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.

I’m trying to have rational thoughts this morning, but before my brain was even all the way switched on, I saw the trailer for No More Heroes 2 – Desperate Struggle. So that pretty much nuked my ability to have a normal conversation with just about anyone (with a brief interlude to make sure that everyone else found the season premiere of South Park to be as lame and re-tread as I did). Unfortunately, the trailer is only available as an embedded file right now, and the damn thing is choppy as hell. But it’s No More Heroes 2. So we both know I don’t care.

Granted, No More Heroes wasn’t perfect – far from it. But there was so much that was fantastic in that game, and I have faith that Suda 51 can get a lot closer to his original vision than he was able to on the first pass. Hell, even Yahtzee liked No More Heroes in spite of its flaws. Enough to tell you to play it, anyway. So far, the trailer doesn’t give away much, and considering how much the final product differed from Suda 51′s original Heroes trailer, it’s awfully hard to make a serious prediction about the game.

Admittedly, my only fear is that the subtitle “Desperate Struggle” is a sly allusion to the fact that this will be a DS game. Not that it wouldn’t make a good DS game, as I can see a stylus interface working well here. But what made the original No More Heroes so engaging was the balance that Suda 51 created via the control scheme. It was a sword-based brawler that actually made clever use of the motion based Wii controls without causing a severe case of Wii Shoulder. It will be interesting to see if he embraces the Wii Motion Plus or if he retains the feel of the original game. Hopefully the amazing (and surprising) reception this game received from gamers will give Suda 51 a bigger budget to work with and grant the game more coverage as it is developed.

Either way, Travis is back, babies.

So, I’ve been saying from the day Pit was announced as a Brawler that a new Kid Icarus game was in the works. And as soon as I fully understood the relationship between Factor 5 (makers of Rogue Squadron, Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, and Rogue Squadron III: Let’s Go To Hoth A-fucking-gain) and Nintendo, I called it that Factor 5′s new project would be Kid Icarus for the Wii. Apparently, the company’s foray into PS3 land with the tragically crippled controls of Lair was primarily the result of Nintendo being so tight-lipped about both the hardware limitations of the Wii and the motion-sensitive controls.

And on some level, I can’t blame them. Sony already tacked on their tilt controls at the last moment (currently due for execution) and rumors now abound of Xbox motion sensor controls on the horizon. However, it was most definitely not in their best interests to alienate a studio as talented as Factor 5. Especially considering that Factor 5 stuck with them, continued to produce for their console despite it being in third place last generation, and worked technical marvels on the Gamecube. No studio outside of Nintendo can even compare to the graphical feats that Factor 5 squeezed out of that little purple box.

At any rate, news of the new Kid Icarus is already unofficially official, and the developer is apparently so obvious it need not be named. Factor 5, for their part, confirmed they are working on at least one new already existing IP for the Wii, and that it would be neither a Rogue Squadron game nor a joint collaboration on a new Star Fox (which, just so we are clear, needs to happen). The only IP that could possibly fit those criteria, and would be significant enough for Factor 5 to work on, is Kid Icarus. And truth be told, it’s a great match. The original Kid Icarus featured very little actual flight, but the new Brawl version of the wide eyed angel suggests a much more fluid, maneuverable game experience. Now, sure, I could be wrong. Maybe Factor 5 is all pumped up because they are working on Festor’s Second Quest or A Man And His Blob. . . but I doubt it.

Kid Icky is coming back, and if Factor 5 can accomplish on the Wii the level of production value they repeatedly offered on the Gamecube, it should be a hell of a ride.

Attention Electronic Arts! When Mass Effect comes out for the PC, I am going to pirate an illegal copy of it. I don’t really want to. In fact, I was more than happy to pay you fifty of my hard earned dollars in exchange for this game. It is a fantastic RPG, designed and then improved upon by a studio that I remember fondly. It is in many ways an upgrade to the already brilliant (if slightly flawed) Xbox 360 version of the game. Everything about Mass Effect makes me want to play it.

However, the copy protection is quite simply a function of the game that I am utterly unwilling to tolerate. After ten days of inactivity, Mass Effect is going to connect to the internet and verify with your server that it is legitimate if I want to play it again? Fuck you. That is unacceptable. That locks this otherwise brilliant game into the subcategory of “people who are reliably online”. It also puts a sunset on the game tied to whenever you stop validating it, despite it being a single player RPG. The way I see it, if you’re going to treat me like a god damned thief, I might as well enjoy the benefits of thievery.

I really wonder what good this is supposed to do. Everyone reading this is aware that there will be a crack for this new version of SecuROM before the game even makes it to the shelf. Absolutely no piracy is being prevented with this awkward, byzantine game of packet ping pong. It does make me wonder if the box for Mass Effect will have a “requires internet connection” sticker on it. And to be honest, it’s not really the danger of being offline that pisses me off. It’s the presumption that this sort of behavior is even remotely acceptable.

DRM systems like these are notoriously buggy and even exploitable. The whole Sony Root Kit fiasco should have been the slug in DRM’s brain, and I thought it was until I installed Bioshock and was rendered unable to play it for two days because it couldn’t connect to its server and verify that I was not, in fact, a criminal. I neither want nor will allow software on my machine that phones home to check in with mommy on a permanent, ongoing basis.

It makes me question, on a larger scale, the type of insults that gamers are willing to put up with. No other consumer market gets shit on by its suppliers as much, or in such fine detail, as gamers do. Imagine if you had to get your car “certified” by your dealer once a month to prove that you legally own it, or else the engine will fail to start. To say nothing of the thousand other paper cuts that gamers are dealt. No other type of product is sold so woefully incomplete, with the understanding that it will be finished via “patches” months after money exchanges hands. To use the car analogy again, that would be like purchasing a car that didn’t have brakes, with the understanding that in a few months, when the brakes are ready, someone will come around and install them.

This type of DRM, which punsihes the legitimate, paying customer while preventing absolutely no illegal activity, is so pervasive now in all forms of media. Music publishers telling me where I can listen to the songs I’ve purchased. Movie studios setting time limits on how long I’m allowed to spend watching a film. But this new obscenity, where the product you buy routinely checks in with its own publisher to make sure it hasn’t been stolen, that’s just too much.

And part of the problem is that all of the trust is on the side of the buyer. There are real problems now with DRM-based video when the “parent server” goes offline – sometimes permanently – and consumers are locked out of content that they legally purchased and wanted to view. Is Electronic Arts promising to keep their Mass Effect validation server online until the end of time? What happens if people stop buying Madden every damn year and Electronic Arts goes out of business? Are they going to give a shit about me not being able to play Mass Effect? Doubtful. Will I be screwed out of my fifty bucks? You betcha.

And so, Electronic Arts, please be aware that I intend to illegally download a cracked, fully functional version of Mass Effect once it comes out for the PC. Not because I am greedy, not because I am cheap. Not because I want to do harm to the developers and the game designers – quite to the contrary, BioWare is one of my favorite game studios. And not because I’m a no good crimial. I am going to pirate Mass Effect because the official version of the game does not meet my minimum standards for quality and acceptability. You are releasing a gimped version of an otherwise exceptional game. A version that crosses some very ethereal and paranoid boundaries concerning ownership and authority. And I am unwilling to pay you for the experience of being treated like a thief.

Interestingly enough, I can get that for free.

You know who is a really weird mascot? Mario. Seriously. It’s not just that his origins are muddled and absurd. I mean, he’s been a circus hand, a carpenter, and most notoriously a plumber. Nor is it that he always seems to square off against large, oddly named anthropomorphic enemies, from Donkey Kong to Wart to Bowser. It’s that really, other than his propensity for stomping on stuff and his ridiculous voice, we don’t really know anything about him as a character. Yet we all know who Mario is. In the quirky, eight-bit era, where games could star miniaturized Japanese dancer/ninjas or baseball playing robots, that was about as much depth as people were looking for in their gaming protagonists. But the field is very different now, and whether you are looking to macabre titles like Alice, noir adventures like Max Payne, or thought provoking excursions like Metal Gear Solid (itself derived from a very bare-bones eight-bit ancestor), our gaming heroes are all expected to have personalities, back histories, and even deeply rooted flaws for their narratives to exploit.

Not that Nintendo has always been known for its deep character sketches. Amongst its most popular icons, Link’s emotions are often superficial and obvious. Even Samus Aran, the only central Nintendo heroine to have a consistently linear (if staggered) time line, reveals exceptionally little about herself over the course of her ten various titles. But none of them have as little going for them, from a character standpoint, as Mario. He’s an Italian plumber that never does any plumbing, doubles in size when he eats fungus, likes stepping on turtles, and shoots fire out of his fingertips. He is absolutely surreal and, if you get right down to it, a bit creepy.

Yet he stands for something, clearly. He’s the flagship icon of the longest running and arguably most successful gaming company in the history of the business. And despite being cartoony and almost cuddly, even those gamers that consider themselves hardcore enjoy Mario games. And yet if you ask most of them about Mario, they’d probably tell you that they wish Nintendo would change things up a bit more and invent some new IPs instead of trying to bleed their old stanbys dry. Personally, I think the idea of Nintendo presenting a series of new IPs is an awful, awful idea.

For one thing, Nintendo doesn’t have a reputation for deep character analysis, so I don’t even know if they’d get it right. But to a much larger extent, Nintendo’s cast of characters serve as shorthand for the games they star in. I mean, it’d be one thing if every Mario game played out exactly the same. The same levels, the same control schemes, the same gameplay and so forth. Quite the contrary, Nintendo’s original games take familiar architecture and present it in new and different ways. Sometimes it works brilliantly, as in Mario 64. Other times, it isn’t quite as clever a game, as in Super Mario Sunshine. And while we’re on the subject, while I didn’t especially enjoy Super Mario Sunshine, I still contend that part of its mediocre score was because it had to live up to the mythos of Mario 64. Had Sunshine been an independent IP, it probably would have sold fewer copies, but gotten friendlier press.

Nintendo’s mascots set the “given” quantities for their games. You know Mario can jump and stop. You know Link will get a boomerang and a bow. You’re aware that Samus can roll into a ball. But every time they present these characters, things are different. The characters are baselines on which to expand. They are the control group in the game’s scope of experimentation. Nintendo isn’t pulling a Madden on us – releasing the same game over and over with miniscule variations to the gameplay. Rather they are using their mascots as a context for what sort of game people can expect.

And that is taken to a whole other level with the Mario characters, since they star in so many non-platforming games. They play sports and race buggies and engage in life-sized board games. Mario sports titles tend to be goofy and eccentric – not a genuine recreation of a sport but more of a caffeine fueled head butt to the sport they are playing. They are wild and absurd, while still retaining the core sports mechanics. Those of you who have played Strikers know exactly what I mean here. Or look at Mario Kart – in theory, it should be infinitely less popular than Nintendo’s other racing offering, F-Zero. And while the F-Zero series still has its fans (as it well should), you can’t argue with the phenominal success of Mario Kart.

So why does a game like Mario Kart work, even though the racers are all out of context and the premise is incredibly arbitrary? Well, for one thing, it’s no more arbitrary than an Italian plumber who stomps on evil mushrooms to save a princess from a fire breathing turtle. In many ways, simply the inclusion of the Mario IP frees Nintendo from the consistent burden of realism that so many games insist upon. But more than that, the game provides its players with so many known quantities and so many understood mechanics.

Gamers know that if they pick Bowser, they are going to be slow but strong. If they pick Toad, they will be light and agile. If they pick Mario, they will be well rounded. Gamers know what a koopa shell does, more or less. They’re aware that getting the star is something that they really want to do. Could Nintendo have invented a completely different racing game, with all new characters that no one had ever heard of before, instead of treading out their standard mascots to race go-karts? Absolutely. And once again, it was called F-Zero. Guess which series is the greater success.

What Nintendo is suggesting by re-using its mascots is that the window dressing is only that. It doesn’t really matter what your character looks like or what your objective is, as long as the gameplay is solid and engaging. Nintendo IPs exist as a sort of quality guarantee on a game. You see Mario on the cover, and you have some idea of what sort of game you are going to be playing. If the game stars a dude named Link, you’re aware of the sorts of adventure / puzzle elements you will come across. With very few exceptions, Nintendo has taken care of its stable of mascots and icons. Think about it. Which game would you be more likely to shell out $50 for: Super Mario Touchdown or Wacky Fun Time Football?

All of this brings me to Super Smash Brothers Brawl, a game that originally wasn’t going to star Nintendo’s mascots. The original idea was to create a different kind of fighting game, where health gauges weren’t the cut-and-dry indicator of victory or defeat. And, more specifically, to rework the Street Fighter II formula so that more than two people could play at once (since the N64 came with 4 controller ports). It wasn’t until well after the game was in development that the choice was made to have it star Nintendo’s established gaming characters. Some tellings of the story even suggest that because the game didn’t have any graphics worked up for it yet, Mario was used almost as a placeholder.

But once again, the inclusion of Nintendo character game Super Smash Brothers a baseline to work off of. People could pick up a controller and have some idea of what characters they were playing and how they could expect them to interact. And Nintendo routinely plays loose enough with its characters – especially in these non-canon style games – to make sure that the inclusion of their icons doesn’t get in the way of the fun of the game. I mean, let’s be honest. In a “fair” fight, Samus Aran would be able to splatter most of the other characters in SSB into smears on the floor in a matter of seconds. Hell, if the game were forced to stay true to the very loose storylines of its respective series, there’d be no reason to ever rescue Princess Peach again – she could just kick Bowser’s ass and be done with it. Instead, Nintendo has set up an interesting and damn near unique pseudo-world with Smash Brothers, where their established avatars retain their appearances, abilities and concepts, but those concepts are fitted around the greater architecture of their new game. It’s sort of like a great big Nintendo-fueled game of Rifts.

Nintendo’s original IPs will always have a place in the mainstream of gaming so long as Nintendo takes care of them, prevents them from being exploited for awful schlock, and consistently uses them to show us something new. One bad thing you can’t say about Super Mario Sunshine is that it was the same old Mario platforming game all over again. You may hate the look of Wind Waker and get bored by the constant sailing, but it was a radical departure from Ocarina of Time. Though perhaps no departure was more severe, more risky, or more well received than the Metroid Prime games. And it looks like there is, in fact, a new Kid Icarus title in the future (my money is on Factor 5 as the developer).

Long live Mario.

Super Mario Galaxy really is an exceptional game. I know, as revelations go, that’s right up there with “Water is wet”. But I’ve been on a serious SMG kick for the past few days and I know I haven’t really addressed the game here despite it being, truly, a Wii flagship title. So here’s my review: If you own a Wii, and you don’t own Super Mario Galaxy, you are criminally retarded.

So much for the review. But not so much for the game. Because for me, what Galaxy speaks to is the confusing way in which gaming has evolved over the years. The basic premise of the game is that Mario has to fly to different galaxies collecting (what else?) stars. The more stars he collects, the more worlds he is able to fly to. Once he acquires sixty stars, he will be able to fly to the final boss battle and save the Princess. Except, there are one hundred and twenty stars in the game. So you really only need to acquire half of them in order to win.

And understand this well – the game is not linear. In fact, if you do very well on the earlier boards, it is entirely possible to skip right to the boss battles for the last several worlds, bypassing all of the interim stages. Essentially, that is Galaxy’s answer to warp zones, which is another Mario staple. And yet, in the earlier Mario games, warp zones served a very specific purpose. Because you could not save your game, and because extra lives were scarce, warp zones were often the only way that many players could hope to beat the game. Gamers didn’t see them as a cheat but rather as a trick. Hell, I must have beaten the original Super Mario Brothers a dozen times before I ever saw World 7-1.

But in a gaming era where running out of extra lives is either neigh impossible or simply isn’t an option, and where you can save your game to complete it over the course of weeks or months if you care to, what function does skipping content actually provide? Certainly completing every star in Galaxy would be beyond the call for some gamers, as many stars are acquired by performing rehashes of previous levels with the situation altered (the enemies are faster, or you die the first time you get hit and so forth). Additionally, many of the hidden stars are so bloody well hidden that it would be unreasonable to expect younger or more inexperienced gamers to find them.

But if you do find them, you can essentially skip the second half of the game. And on some level, I think I have a problem with that. Content means a very different thing in games now than it does twenty-odd years ago. Nowadays, content is a commodity that is traded and paid for rather than a challenge to be overcome. Expansion packs, map packs, and now even weapon packs all cost extra cash, and what you are buying is a longer or more enriched experience. Well, that’s the theory, anyway. In an MMO, content is often locked by progression, or doled out in patches throughout the year. Some people will grind their characters for week, months, even years so they can be rewarded with new content. In Super Mario Galaxy, apparently, the reward is being able to skip that same endgame-style content.

It also raises the question of whether or not a game is about the ending or the experience. Perhaps for a game like Galaxy, where the plot is so unabashedly paper-thin that you could probably act it out with sock puppets, the game has to be about the experience – even if you accept that part of that experience is the final boss fight. And yet if the game really is measured in the sliding scale of “percentage beaten” rather than the simple pass/fail metric of reaching the end, then would a person who only achieved 99% of the game’s content be said to have not beaten it?

And to be fair, the content in Galaxy is skippable on a scale that most games would never consider. Even other Nintendo offerings, like Metroid Prime 3 and Zelda: Twilight Princess required you to at least put in the bare minimum amount of effort in every stage to progress to the next one. Sure, you didn’t have to get every last missile expansion or wolf down every last Poe, but it wasn’t as though you could skip entire planets or dungeons, either. But as far as raw content goes, you were still skipping part of the experience. And where Galaxy takes the adventure game and distills it to its most raw concepts, it’s mostly comparable.

Consider sandbox-style games like Grand Theft Auto. I know plenty of people that haven’t beaten all of the Grand Theft Auto III series, some not at 100% and some not at all. Yet they own all three titles. Which is to stay that after actively failing to play all of Vice City, they still anted up for San Andreas. Content upon content, all locked and unbeaten. For that matter, what about a game like Mass Effect – where there can be 20 hours of content or 100 hours, depending on your investment in the game. I know plenty of people who didn’t come close to beating all Mass Effect had to offer, and yet they were excited, almost irrationally so, over the downloadable content for the game.

I suspect I’ll revisit these thoughts in a few weeks when I finally sit down at tackle Assassin’s Creed, which also features a wealth of optional content. But Galaxy is still in its own league not just in terms of how much of it is skippable, but because a lot of that skippable content is extremely good. That may be the difference. Even casual players are going to unlock some of the hidden stars in Galaxy. A number of them practically bludgeon you over the head as you pass through the stage. So it won’t be tedious collection quests or annoying escort missions that players can skip. It will be some of the most challenging and engaging levels the game has to offer. It does create a line where the concept of skipping content is quite different than the concept of warping past it.

And there are probably a few people who think this entire discussion is absurd. That they just want to beat their game so they can catch the game, or go out to a show or, in the case of us addicts, load up their next game. For those players, I wonder, where exactly is the end of the game? I know for myself, I usually start out trying to acquire all of the content before beating the game – and if beating the game with 100% of the content unlocked yields a better ending, I almost follow through. But some games seem to think they can add extra play-hours by not giving you any bloody clue as to where the remaining content is. If the game world takes me an hour just to cross, and I have 99% of the collections and content finished, my desire to spend another week looking for the one little gem (or ghost. . . I’m looking at you Zelda team) that I missed? Not really there.

I guess the answer is that completionist gaming is great – until it pisses me off. More on this topic after Altair and I waste some dudes.