts towards Sayid and Claire, who may know be called Crazy French Claire or Claire French Lady or Claire Rosseau if one likes.

So this was a pretty Locke related episode, though technically it was half Locke and half SmokeLocke. Locke's sidestory continues along an odd theme: without the island, everyone seems like they're doing all right. Locke is getting hitched to Helen, is becoming comfortable in his own (broken) skin, and can even roll with the punches when he gets fired (thanks to his other would-be Losties). So the theme seems to be: this is a group of people who would have made each other's lives all right.

And then Jacob comes along, crashes their plane and they start dying. Or time travelling. Or whatnot. SmokeLocke confirms for us that Jacob has slowly weaved events off-island to bring them all to "candidates" of some kind, though we can't be sure what that really means with Jacob currently a pile of ash in Ilana's pocket.

Or perhaps he is a bloodied blonde hair kid? Wait - what? OK, one sec - is this really the best time for Lost to get weirder? The proverbial Swan clock is ticking down here, and this is the most tantalizing tidbit we got:

4 - Locke
8 - Reyes
15 - Ford
16 - Jarrah
23 - Shephard
42 - Kwon

Written on a cave wall. It's been noted that Kate is not among the names, though it should be pointed out that Sun might not be either - as Kwon could well mean Jin. Is being a candidate a male exclusive recruitment option?

SmokeLocke mentions that "Jacob had a thing for numbers". Let's hope that isn't the complete explanation for one of the first mysteries the show offered up. Honestly, Lost Writers - we get the "black and white" thing. Honestly, I was hoping for something more like a ... spaceship? Less like a ... mysterious cave? If you were Sawyer - would you buy SmokeLocke's speech as a reasonable history of being plane wrecked? Before they go jaunting off together and selecting floral arrangements, shouldn't Sawyer try to figure out just what SmokeLocke is?.

We seem to be teetering towards something of a conclusion, but it remains to be seen if there is a Grand Unified Theory to explain all the loose ends Lost's rambling plot has left in its wake. So far little is know about the next episode "Lighthouse" (Lost producers have said that even a single screenshot from episodes this season will reveal too much) - but hopefully we keep following the smoke trail down the old rabbit hole.

Crazy theory time: Evil Locke put a bit of a damper on the alien theory, claiming he was once just a man like Sawyer. I'm not thrown off the scent quite that easily. Smoke Monster can clearly resemble dead people, complete with emotions and memories. Evil Locke used to look like someone completely different. "I was a man once" might mean, "I took that dead guy's appearance." We're still dealing with an entity that can resemble dead people, cure cancer, regenerate broken legs, and manipulate world events (somehow to the point where people can't even die).

OK, now that I put it that way, maybe even aliens doesn't cover it. It may be time to start wondering just how much into the supernatural Lost will be willing to go.

More on MAG

I've been playing a pretty silly amount of Zipper's MAG since I last posted on it, and I need to preface this with the note that I'm still pretty wildly positive about the game. It's impressive how much the size of the maps and teams helps insure that you've got consistent gaming available to you - and usually pretty decent matches.

Take the recent Aliens Vs. Predator demo as a counter-example. The matchmaking is loose and seems to have troubles getting more than four people into a game together. The end result is long wait times to try the gameplay out and very uneven results in the long run.

But while MAG is something of a technical achievement, especially for the console, there is quite a bit left to be desired. Here's my short list.

Shoulder Controls
Right lower shoulder cycles weapons, left lower shoulder cycles gear, left top shoulder aims, right top shoulder fires. If that sounds like a strange mental crossword puzzle, it is - and it is complicated further by slow animations which can't keep up with what you need. Not to mention my rocket launcher (a weapon) is cycled as a gear, at the end of my gears - so if I miscount the number of shoulder clicks to pull it up ... that APC may have just driven past. You do get used to it, to a point, but even after clocking several hours I'll mess it up in the heat of battle.

Weapon Balance
While weapons across the three major factions feel balanced, the individual genres of weapons seems off. When threatened by a sniper, I don't go get a sniper rifle - I put my large machine gun on a bipod. I may not get the advantage of the best scope, but I do a lot of damage and can fire 100 bullets before having to reload. And should I need to get up and close, the LMG is still the one of the better options. It can spray, target shoot and tango - once you can respec to the LMG I don't see any reason to use any other gun in the game.

It's not that the sniper rifle or the assault rifle or poorly designed, both are good in certain situations. It's just that the LMG, properly equipped, is handy in nearly any situation. It's a little too Rambo for a modern shooter.

On the flip side, the RPG's feel wildly underpowered. OK, I get that bunker turrets should be difficult targets and it makes sense that they can take more than 3 rockets. But when I'm point blank to an APC and they don't even bother to pick me off with that big turret - and I have to go run for more rockets just to finish them off ... why did I bring it in the first place again? Not to mention that it doesn't seem you get assist points for helping finish off vehicles.

Skill / Equip Options
MAG works on experience. If you do stuff, especially, stuff your squad leader wants, you get XP. XP can be traded for better guns, gear, abilities and options. For the most part, this works really pretty well. Some of the choices, like before mentioned placement of a rocket launcher as a piece of "gear", and that it occupies a slot in and of itself ... so in other words your near future soldier can slap an RPG on his back, but not - say, another grenade.

Mostly, though, it would be nice to see the upgrade tree allow for more flexibility and versatility. It's almost, but not quite, RPGish. If you could, say, tweak the LMG to have better range by foresaking rate of fire, you would allow players to toy with their builds much more as well as potentially balance out weapons better.

Also, I would recommend a free respec for new characters. Especially with the balance issues, it is hard to know what works and what doesn't until you've tossed some XP at the problem.

Squad Leader Mechanics
OK, now we get into some real split hairs - because the squad, and the squad leader, mechanics really help MAG work as an online shooter. It's not that the system is broken, the system usually works extremely well. But there's a few faults.

First, no tutorial. So many new squad leaders just have no idea what they are doing. It is really, really not that complicated and Zipper would be well served to add a tutorial level for setting fraggos and using command abilities. It's as easy as hitting select, panning the map and clicking a few buttons. But so many start without really understanding what a fraggo even is.

Second, a better waypoint system. Many assaults would work better if the squad had a "meet point" which was secondary to the fraggo itself. It would even be nice to be able to set secondary fraggos (guard the bunker, but if someone could repair that AA...).

Third, some kind of demerit/demotion system. Some squad leaders just don't actually want to be squad leaders, or have so little clue as to what to do that the squad quickly devolves into a wandering band of mercenaries. Right now, if you say ... have a squad leader who continually drops cluster bombs on his own squad, the squad can only kick the leader off the server completely. If there was firstly some kind of auto-grief system for leaders, and secondly a way to demote a leader out of office without kicking them completely - bad leaders could be handled without much harm to the team in general (there are often situations a squad should rather not be a man down).

On a side note, though, some MAG players need to freaking cool it. I've seen perfectly good squad leaders go through kick vote after kick vote. One even kept asking what the squad thought he was doing wrong, and he never got a response. I was just on the receiving end of a similar vote recently. I was setting my fraggos, trying to move the squad up the map, and using command abilities but two players apparently didn't like my lack of cluster bombing (which I didn't actually have much control over) and decided to ignore the fraggos and constantly vote to kick me.

We ended up winning the match, not really thanks to our squad since they kept dying in random places on the map. But we did win, and I ended up on the MVP list at the of the game. If I had had my squad with me, I probably would have done even better. So to MAG players - if your leader isn't setting goals, or keeps carpet bombing you ... fine. Kick them.

If you just don't like the goals - kick yourself. Seriously, just go home. Directives might bring in some other player who isn't an asshole about it.


That's about that for now. I'm hopeful that Zipper will update the game with DLC - certainly more maps would help, and if they could add more upgrades/weapons/etc, that would be grand. I won't hold my breath for a control remapping (or at least the ability to remap individually) ... but some additions to the squad leadership concept would go a long way.

Demo Play: Heavy Rain

I was pretty iffy on the game play of Indigo Prophecy / Fahrenheit back on the PS2. One part of me wants anything which is trying to push the interactive adventure genre forward, since any game should be a bit weary about a world where we're only getting the next shooter, or next third person platformer, or the next rendition of a franchise, etc. While I mostly enjoyed the game, I felt the story kinda whimpered towards the end and the control system got to be a rather insane exercise in quick-time events.

QTE's are oddly controversial. In case the term is unfamiliar, this is where the "press button now" interface is displayed and the player generally has a pre-determined amount of time to respond. It was basically the only gameplay mechanic in Dragon's Lair and got a refresh in Shenmue and became widespread with God Of War. Many game developers and critics bemoan them, but players seem quite willing to devour them until they get truly abusive. Heavy Rain accepts this reality and moves forward in two ways - one: turn nearly every action in the game, from opening a door to swinging a punch, into a kind of QTE. And two, lessen the penalty for failing them.

I can't tell how the story will be from the demo, but it looks like at least a decent noir detective tale in the making. The graphics are good, the advantages of a controlled camera view clearly being put to use here. Sound and other production elements seem pretty high value, and even if the characters are somewhat stuck in the Uncanny Valley, the developers should get some credit for trying to add a layer of emotion to their performances.

But back to the QTE's. The first portion of the level will introduce you to the concept and partially because of the fact that it is being a tutorial, becomes instant overkill of the concept. It feels like a burden to literally move and breath in the beginning, but once the commands have all been put through their paces, the game feels more rational. I actually thought the fight scene was pretty impressive - it felt fluid and engaging, which is pretty rare for a QTE based game.

And yet during the investigation, I wonder when I have to perform a QTE and wait for animation to perform every time I want to switch between the cool cyberglasses (which, are actually pretty cool) and normal vision ... if the game isn't going to have components where it continues to lay it on too thick.

Heavy Rain is a difficult game to measure on the basis of the demo, simply because it hold a unique place in Sony's library. It's not like it can be recommended simply because it's a shooter, or based on a franchise or if "you like X" kind of thing. I would say it should be recommended because it is trying to do just that - be unique, but that's hardly enough for the average gamer. I can say I'm tempted by the game, but not sold - so my suggestion is that if you're a fan of the old adventure games or interactive fiction, certainly give the demo a try. I'll be keeping an eye out when the title comes out and may pick it up if I'm past my Bioshock 2/Assassin's Creed 2/Brutal Legend glut.

For Friday: Brief History Of Everything

Via Geekologie, which notes:

This is the final piece for my AS art course, a flipbook made entirely out of biro pens. It's something like 2100 pages long, and about 50 jotter books. I'd say I worked on and off it for roughly 3 weeks.

TV Watch: Lost, What Kate Did

This was a bit of a mixed episode for me - still good, but it kinda shines a light on one of the fundamental problems Lost will need to overcome this season.

So, first - we got a lot good little bits, mostly surrounding around Sayid's "sickness" and a lot of fan moments in the sideback scenes from the parallel universe. There's a lot of chatter that the sideback plots will be mostly fan filler, but I still think they're an interesting foil for the main plotline. Here we have Kate being not just badass Kate, but looking after Claire as well. We've also got Claire pulling a "deja vu" style event - naming Aaron when she has barely thought about keeping him, which I'm assuming will be commonplace drops through the end of the show.

Anyway, back to Kate. The backstories stopped being overly useful a while ago, mostly because they didn't offer much new information on the character. In some ways, the sidebacks suffer from that - but we can look at them for insight into how the island has changed (or, technically, would change people). Is Kate who goes after Sawyer to, eventually, go after Claire much different than Kate getting Claire to the hospital? There has been a lot of talk about the island / Jacob choosing people so that they can have a chance at retribution/resolution/absolution. In this case, Kate seems to have the same absolution: Claire.

And a note on Sawyer: he's probably my favorite character right now. I hate it when TV plots abbreviate grief or emotion because it isn't a convenience to some other plot point. Sawyer has plenty of room to breath and, well, brood - which is exactly what would make sense for him.

But then we have the sickness. See the Lost And Gone Forever Blog for a great recap of the various contradictions to the sickness and the vaccine we've witnessed over seasons. It went from being one of the more interesting early mysteries (seeing "Quarantine" on an open hatch is kinda brilliant) to just plain confusing. Can the writing march forward and explain the range of events we've seen? I'm hoping so - because that will be better than some reconned explanation which just happens to fit this season.

So a thumbs up, but with the tacked on reminder that the show has a lot of work to do.

Crazy theory time. Last week's was that Jacob, Anti-Jacob and Richard are all aliens. The weak point in this theory seems to be Richard, which seems like a hard sell to be on the same level as Jacob and Anti-Jacob ... which is pretty sound reasoning since nothing in the storyline refers to Richard in the same light. Richard seems like he more likely shares the same camp as Ben and now Sayid - someone who has been effected by the island at a very extreme level. A slave on the Black Rock who went to temple, it might seem.

Not much this episode contradicted the alien theory, but nothing really to support it either - we didn't really see anything of Smokey. Which, I'm hoping we don't get into a tempo where we only get cool Jacob/Locke related material every three to four episodes.

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.