I’ve written before about the state of MMOs, the dated mechanics that drive them, and the sorts of innovation that will propel the evolution of the genre. Since I started posting on that topic, I’ve received a lot of feedback – including several emails from MMO developers – that largely agreed with my observations but also made the completely fair observation that talking about how much better a product can be on a blog is an incredibly easy and cheap thing to do. Designing it so it actually works (and then getting the notoriously curmudgeony MMO community to accept it) is much more tricky.

A lot of these discussions take place in direct relation to World of Warcraft, and whether you like WoW or hate it, the reason is quite obvious. Most MMOs that come out are doomed to either failure or at least obscurity specifically because of the behemoth from Blizzard. It dominates its genre in a way that no other game in no other genre does. The very nature of MMOs make them exclusive by default. From both a pricing and a time investment model, it is not reasonable for most gamers to play more than one of them at once. Especially not if they have other concerns like a job, a social life, and might actually want to play other non-MMO games as well.

In that respect, MMOs are unlike any other gaming genre. Some folks might bounce from one to another occasionally, but most of the MMO players that I know have one MMO that they invest genuine time in, and that choice is often dictated by both the quality of the MMO and the availability of their preferred gaming community. I know that the last time or two I went back to FFXI, it wasn’t for the game itself so much as it was for my Linkshell. And I know that when I take a little WoW break, what often brings me back is my Guildmates.

This situation is exasperated by the time requirements of MMOs. While it’s not uncommon for me to return to other types of games periodically (certainly, I might play a new shooter in the same span of time that I log a few hours of Team Fortress 2), it’s just not realistic for an MMO. For the vast chunk of the market, for all of the subscribers that actually matter, an MMO either gets their monthly fee or it doesn’t.

World of Warcraft has capitalized on that truth and tuned their gaming experience for that reality. They don’t inherently care if their customer base plays another game as well, but the truth of their industry is that customers who play another MMO are less likely to continue playing (and thus paying for) WoW. It’s a dastardly reality, but at the same time it has driven incredible levels of content, developer time and genre evolution. Yes, Blizzard’s lead on even the second most popular MMO is comical, but at the same time, they never rest on their laurels.

Constant content, mechanics updates, regular expansions and the infinite re-tooling of the very class mechanics upon which the game is based are designed to keep players interested in WoW, to the exclusion of anything else that might otherwise seem like a decent investment of $15 per month. And in that respect (as Tycho of Penny Arcade observed years ago), Blizzard has the budget, the development team, and the sheer marketplace power to lay smaller MMOs to waste.

Or at the very least, to marginalize them into niche games. And sadly (as has been my experience in four MMOs that I’ve given a month or two’s worth of attention to over the last few years), those games are principally populated by jaded WoW junkies who simply cannot shut the fuck up about how much better whatever they are playing is than WoW, in much the same way (and with the same level of sincerity) a hooker might tell you what a big dick you have.

So, with that daunting wall of financial reality expressed in many more paragraphs than I’d originally intended, I’m going to talk about something that is likely to piss a lot of MMO players off. I said before that MMO players inherently resist change, and I meant it (I’m looking at you, Sad Sacks That Still Play Everquest 1). People assume roles in MMOs and get very comfortable both with those roles and the tools they use to execute on those roles. It becomes part of their playstyle and skillset, rigidly divided into Damage, Tanking and Healing.

I’ve said before that the distinction of these three roles strangles MMO development and forces arbitrary mechanics into the game. The developers for Guild Wars 2 apparently feel the same way, as there will be no tanks or healers in their upcoming sequel. That’s a very radical approach, and it trends the game more towards a Diablo style of play than a Warcraft one – not that I have anything but love for Diablo. It is a radical departure from the established playstyle, though Guild Wars is in many ways a different genre of game (requiring no subscription). In that respect, it is more Diablo than Warcraft anyway.

But Guild Wars 2 stands more or less alone in that regard. And while I agree that they’re addressing the correct problem, I think there is a much more articulate way of solving it than simply removing class roles and turning everyone into a self healing, self tanking damage dealer. Many players don’t want to hear this, but the problem has always been tanking – because in MMOs tanking is a completely arbitrary and mechanics driven activity. Hell, I primarily play a tank and on some level I don’t want to hear it. Doesn’t make it untrue. And I’ll prove it to you.

In most MMOs, tanks have two basic things they need to be good at. The first is that they need to be able to mitigate damage, either through absorption or avoidance. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It makes sense that the person designated to take the biggest hits would want to focus on those sorts of abilities and stats. But that brings us to the designation. The second thing a tank has to do is generate threat. And that’s where the combat mechanics of almost every MMO fall completely apart. Threat (or aggro if you want to go old school) is killing MMOs. In fact, I’ll go one step further. If you can find a way to make threat not matter, you would solve not only grouping problems and role problems, but you would also have an instant solution to the PvP versus PvE branching in MMO combat.

First of all, let’s define our terms. Threat is an invisible game mechanic that causes the AI in MMOs to be stupid. It makes enemies and bosses spend all of their time attacking the most damage resistant and (here’s the important part) least threatening player in the fight. It is a button you press or a meter you watch – and the fact that most MMOs don’t include any graphical display for threat mechanics alone tells you how much of a crutch it is – that causes fights to hobble along in a completely artificial order. Again, it actively causes enemies to make the worst possible tactical choices. Somehow, I have trouble taking seriously the Lich King himself, master of all the Scourge and the single greatest threat to all life on Azeroth, if he can be distracted by a guy with a shield yelling, “Hey you! Come attack me!” every ten seconds.

The proof of this is as direct as the comparison between PvE and PvP. In the average PvE scenario, enemies wind up attacking the tanks first, the DPS second (assuming all the tanks are dead) and then the healers last. Some MMOs swap the healers and damage dealers, depending on the once again artificial threat mechanics, but the point is that the tanks get the most damage and attention. That’s a game device to allow tanking. Compare that to a PvP encounter. In those situations, it’s always either healers or dangerous DPS that get selected for death first. Any tanks on the field (if there are any) are considered a nuisance, relegated to last place status.

The same thing is true of how players deal with enemies. When confronted by a group of AI targets, it is almost always the healer that gets burned first. The only exception is for special mobs that have dangerous or powerful attacks that can endanger the entire group (the afore-mentioned dangerous DPS). Tough but weak-hitting melee targets get saved for the end of the fight to be “cleaned up”. In our AI analogy, those would be the tanks. Except because players have a sliver of common sense, those tanks cannot do their job. Players are not chained to an absurd mechanic like aggro tables. Rather, they are analyzing the actual threat that their targets pose and attack accordingly.

The point is that if you could make tanks the most dangerous target without a threat mechanic, you would simultaneously cause PvE targets to act logically and introduce a vibrant and new PvP mechanic that would largely mirror the normal game tactics. With that baseline, the same abilities, stats and group compositions that are valued in PvE could be valued in PvP. Combat would make sense across the board and true PvPvE scenarios (which games like Aion promised but largely failed to deliver on) would become a reality.

Now obviously there are things that wouldn’t work. You can’t simply ramp up tank damage, or else groups would be composed of nothing but tanks and healers – and healers would still be the primary targets. Rather, you need to give tanks abilities that provide the one thing that aggro tables attempt to: control. For far too long, damage dealers have also been the players that can control and manipulate opposing targets. They are the ones with the snares and the stuns and the roots and knockdowns  and the slows the various other crippling abilities. They are the ones who will put an enemy target out of commission completely so that other targets can be focus fired down.

Logically, this makes very little sense. It’s just another reason for DPS to be a bigger threat than tanks. If you were to give these sorts of abilities to tanking classes, you could create all sorts of situations where enemies (both players and AI) need to keep their focus on the tanks in order to avoid or mitigate effects that completely lock them out of combat. Essentially, you give a tank tremendous combat advantages over any target that is targeting someone else. And they would have to be powerful abilities – strong enough to make suiciding against a healer an invalid tactic. They would also have to be balanced around multiple tanks on the field (a simple system where a target cannot be “marked” by more than one tank at once would suffice).

There are even very interesting things you could do with collision, lag allowing of course, to mimic the real world functionality of putting the big armored brutes in front and the squishy rangers in the back. But anything to remove the absurdity of aggro tables would be an improvement.

Giving tanks mobility, crowd control and potentially multiplied damage on enemies who ignore tanks in favor of squishier targets, combined with a ramping down of the instant gibbability of non-tanks (so that a lack of a 100% threat lock via a metered mechanic doesn’t spell utter disaster) would make for a much more balanced, much more realistic game. To Blizzard’s credit, it sounds like they are making non-tanks slightly less destroyable in terms of health pools, so they’re getting there. But I don’t see them getting rid of threat anytime soon. Their system is structured too firmly around the idea, and the concept of the threat meter is as inherent a part of WoW as anything else – even though Blizzard’s own default UI still does not offer an actual threat meter.

But although much of this article talks about World of Warcraft (for the many reasons I’ve detailed above), it’s not a suggestion for Blizzard. I started this article talking about the MMO market and the difficulty that WoW poses to new entries into that genre. As long as companies continue to crank out weaksauce WoW clones that offer nothing significant or new in terms of gameplay, they will fail. The problem lies in trying to best Blizzard’s offering, because it has an incredible level of invested time and polish. Hell, the new expansion is going back and redesigning every single quest, enemy and area from the original game. Not just tuning, but completely burning down and rebuilding it all. I don’t know if there are any game studios equipped to compete with the Warcraft juggernaut head to head, offering a similar product.

The only way to establish more than a loose foothold in that market is to create something that Blizzard is either unable or unwilling to offer in WoW. It sounds like BioWare is taking that route with Knights of the Old Republic, and the combination of a beloved IP with a more personal gaming experience (that blends MMO anonymity with the concept of story and character) might be enough. Turning out a well built MMO that doesn’t take place in a purely fantasy setting will also be helpful.

But outside of that one rather unique example (especially with Jumpgate Evolution in limbo), there’s not much new on offer other than updated graphics engines and clunky fight mechanics. Redefining the relationship between targets and attackers by getting rid of threat is exactly the sort of change that would vastly improve gameplay, encourage more people to take on the tanking role (thus removing another awkward obstacle most MMOs suffer from), and add a genuine sense of realism and parity to a game’s combat mechanics.

Threat is a crutch. A stopgap for lazy design. An artificial construct intended to plaster over one of the gaping holes in MMO fight mechanics. My suggestion for designing it out of existence is one approach, and I am sure there are others. But the development team that launches a solid MMO offering where threat is an effect of combat rather than a cause will have an advantage over World of Warcraft that not even Blizzard’s absurd bank balance can offset.

I can’t say that the next big MMO will definitely strip aggro tables from its combat, but it will eventually happen. And once we are used to that model, we will stare aghast at the old way of playing MMOs with the same sort of chortling disdain and misplaced nostalgia that we currently have for games like the original Everquest. As an outdated relic that expressed the desires of the genre without ever fulfilling them. A few people will never move on – but most of us will never look back.

There are plenty of problems with DLC – I don’t know if this post is the place to detail them all. But as I see it, there are two primary types of DLC out there. The first exists in multi-player offerings, everything from additional maps to new songs for Guitar Band Hero Rock Lip Times. These are stand-alone offerings that provide additional content to be stomped through, and don’t concern whatever story mode or campaign arc the game ships with. Other than the varying price point (by which I mean to say, if you’ve spent $30 on Modern Warfare 2 maps without them even fixing the absurd levels of game breaking bullshit that are part and parcel of that multiplayer experience, you are daft in the head), the model generally works.

DLC starts to run into problems for games with cohesive single player campaigns, or where the single player campaign is the entirety of the game. The problem is very direct – DLC splinters the game’s community into two groups. This problem is bad enough with things like map packs, where all that is being fractured is the matchmaking. But if you ever plan on developing your IP further, and making a sequel, you need to assume that what the plot ended with the actual game. That has the unfortunate side effect of rendering everything that takes place in the DLC moot. Which is why so many DLC packages contain new levels and scenarios where absolutely fucking nothing happens.

I first noticed this issue, actually, with the first piece of DLC I ever bought – the additional content for the new Prince of Persia (not the movie tie in. . . thing, but the new cell shaded one). It was a game I actually really enjoyed, but the story itself ended on an incredibly down note. Seeing as how the DLC adds a new level and a new chapter immediately after one of the most depressing endings in gaming history, I was looking forward to seeing what Ubisoft would do with that scenario.
It turns out they did nothing. The Price and What’s Her Name bound through an entirely new temple, if by “new” you mean a brief rehash of what was already plentiful in the maine game. Not that the DLC was bad, I actually enjoyed it. But there was nothing there that wasn’t in the game proper, and at the end of the DLC they were in just as bad a position as at the end of the game. Identical in fact.

Now, other DLC attempts to circumvent the plot tampering problem by setting their content “outside” of the main story, or in the middle of it, or by ret-conning it into the existing plot arc. Gears of War 2 released an abandoned level that the team finally polished for release. If GoW2 hadn’t already been a full and exceptional game, I might have felt a bit cheated about paying for that. Tomb Raider: Underworld did the same thing, but then at least tried to branch off an offer different game modes.

The first Force Unleashed pack was a stage that they wedged in between two existing stages in the game, though it doesn’t seem to care where you are in the game or what progression your character was at. The other DLC (which I refuse to buy, based on its current brevity and price) takes place in an alternate reality version of the game that splinters off from the “real” ending, and has absolutely no bearing on the sequel.

All of this was running through my head today as I stared at the box for Alan Wake, a game which I thoroughly enjoyed despite its casual faults and would be very happy to play more of, if there were any. The original buzz was that the DLC for Alan Wake would actually be Alan Wake 2, an approach that I found refreshing and exciting. That changed shortly after launch, and now the DLC will be a “bridge” between Alan Wake and its sequel. In other words? Nothing is going to happen. It can’t.

Because Remedy can’t reasonably expect players to have definitely purchased the additional chapters in order to maintain their understanding of the story. Even they realize that would be unsportsmanlike. So the solution is to release DLC that’s a rehash of Alan Wake in slightly different scenarios where nothing relevant to the plot takes place. And since Alan Wake steeps itself so heavily in its own plot, that means there won’t be much there.

Now, the first of these two (or maybe three) DLC packs is going to be free, because I bought the game new. So I’ll obviously check that one out. And at the relatively sane price point of $7, I might investigate the others anyway, depending on their length. But DLC could be doing so much more, especially for a story-driven game like Alan Wake. It could be, if it wasn’t for the very nature of the delivery system. I can already hear the narration on the final bit of DLC, telling me how despite my best efforts the situation was still grim, and it would take much more to finally set things right. As in, it will take me buying Alan Wake 2 in 2013 (or whenever it comes out).

Now, a very good friend of mine did suggest a solution to this problem. Release meaningful DLC, and then pacakage the sequel with a redemption code that makes the DLC for the first game free. The real fans of the game will buy the DLC long before the sequel comes out, the people that don’t care about the plot will skip it, and the people who only buy the sequel will actually have an additional incentive to go back and pick up the first one.

Of course, this is a great solution, so don’t look for the industry to adopt it anytime soon. But they’re going to have to come up with something. The community has already had a rough time adapting to DLC, and overall I think the feeling is pretty universal. We like it, we want it, and we’re willing to pay for it. But we most definitely want more out of it. There’s got to be a middle ground between clunky additional levels and full on episoding gaming that allows additional DLC to have meaning and substance, but not break the game for people who aren’t willing or able to carry the addional cost. And the developer that finds it first is going to find itself awash in delicious cash dollars.

I’ve been meaning to write about Aion for quite some time, but I honestly haven’t been able to scrape up the will to do so. There isn’t a lot to say that hasn’t been said already. It’s a better-than-average Korean MMO (which doesn’t say much on its own) that is entertaining and engaging for about the month’s worth of free play that you get with the title. The flying works like most other MMOs (air swimming), and the gliding is actually much more fun though useful primarily as a way to run from objective to objective in slightly less time.

The classes are generic and poorly balanced, and suffer from the common MMO problem of having a tank / healer shortage. They also suffer from the old PvE / PvP problem (what works in one sucks in the other, and vice versa). And the wealth of content available in the first two leveling zones (from 1 to 20) dries up pitifully once you progress beyond that point, so be prepared for some heavy and directionless XP grinding. Crafting is functional and can produce excellent returns but can be both costly and time consuming. Aion’s player base is obsessed with griping about how World of Warcraft is no longer hardcore enough to the point where you are unable to have any other discussion, and yet the player base seems no more skilled or mature than the WoW population. In short, Aion is plagued by all of the problems of a freshly launched MMO, needs considerable polish, and will be worth re-investigating in about six months.

See? Not exactly a breathtaking post, and honestly there’s not a whole lot more I would bother adding to that summary. If anything I’d spend more time crucifying the player base for never shutting the hell up about WoW – the spam they generated was infinitely worse than any of the gold selling spam I’d get blasted with at login. But there’s really not a whole lot else to write about.

It’s something that didn’t really come into focus for me until today, when I was discussing Modern Warfare 2 with a few friends of mine. Now, to be fair, I played MW1 long after its hay day and really only took part in the single player offering. It was entertaining, but not something I was willing to pay $60 to continue. I bought MW2 for the multi-player. That’s an odd choice for me, but since my entire Xbox Friends list was populated by nothing but hordes of people playing the damn game, I decided I was willing to give it a shot.

Just quickly, to address the single player in MW2? More of the same. Really. And if you liked MW1, that’s great. If you didn’t, don’t bother. The whole “shooting civilians” controversy is exactly that. A controversy. It’s shock value that doesn’t even feel shocking from a single player scenario. It was added to the game to drive up sales via free media caterwauling, and in that respect it worked brilliantly. In a post-GTA gaming world, though, it’s borderline passe. And that’s about as much as I care about the single player campaign.

I don’t even feel like I have as much to say about it as I did about Aion. Upgrading the guns and gaining access to new weapons is primarily what keeps me playing. The perks are well thought out and there is no one “best combination” though most playstyles favor a few of them. There is a very distinct assault rifle barrier – the M16 is an insanely well balanced weapon and you’ll find very few players above level 40 using any other rifle. Though it’s not cripplingly unfair to the point of requiring adjustment. Other than my lament of the game lacking an inherent cover system, ala Gabe, there’s really not much else for me to say about this Most Important Title Ever in modern gaming.

At least, I didn’t think so. And then today, in a completely off-the-cuff manner, I hit on what has been bothering me about MW2 so very much. This does not feel like a game that came out ten years after Counter-Strike.

Now, obviously I’m not talking about the graphics. The engine is robust and expressive in all of the ways that it needs to be. No one is going to confuse MW2′s visuals with a multiplayer mod for the original Half-Life engine. And there are obviously plenty of other items that add to the realism of the game. The lack of bunny-hopping jerks comes to mind. The more refined weapons selection. Sprinting. Character progression. The inclusion of grenades that aren’t their own weaponry class. Auto-restoring health.

I’m not saying the games are identical by any stretch. What I am saying is that Modern Warfare 2 is emblematic of its genre, and it doesn’t feel like a decade of advancements over Counter-Strike – a game which came to market from a pair of independent game developers. The movement still feels like it’s being played out on a huge checkerboard grid. The maps are still designed to reward camping, blindsiding and AWP-style sniping. And hell, I’d call the melee in MW2 a huge step backwards. The bulk of what makes MW2 superior to its ten-years-apart ancestor could be patched into the original Half-Life mod quite easily. And honestly, I have a problem with that.

That thought led me back to my idea of reviewing Aion. What is there to say, really? Haven’t I written this sort of review a dozen times? And haven’t you read it a hundred more? Understand that I am not impugning the quality of either of these games but rather their pedigree. They add new features, certainly. But neither address the core problems with their genres. And they’re not alone in this fault – they’re just the most obvious and high profile examples available to me right now.

Most of what makes MMOs “not fun” is present in Aion. Most of what makes FPSs “not fun” is present in MW2. Ten years of the best minds in game design hammering away at these genres has done little more than offer a series of increasingly pretty distractions from these facts. In the end, my choice of what game to buy (and certainly what game to play) is largely dictated by the popularity of the title itself. It’s a matter of which company is selling my friends back to me. Admittedly, that’s good news for MW2 – and bad news for Aion. Unfortunately, it’s also bad news for all of us.

A little while after Batman: Arkham Asylum came out, there was a tidbit from the developers about how the original incarnation of the combat engine worked like a rhythm game. Most of the articles, blogs and comments I read about that throw away line were full of scoff and ASCII inspired eye rolls. Eventually someone would make a “Punching Hero” joke, and everyone moved on with their days.

I had a different reaction to that piece of information. Because I had always considered the combat in Arkham Asylum to be a rhythm game. The absence of digital frets or huge plastic acccessories be damned – it’s a rhythm game. Your default strum is the X key. It’s your basic attack. You press this at an even, steady interval to build your combo. Variations include blocks, grabs, throws, dodges, batarangs, cape swipes, and target shifts. In each of these examples, extra buttons are pressed either in combination with or as a substitution for the basic attack (or strum), but if you’re keeping up your combo, you’re keeping up the rhythm.

The entire combat system in Arkham, which allows the player to be completely overpowering against a given opponent while still maintaining a sense of vulnerability and danger when faced with multiple opponents, is absolutely brilliant. And whether you played it like a rhythm game or like a button masher (in which case you probably never really racked up any serious combos), the combat system that Rocksteady created managed to simultaneously work as a gameplay mechanic and stay absolutely true to its source material. It plays the way Batman would behave.

I’ve been thinking about Akrham Asylum quite a bit lately as I played through Assassin’s Creed II. This is partially the fault of one of my good friends, long ago, referring to the first Assassin’s Creed as “Medieval Batman”. And while there are obvious differences (such as the obvious violation of Batman’s one rule), there is also a lot of validity to that comparison. Both Altair and Batman are methodical and calculating. They are planners and investigators, studying and researching their foes to formulate the best possible plan of attack. They use gadgets and technology to gain the upper hand despite overwhelming odds. The comparison could roll for paragraphs, but you get the general idea.

And Batman not withstanding, Assassin’s Creed II is a very good game. It is an improvement on its predecessor in virtually every way. In fact, it almost feels like Ubisoft sat down, watched Yahtzee tear their original game to shreds a few thousand times, and used that review as a blueprint for how to improve the sequel.

Gone is the tedious need to crawl at a snail’s pace whenever you are within ten square blocks of a city guard. Gone also are the annoying beggar ladies and lepers that are free to shove you around into said guards, who will then attempt to stab you. Gone also are the obnoxious and pointless riding sequences between towns. Ditto on the ten minute conversations with people you’ve recently stabbed in the neck (those sequences still exist, are simply much shorter, and are more enjoyable to watch). Gone also are the constant interruptions where you warp out of your DNA flashback and are forced to wander around as Desmond for a few minutes a pop.

Instead, Ubisoft has added a much more fluid story progression, which makes the game feel a lot less like just a series of missions and actually ties the in-game events together nicely. They’ve also included some very interesting back story puzzles – and make no mistake, they are actual puzzles whose difficulty range from “Obviously Solvable” to “Tricky” and occasionally launch right into “There are seven thousand combinations, I’ll just try them all!” They also added a very interesting “dungeon” concept to the game. Set, closed off areas with strategically placed guards and obstacles that must be navigated and exist outside the world proper – almost like an MMO instance. I found these to be quite a bit of fun, and wanted more of that kind of content. I have no doubt that Ubisoft will endeavor to sell me more of these dungeons later on via DLC, and I’ll consider buying them depending on the price point.

The combat is better than it was in Assassin’s Creed, though I still feel like this is one of the roughest areas of the game. You’re afforded a whole arsenal of weapons, as well as the ability to steal weapons from your opponents. And yet I handled 95% of the combat either by sword-hacking my opponents down or walking up behind them while they were busy and wrist-blading them in the chest. Just about the only time I used any other technique was when I was faced with an enemy with a spear, at which point I would steal his weapon, spear him in the chest, and then continue to sword-hack my way through the angry mob.

There are also some things that they added that really don’t strike a chord with me at all. There’s an economic system in the game – just barely. If you can skate through the low difficulty of the first mission or two just investing your cash back into your villa, you’ll be so flush with gold for the rest of the game that the biggest financial problem you’ll have is having to constantly go back to town to pick up all your extra cash. I understand what they thought they were doing, I just don’t think they struck the proper balance. There’s also a side quest to collect 100 MacGuffins spread out across four or five cities which don’t appear on the map, are small enough to hide anywhere, and offer almost no reward. So screw that. And finally there is the main character – who I never really connected with. Despite him having more development, more story, more supporting characters and more motivation, I really couldn’t be bothered to care about Ezio in the same way that I grew fond of Altair.

In a vacuum, with only Assassin’s Creed to compare its sequel to, AC2 is a direct improvement in every possible way. The repetitive nature of the investigations is either gone or very well hidden by the story, the towns are designed in much more interesting ways (Venice’s waterways do very interesting things to the map, although deep in my heart I feel that the setting and period of AC1 is more appropriate for the story being told) and your exploration of them isn’t quite as gated. The game contains more characters, more motivation, and some pretty well done voice acting even if it does feel like a crash course in Tourist Italian.

But the title doesn’t exist in a vacuum. And when I mentioned the post-Arkham world of gaming a little while ago, I meant it. Arkham Asylum set an insanely high bar because it took just about every gaming trope we’ve come to expect over the past fifteen-odd years and not only handled them all brilliantly, but managed to weave that brilliance into the fabric of a pre-existing world and cast of characters in a way that felt effortless. Even the stealth “predator” sequences in Arkham leave me feeling more like an assassin than the very best sequences in AC2.

Assassin’s Creed II is a very capable game, and if you were willing to play AC1 to its conclusion, you’ll find plenty to enjoy in its sequel. But I didn’t get that same  “Renaissance Batman” rush from AC2. It surpasses its predecessor, but it fails to surpass its competition. Is it worth $60? Yes, absolutely. But only if you haven’t already dropped $60 on Arkham.

Fair Warning: There are game spoilers contained in this article (specifically for Grand Theft Auto IV). If you haven’t played GTA4 by now, but you don’t want to have the ending revealed, then, um. . . seriously, dude, it came out like a year ago. Too bad.

A few months ago, the boys over at Penny Arcade made a mostly off the cuff comment in one of their podcasts, pointing out that game reviews often use the term “linear” perjoratively – as if calling a game linear holds the same negative connotations as calling it bland or ugly or poorly designed. And I suppose, within the bubble of that world, I can understand why linear has become a dirty word in gaming.

It gets trotted out whenever a reviewer has about a line and a half to convey the idea that the developer put minimal effort into anticipating the desires and the actions of the gamer. Linear, in its genuinely negative context, doesn’t mean that all non-open ended games are bad, but it’s become such a popular buzzword that many great yet linear games get the shaft.

For a long time, linear gaming was the only and obvious choice. The paddle in pong moved up and down. Mario could jump over the barrels and collect the hammer. Pacman ate dots. And then he ate some more freakin’ dots. These were games of limited structure because the hardware offered no alternative, and gamers happily lived inside of those bounds. The first true attempt at a non-linear game was probably text-based adventures. It was the first instance of a programmer sitting down and trying to think of a way to anticipate the things that a player would do with a non-finite set of inputs. But even in text adventure gaming, that non-linearity was an illusion. You did have finite inputs, and any time you breached those bounds, the game would dutifully report that you could not get ye flask.

The open-endedness was a lie. The choices were really not so much choices as they were a branching tree of potential outcomes that you drilled down through. They were essentially choose-your-own adventure novels without any indication of which page to turn to next. The advantage was that these sorts of simple, simulated worlds offered a vastly increased number of pages to turn to, and it was up to the player to figure out all of his options. The disadvantage is that the game had to have a catch-all response for when the option you invented didn’t match the limited grammatical parameters of the game’s logic. And sometimes that grammar was stunningly limited.

But those games didn’t just present an illusion of choice in terms of the inputs (why can I “climb up ladder” but not “climb ladder”?). They also meted out a player’s options and choices very unevenly. Far too often what seemed like innocent, obvious actions and motions would lead to a page full of text that ended with something like “You have died. Final Score: 6/250″. The frustration of those sorts of games came when players pierced the admittedly thin veil of suspended disbelief and spent more time playing with the mechanics of the game than playing the game itself.

And then, for a very long time, open-ended games went out of style. They held on for a while on the PC in point-and-click adventures. King’s Quest, Maniac Mansion, Sam & Max and, of course, raunchier fare like Leisure Suit Larry. These games quickly circumvented the need for actual game grammar by providing the player with limited inputs, and the advent of actual, moving graphics made it much easier for a player to understand why ye flask was un-gettable. But this was all just a long-armed end run around the necessity of having an actual, live human being moderating the game experience (like in most tabletop games).

Even today, the task of simulating a human being for rudimentary gaming purposes is beyond the hardware we play on. That’s why I’ve been told for the past fifteen years that the AI in my games is going to be very clever, and it usually winds up cheating its way to superiority. That’s why most MMOs have such rigid questing and leveling structures in place, so that it almost sort of maybe feels like a crappy DM on autopilot is handing you out busywork.

That’s why so many people became wowed (and then eventually disillusioned) at the Black & White series, which promised you an AI at least as smart as a badly trained house pet. Five hours of trying to teach it not to eat its own poop later, most people realized that they more or less nailed it on that one. And that’s why rooms full of otherwise educated adults stood in awe at E3 this year while a woman pretended to talk to a scripted child about a pond – a demonstration I’ll believe when they can pull it off with a random audience member and not before.

All of these things are attempts on some level to take the automation out of gaming. To make games less linear and pre-ordained. And even when they succeed, they’re still a lie. They’re no different than the old text adventures we used to play years ago. Never has this fact been more impressed upon me than when playing Grand Theft Auto IV. As the undisputed heir to the sandbox throne, GTA4 promised its players a living, breathing simulation of New York City. And its recreation is remarkable. The city is full of cars and people and events and activities.

Except it isn’t. But the genius of the game is in covering that fact up. I’d say that for about 80% of my playing experience, I didn’t notice just how empty and lonely the city is. Mostly because I always had stuff to do. I had some schmuck who wanted my help with his wife, or some guy who needed me to collect money, or a car that just had to be stolen or an immediate family member that was once again kidnapped. But as I played through the game, it became obvious which quests were optional stuff and which ones would advance the main plot. And as a reasonable completionist (which means I want to experience all of the content, but I draw the line at un-fun busywork), I wanted to make sure that I got all of the side missions and activities taken care of before I closed out the story.

So once I narrowed the main story down to one final set of missions, I did everything else. I took care of all of my side jobs. I hooked up with all of my girlfriends (one of whom needed a crack upside the head, to be honest). I got my friendships up enough to feel accomplished without having to play the fucking darts game for a day straight. And then I zeroed in on the last set of missions.  Which was apparently a bad idea because that last set or so had a lot of lag time between individual tasks. Time I suppose the game expected me to fill tying up other loose ends, so they gave me no way to advance the plot any faster than the game wanted so.

So sometimes there’d just be time to fill between activities. I’d go to my apartment, I’d drive around the city, but it was all just listless drifting. Even most of the NPCs wouldn’t answer my calls – presumably so that I’d be ready for the next mission without interruption. Suddenly Liberty City ceased to be a sandbox and was really just. . . nothing at all. But honestly? That’s not what shattered the illusion for me. What broke the game was the decision before the wedding mission. You essentially have two choices. You can either cause Kate to dump you and let Roman die, or else you can do the “right thing” and have Kate get killed for it. Those are your options. That’s it.

All of the badness happens in a cutscene, and there is no way to prevent it. No way to take out both Jimmy and Dimitri beforehand (which honestly, I wanted to do anyhow because they were both pricks). No way to set up a barracade or take down the car before they drive by. No way to stop another character in the game from dying because of my actions.

And yes, I get that the game is making a statement about consequences. That these events are meant to be contrasted against your decision about whether or not to kill Darko (for the record, I did not) and whether to deal with Dimitri (for the record, I took his ass out first so Kate died in my game). It’s a powerful and interesting reflection on the choices that we make as human beings, and how we let those choices dictate what we become. It’s probably one of the most interesting and emotionally complicated cutscenes since FFVII – at least it was for me, because I really liked Kate. And it was decidedly and absolutely linear.

Yeah, I said it. The grand-daddy of sandbox action, Grand Theft Auto, went all linear on us. In the end, the only choice we had was who the target of Niko’s anger and vengeance would be. We had no say in what Niko was, or what he would once again become. Don’t get me wrong – I wanted to kill Jimmy big time. But I couldn’t NOT do it. In fact, his execution happened in another cutscene, unlike every other execution in the game. I could not choose to be a better person.

And that problem wasn’t isolated to just the final chapter of the game. There were plenty of times when Niko took part in situations that just didn’t jive with either my interpretation of his character or even with the character that he actively professed to be. There’s a side mission when a man stabs his wife to death because he thinks she is cheating on him, and you know that’s not the case. At that point in the game, my reaction was to let fly with some vigilante justice and pop him right back. But he pays me to cover up the murder and my only option is to agree. In that case, I wasn’t even presented with the Obviously Good and Hideously Evil sort of moral choice that so many games like to foist upon their players (I’m looking at you BioShock, as well as Every LucasArts Game Where You Use A Lightsaber).

But in playing through the game, and then going back and rethinking where GTA4 takes the player, what I eventually concluded was that linearity is a function of statement. Even with the budget and man hours spent making GTA4, there were only so many player variables the game could adjust for. And the ability to make that statement about the inevitability of a person’s actions dictating their future wouldn’t be possible without forcing those consequences on the player. Rockstar essentially presented the player with their own, gangster style Kobayashi Maru. Any like anyone who might find themselves in that situation, I resented it.

Though it does speak in another way to the many critics of the series, who feel that GTA glorifies violence, crime, murder and lawlessness. There are no happy endings for Niko Bellic. His choices and his lust for revenge will always lead him, in the end, to a no win scenario. From a narrative standpoint, GTA4 has an incredible ending. From an actual gaming standpoint, I actively hate how the story resolves. And that, honestly, is the best argument I can make in favor of linearity in games. If we want games to be a legitimate medium for conveying ideas and thoughts, there simply has to be a narrative. And for there to be a narrative, there must be a linear structure.

That doesn’t mean a lack of choice, or that the world must be broken into stages (though Bionic Commando accomplished this nicely). It also doesn’t mean that the choices have to be so stark as to spang the player across the head with a shovel of foreshadowing – though without that foreshadowing many gamers will complain that they game went in a direction they didn’t want it to because they weren’t presented up front with the consequences of their actions, and will likely just re-play the offending sequence to get the desired result. In a lot of ways, that’s no different to most gamers than retrying a failed mission or loading up a saved game from before they died.

Balancing a game around the player’s enjoyment and the easy access of a metaphorical reset button compared to the need to actively place the player’s characters into undesirable and even permanently debilitating situations just about has to be linear, or else the game’s narrative loses the capacity for character development, and the right choices simply become a matter of optimal play. The game goes from speaking to the consequences of actions to being a puzzle or logistical problem to be “beaten” by the player. Without at least some degree of linearity, games will always be just nothing more than games. So question that word, that judgment, and that context when you hear it used negatively. Because very often, the linear elements of games are what make them great.

When the demo for Bionic Commando hit Xbox Live, I have to tell you, I was disappointed. I’ve long been a fan of the series (and by series I mean the one game) and I have been looking forward to Bionic Commando for some time. But the demo was a dark, crowded, single-level free for all gankfest dominated by twitchy sniper one-shots and the brazen overpowered spray of one or two select weapons. The truth is that without the Bionic Commando name (and the good will that Grin earned by gracefully remastering the original title as Rearmed), I can’t imagine that demo selling any units. In fact, when I first played it, I couldn’t figure out why Capcom chose such a mediocre experience to demo such a highly anticipated game. Usually that’s a bad sign.

Well, I understand why they did it now, having beaten the full game on the maximum difficulty setting, and it has nothing to do with a lack of quality. The game experience itself is unimpeachable. It is consistently challenging without ever being cheap, well designed, balanced, and taking full advantage of all of the unique situations that its primary feature – the bionic arm – has to offer. The reason they threw everyone into a multiplayer zone during the demo was so that your opponents would suck as much as you do. Because when you first start playing Bionic Commando, make no mistake, you suck at it.

And I mean you suck hard. Even once you get the basics of swinging and targetting with the grapple down, once you figure out how to do some basic weapons aiming and how to take advantage of cover (though there is no inherent cover system), you will still be very bad at Bionic Commando. To be honest, I think I was about a third of the way into the game before I really got good with the arm, and I know that by about two thirds of the way through the game I was performing maneuvers that wouldn’t have even occurred to me earlier on.

The progression and skill curve of using the arm not just as a weapon (because it is a powerful weapon) but as a tactical tool to place your character where you want to be is constant. Even having beaten the game, I’m sure that a second play-through would continue to build on my technique. In short, it just isn’t something you could have ever learned in the span of a demo. And it puts the early previews, which all said that the game seemed cool but the arm was very hard to use, in sharp contrast. Those reviews were dead on accurate. And that’s a good thing.

If you go into Bionic Commando expecting to be able to swing from rooftop to scaffold simply by spamming your grapple button (which has been the principle mechanic in most other swing-based action games), you’re going to be frustrated. If you go in unwilling to treat the basic “grunt” enemies with a certain measure of lethal respect, you’re going to die a lot. And if what you’re looking for is Grand Theft Auto with a retractable claw, man are you going to be pissed.

And it’s the last part that surprised me the most – the game is most definitely not a sandbox experience (ala Spiderman 2). The levels are strictly linear, with waypoints clearly defined. If you attempt to venture too far off course, you will start to take damage and eventually get killed by radiation (the game takes place in the aftermath of a nuclear-style attack).  This mechanic is a bit clunky at times, make no mistake, because there were a few occasions where I haplessly swung up into what I figured was clear skies only to die in the air with very little warning and almost no way to alter course. But this is nit-pickery at best, and exists only to highlight the single gameplay aspect that I wasn’t completely satisfied with.

The physics of the swinging are utterly flawless – once you understand how to properly control your character. And it keeps coming back to that element because the control is so very important. When you first start playing the game, you will spend a lot of your time hurling your character more or less at your objectives and floundering around mid-air because you let go of your swings too late. That’s quite normal. By the end of the game, I was using enemy hovercraft as swingpoints to grapple between buildings and riggings to dodge sniper fire without so much as a second thought. The curve really is that steep, but it’s also that rewarding.

As far as the combat goes, it’s surprisingly pure in its execution. I’d estimate, not counting bosses, that there are about ten enemy units in the entire game – and in some cases, that’s recounting the same unit if it’s armed with a different weapon. What sells the combat are the environmental situations they put you in when you are dealing with these enemy types. Sometimes you’ll have to take down mech-type opponents (who are impervious to normal small arms fire) without any sort of explosives. You’re limited to what you can use to damage them environmentally and how you can out-maneuver them with your arm.

Other times you will be put into a wide open space with limited cover and an array of deviously placed snipers – often without any long range weapons of your own. The challenge then becomes to travel from sniper nest to sniper nest at high velocity, because leaving yourself exposed and stationary will get you killed in literally three seconds. And eventually the game starts mixing up different combinations of enemy units and locations. And it’s the locations that are often important. Performing a wild dive down to a pack of grunts is a completely different combat experience from trying to assault them in a narrow tunnel full of debris.

Likewise, fighting a hovercraft (which can nearly one-shot you) on a series of scaffolds where you have to swing to avoid its exposives, but you also have to stay under cover to hide from a sniper, and you can’t advance too far forward or else you will draw attacks from the soldiers. . . it very much becomes a tactical experience. You begin to play a secondary metagame that’s all about limiting and controlling the parameters of the fight. And that’s when your progression with the swing mechanics comes into play. You simply can’t do all of that if your attention is 100% focused on the click-and-release controls of your arm. In fact, I doubt it’s even possible to beat this game unless you can learn to swing as comfortably as you would run or aim in most other games.

And that’s what makes it brilliant.

You can’t cheat the game. You can’t just hold back and pop every enemy from the other side of the board. You can’t always go in with the heavy explosives and splash-damage your way to victory. You don’t have that one cheap move that you can just use over and over again on everything that stands in your way – in fact, your most potent arm attacks also leave you vulnerable to other opponents. The game lacks one single I Win button, opting instead for a series of I Am Awesome buttons. But in order to push those buttons, you actually have to be awesome.

For those of you that never played the original (or Rearmed), there’s not really enough plot from those games to worry about. For those of you that care, the Chain of Command comic on the Bionic Commando website neatly bridges the old story into the new one, and sets up the major themes of the game nicely. Just about the only person I wouldn’t recommend this game to is the extremely casual gamer, because no matter how low you set the difficulty, no matter how easily bosses go down or how much damage you can soak before you die, the swing mechanics will always be there, waiting to be engaged and learned. They’re vicious and tricky – even deceptively difficult. You will reach what you think are zeniths in terms of your ability, and they will turn out to be minor plateaus at best. But the better you get at using the bionics, the more rewarding the game becomes.

In short, it is worth every last one of your sixty dollars. Go buy it.

There’s been a very disturbing trend throughout virtually all forms of entertainment media in the past few years known as the “reboot”. I can’t lock down exactly when this rather unimaginative and jargon-y term became mainstream, though I suspect it had a lot to do with Chris Nolan’s fantastically successful Batman Begins. And to it’s credit, Batman Begins was a genuine reboot. It took a concept and basic outline that just about all people are familiar with and completely re-wrote it in a creative and modern way. It sought, as much as one can do with a “superhero” movie, to leave behind the more childish aspects of the material and present movie goers with something truly interesting. Of course, by that definition, Tim Burton’s Batman would also have been a reboot, but no one called it that at the time outside of Hollywood because the term “reboot” hadn’t become shorthand for “making lots of money” yet. Ah, good times.

Any-old-how, rebooting a franchise now means something slightly different. Essentially, it means dredging up some old crap people are tired of and trying to get them to pay to be disappointed again. They called Superman Returns a reboot when it was, in fact, a sequel to Superman II (correctly leaving the third and fourth movies in some alternate Universe of Suck, Richard Pryor excluded). And now the gaming industry has gotten a hold of the “reboot” concept and, as with anything they borrow from the film industry, somehow made it ten times worse.

I mention all of this because I’ve just played through Tomb Raider: Underworld (which is on sale for $40 at Target right now), a game that got partially panned by critics for being, well, Tomb Raider. And to be clear, I was completely done with Lara Croft for a very long time, until Crystal Dynamics was handed the franchise. And what they did with Tomb Raider: Legend wasn’t a proper reboot per say, but rather just a new framework for an otherwise tired series. A framework, it should be noted, which actually contained a good game. And now the rumor is that Eidos wants a full on, proper reboot for Tomb Raider. Which is, of course, a very stupid idea.

Underworld itself was actually a fairly good game (minor character animation twitching aside). It wasn’t a 10, but it wasn’t a 6 or a 7 either, as I saw it so frequently scored. It wrapped up the story of Legend nicely, and it actually loaned some perspective to Crystal Dynamics’ decision to remake the original title as Tomb Raider: Anniversary (as Underworld ties those two plots together). While I admittedly feel like Underworld was a touch on the short side (they can go to hell selling me DLC that should have been on the disc) I will say that I enjoyed it quite a bit. The levels, while still linear, are a bit more experiment friendly in terms of finding alternate or even unintended paths. And they really nailed the feel and the fun of the series. I did feel that the game was a bit short on actual boss fights (read: there are none), but otherwise they crafted a fine addition to the franchise.

That all brings me back to the sudden desire to “reboot” Tomb Raider, and the aforementioned stupidity of that idea. Apparently Eidos is concerned that Underworld only sold 1.5 million copies. That’s by no means a meager sales record, but Tomb Raider as a franchise was expected to do better. That is, assuming you live in a bubble where you aren’t releasing your game right before the holidays up against every other new title on the market during one of the worst global financial clusterfucks in the past century.

Of course, other factors contributed to Underworld’s mediocre sales – such as the mediocre reviews. What I will say for Underworld is that it gets better the more you play it – with each level presenting a more interesting series of puzzles and scenarios. It probably didn’t help reviews too much to start the entire game with a prolonged, underwater swimming stage that, unless you’re a fucking psychic, will have you doddering around the ocean floor for a good half an hour until you psychicly find the hidden McGuffin required to open the first door in the game. But the thing is, aggrivating scenarios like that (and there are a few more. . . I’m looking at you, Belt Room) must be contrasted against the sprinting dash through a gravitationally irregular sinking barge or the sheer thrill of razing enemies later on in the game.

So I don’t think the problem is that Lara Croft herself has grown “stale”. As a matter of public record, I will officially state that hot, armed chicks with British accents are in no danger of ever going out of style. And the platforming itself is very solid. Plus, Underworld did something that game designers have been trying to figure out for about ten years now. They got rid of the quicktime events and replaced them with a situation where in you still have a hasty “reaction” based event, but you retain proper control of your character. It did surprise me a bit that that our stalwart crusader against “Press X To Not Die” game sequences, Yahtzee, reviewed Underworld without at least giving it that subtle nod.

But the core issue here is that, really, there isn’t enough of Tomb Raider to reboot it. The game is already pared down to its most basic concepts (a hot, armed British chick jumping from ledge to ledge) and the gameplay steps forward in almost all cases. If what you want to make is a game that isn’t Tomb Raider, and you feel that the franchise is an anchor, then make a new game. Uncharted for the PS3 borrows heavily from Tomb Raider (which originally borrowed from Indiana Jones, and which in turn has now borrowed from Uncharted), was a completely new IP on a poorly-selling exclusive platform, and it was a major success.

Now, maybe some executive was just talking out his ass and didn’t understand what “reboot” actually means when he was talking about the next Tomb Raider. If they are simply talking about a new plot arc, then it almost goes without saying (as Lara’s current plot arc ties up fairly well in Underworld). If they are saying we need to re-imagine the character and the setting, I just can’t see that going anywhere good. The truth is that for every one Dark Knight, there are about a hundred Extreme Ghostbuters. The failure rate on these sorts of reboots is both high and needlessly risky, especially considering the amazing job Crystal Dynamics did taking the Tomb Raider franchise from the abysmal crapfest that was Angel of Darkness and revitalizing it via Legend – all without having to reinvent the wheel.

I’ll admit that I’m surprised to see that one of my most anticipated games of the year, Prince of Persia, isn’t really selling that well. Oh, sure, it’s not selling badly per say. But it’s not moving the numbers expected of an Ubisoft flagship title around Christmas. Especially considering that it’s from a series of celebrated and favored games (where even the emo-whiny Warrior Within was, underneath it’s over-marketed bullcrap, an outstanding game from a playstyle perspective).

The one thing I’ve always liked about Ubisoft is that they aren’t afraid to screw with an established formula. Sometimes they expand upon it in small ways (as in the first few Splinter Cell titles), and sometimes they make games that are just good games – critics be damned. Beyond Good and Evil was one of these titles, if only anyone had ever played it. Other times they try something that only sort of works, as with Assassin’s Creed, and what they end up with is a very different experience that doesn’t quite fit the cookie-cutter expectations of their target audience.

Creed was by no means perfect, but it certainly didn’t deserve the hate and vitriol that the gaming community thrust upon it. People saw the promo and wanted “Prince of Persia in Jerusalem” because, for all of the community’s wailing about being given the “same old game” every year, that’s essentially what sells. Just as EA, who pumped out sequal turds until their pockets were bursting with money and are now taking a hit at the register because they finally have some unique and interesting IPs in their lineup. But what Assassin’s Creed at least tried to do was to create a new genre of game play. And yes, travel was a bit tedius, and the sword play could have actually used more Prince of Persia. But when Ubisoft got hammered with scores like in the 5-6 out of 10 range, I was admittedly baffled. Compare that with the 9.5 and 10 scores gifted to Grand Theft Auto IV which, while a very good game, is really just Grand Theft Auto III with a major graphical facelift and a more compelling main character.

What really surprised me about the new Prince of Persia is the character development, and the sheer volume of dialogue in the game. Occsaionally the Prince’s quips do get annoying, as with any gaming character. But the purely “optional” dialogue sequecnes between the Prince and Elikah are actually wonderfully done, recorded believably, and add an entirely new dimension to the game that one might dare to call “character development”. Maybe it’s a sad thing that non-cringeworthy voice acting and interesting characters are worth pointing out as an exception in a game – though they’re often the rule and not the exception for Ubisoft (yes, yes, Warrior Within, I know), and that deserves recognition. And that development is not unique to the Prince of Persia franchise. The afore-mentioned Beyond Good and Evil was filled with compelling, interesting protagonists. And hell, Sam Fisher and Irving Lambert feel more like “real” people than most television and movie characters.

One of the principle complains I kept reading was that there was no way to really “lose” in the new Prince of Persia. Technically, your character cannot die. In the event that you miss a jump or get taken down to no health by an enemy, your companion resets the encounter. In the event of the climbing sequences, she pulls you back to the last place you stood on firm ground. During battle, she resets the fight, often allowing the boss to regain a large portion of his health. And these critics are right. You cannot die in Prince of Persia. They’re also missing the bloody point.

If you want to get right down to it, you cannot die in the last three Prince of Persia games, either. For one thing, you had the time rewinding powers that let you re-try difficult jumps or undo poorly thought out attacks. And there was also a save feature in place, coyly disguised as the Prince’s faulty memory. In fact, I can’t think of any game that I’ve played in the past several years where death was any impediment to progress. All Prince of Persia does is automate the quicksave and quickload buttons so you don’t have to tap them every time you fuck up. And to be honest, the new “saving” feature actually adds some measure of challenge to the movement sequences, since you don’t get to simply rewind your mistake. You must start the entire sequence over from your safe “starting” point.

So, from a console standpoint, what they cut from the game was an annoying “death” screen that I’d see a few hundred times and a constant set of trips through the save / load menu. I can live without those things. Now, I do think that the boss fights could have been handled more appropriately. Those just seemed like an endurance match, with quicktime events popping up so often they scarecely felt like quicktime events and almost became gameplay elements. Almost. So the boss never-die feature was imperfect, and until you figure out each boss’s technique you may be fighting them for a long time. But the overall arch of the game, the style with which it was carried out, and the cleverness with which they turned the final boss fight (no spoilers) into a test of what Prince of Persia is really about as opposed to a combat twitch-fest deserves more praise, honestly, than the game has received.

Ironically, the other game on my 360′s to-beat list is Bionic Commando: Rearmed. As a huge fan of the original, I have to say it’s pretty breathtaking to see a non-franchise title receive the sort of fan service restyling that Bionic Commando did. There are plenty of elements of the game that have been updated – there are both new and improved weapons which can be hot-swapped mid-level, many of the bosses (as much as BC had them) are completely redesigned, and the bionic arm is insanely powerful in comparison to the original title. But the reason that I mention Bionic Commando is that it was traditionally a difficult game, and it still uses a “lives” system. You have a limited number of chances, per level, to not die. Failing that, you get booted out to the stage selection screen.

Of course, Rearmed uses a saved game feature, unlike the original which had to be defeated in either a single sitting or else was a slow, lurking death sentence for your NES (as the console sat on pause for hours at a time). There are no quicksaves in Rearmed, and while you can acquire extra lives, the supply is by no means infinite. Add to that the fact that several of the bosses take some practice and coordination to learn to fight. So does all of that makes Rearmed a harder game?

No, not really. It just makes it take longer to beat. As long as you have the requisite skill required to beat the trickier stages, you will eventually (by either luck or rote memory) defeat them all. You’ll figure out every swing sequence and time every bazooka shot to the point where you are killing off-screen enemies as you progress. Because the truth is that in games like Prince of Persia and Bionic Commando, where the environment is a principle enemy, your ability to move through that environment is as much a test of your gaming skill as the enemies you defeat.

And what happens in Bionic Commando is that you learn the earlier portions of the stage better than the later ones, because you have to traverse them over and over again. Death has, at least, some meaning because of the greater penalty involved. It also makes the game less enjoyable during several sequences where the game does feel as though it is punishing you for its own learning curve (including one where a boss does not count as “defeated” until his death animation completes, and should you die in that time, you still fail. . . I damn near gave up on that encounter at first because I couldn’t figure out why I was still losing). Interestingly, because of the “connected world” aspect of Prince of Persia, as well as the surprisingly enjoyable “scavenger hunt” sub-quests (and I normally hate scavenger hunt mechanics), my overall ability to move through the stages and perform the acrobatics is pretty balanced across the board – a claim I simply cannot make in regards to Bionic Commando.

Look, if your complains about the new Prince are the graphical style (though I can’t see why) or the ending (which was ridiculous, but at least different), I can see your point of view. I may disagree with it, but I can at least understand it. But if you’re bitching because the game isn’t “teh hardcorez”, then I have a suggestion for you. Every time you die, quit to the main menu and load your last saved game. There you go – artificial difficulty restored. For everyone else, I can’t recommend the new Prince of Persia enough. Give it a spin. And if you haven’t played Rearmed yet, seriously, get off your ass (I only waited so I could play it on the 360 with a proper controller). Rearmed is as much a blueprint for how to refashion a side-scrolling classic as Metroid Prime was a blueprint for how to transfer it to 3D. And I hope Capcom paid attention, because the new Bionic Commando title is on the horizon!

Although my posting this is kind of like the echo of an echo of an echo, I figured I’d let everyone know that Penny Arcade has officially launched Child’s Play for this year. I figure since the non-gamer contingent of my readership is likely much larger than it used to be, I’d give everyone a heads up. And rather than some mishmashed explanation of what Child’s Play is, I’ll just give you the blurb right from their website.

Since 2003, over 100,000 gamers worldwide have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Over two million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since our inception.

This year, we have continued expanding across the country and the globe. With over 45 partner hospitals and more arriving every month, you can be sure to find one from the map above that needs your help! You can choose to purchase requested items from their online retailer wish lists, or make a cash donation that helps out Child’s Play hospitals everywhere. Any items purchased through Amazon will be shipped directly to your hospital of choice, so please be sure to select their shipping address rather than your own.

When gamers give back, it makes a difference!

This charity event has always hit home for me because, when I was in Kindergarten, I was one of those kids. Now, I was incredibly lucky that my stay was brief, I made a complete recovery, and I had two amazing parents who were there for me as often as I could want. Not every kid is that lucky. And even with those advantages, I remember what it was like sitting in that bloody hospital bed day after day. So Child’s Play is important to me.

To that end, I’m asking everyone who reads and enjoys my site to consider giving something to the charity. It doesn’t have to be an expensive purchase, and if you have a personal preference against video games, there are plenty of other toys, movies and incidentals to choose from – I usually go in for at least one set of Leggos in addition to whatever games I buy. Or you can make a straight donation. What’s great about Child’s Play is that Gabe and Tycho don’t have any sort of real overhead. Anything you donate will go right to the kids – about the closest thing they have do to overhead is paying to ship the donations to the various hospitals.

Last year they shattered the $1 million mark, which is pretty exciting on its own. I know everyone’s budget is a bit smaller this year, so we’re not all going to be ponying up for 360 Elites. But please consider giving something. And for all of you political wonks and malcontents out there, if this Presidential election has taught us anything, it’s that the small contributions of a large number of people can make all the difference in the world. Though really, if you have a heart at all, these letters should more or less put you on notice.

It may have been ten years coming, but at long last Fallout 3 is on the shelves and, more importantly, on my computer. This was one of those rare, so-unlike-me launch day titles that I simply had to have. And was it worth it? Well, I’m a scant six hours of play into the game (and I am already considering re-rolling based on what I’ve learned about how the mechanics work and vary from the previous titles). But the simple fact that I’m sitting here at work, physically itching to go home and play like a Jet junkie desperate for a fix should tell you what you need to know.

Fallout 3 trades in the isometric sort-of-3d tile based system for the standard first/third person environment that virtually every game uses currently. And yes, Fallout 3 has a lot in common with Oblivion. Though I’d say it’s far more than just Mad Max meets Elder Scrolls. I’m sure there are some Fallout die hards out there that will curse the very inclusion of a three dimensional environment and a twitch-capable combat system. To be honest, the twitch portion leaves much to be desired, but in a lot of ways that feels intentional. The real combat takes place with the VATS system, which should feel instantly familiar to old school Fallout fans and is a vastly superior way to approach combat. So if you’re worried that Fallout 3 is just Doom with dialogue trees, don’t be. Combat is much deeper than that.

Specifically, combat is much tougher than that. Admittedly, I’m playing the thing on maximum difficulty because that’s just how I roll, but even sampling the game on an easier setting simply caused me to have to apply the same clever tactics fewer times in a row. Overall, I’d say the combat is still clever and tactical, just a bit more frantic. The one improvement I can see is that it doesn’t result in nearly as many no-win situations, which were my single greatest point of frustration in the previous titles.

But don’t take that to mean that the game is easy, or that it lacks serious consequences. Save states aside, dead still means dead in Fallout. And the Karma system is there in full force, judging your every action and choice. So far I’ve already run across at least one character that didn’t want to help me out because I was such a goodie-two-shoes, even with my wildly unchecked Charisma bearing down on his ever so plyable ears. The voice acting has been very good so far, and one thing that I do prefer over the previous titles is the fact that you are never taken out of the game’s perspective. Accessing the PipBoy is a matter of raising your wrist to the screen, and all conversations and dialogues take palce through your normal view. Granted, that’s a pretty common feature ten years removed from the last real installment of Fallout, but the disjointed loading and unloading of interface to talk to NPCs always bothered me a bit.

On the flip side, there are loads in the game. Essentially, there is an overworld, and within that overworld there are locations which load as separate areas (many of which have sublocations which are additional loads). The load time is fast, don’t get me wrong. It’s just a shame that it couldn’t have been done more seamlessly, especially in the case of the small, one or two room stores and buildings inside the already modest sized towns. For a game that’s all about immersion, I find it disjointing, though your mileage may vary.

Since we’re getting annoyances out of the way, I’ll just make a few remarks about the game’s engine and move on. Movement could be smoother in general. Though the isometric view is gone, I still feel on some level like the characters are navigating down extremely rigid tracks and paths. Usually it’s not noticable, but when it does come up it’s just about all you can notice. There are also reports of crashes and hang ups, which I pretty much expect with PC game launches at this point. I heavily suspect the game leaks memory, based on the degrading performance I experienced and the fact that I’m not alone. And for a lot of players, there are unusual sound issues (ambient noises completely drowning out combat, speech and music). But I started playing the game about two hours after it was even available, and I expect that most of these things are temporary bugs that won’t even affect 1% of players and will disappear for We The Beleaguered within the week.

I’d love to write more, but honestly I’ve only spent a few hours with the game and I don’t want to pass final judgment on the experience without even making it to the second town on the map. But I will say this. Anyone giving this game a “perfect” score needs to have their heads examined. Perfect means perfect, and Fallout 3 isn’t that. But anyone giving this game a score that doesn’t say, “You should buy this right now!” is also full of shit. This is a title that already wants to be amazing, and wants it bad. I’ll be back in a week or so to let you know whether it wants it badly enough.

Update: Ask and ye shall receive. Upon coming home last night, Fallout 3 patched itself (hurray for Steam). Whatever the patch was, it resolved my sound issues completely, and also improved my outdoor graphical performance. I don’t know if the patch actually did both of those things directly or if fixing my sound simply stopped the game from wonking out so the graphics engine wasn’t hanging up waiting. Either way, that’s less than a twenty-four hour turnaround on a widely reported problem – most MMO companies, who I expect to be perma-patchers, don’t resolve bugs that quickly.