No Russian

WARNING: MODERN WARFARE 2 SINGLE-PLAYER CAMPAIGN SPOILERS AHEAD.

The screen is black.  All you hear is the unzipping of duffel bags, the clicks of weapons being loaded and cocked, and the ding of an elevator.  When the scene comes into focus, you find yourself in that elevator, surrounded by men dressed in suits, wearing body armor and carrying heavy machine guns.  One of them, a young man with black hair and pale skin, looks at you and says “Remember, no Russian.”  You only now realize that you are holding a gun.

The elevator dings again and the doors open.  The men calmly file out; you follow them.  The scene is easy to recognize: an airport.  Tired-looking travelers stand in line, waiting to get through security.  The familiar sounds of an airport are everywhere: chatter, the echo of an announcement over the PA system, the distant exhale of a jet engine.

One of the travelers notices you and the men you are with.  They get the attention of the person next to them, and soon everyone is looking at you.  They look confused and scared, but they don’t run; before they even have the chance, you are holding your trigger down, tearing them to shreds with machine gun fire.

It all gets worse from there.

Every serious gamer in the country has probably finished the single-player campaign in Modern Warfare 2 as of now, so it’s a good time to address the level “No Russian,” wherein the player-character–a United States soldier infiltrating a Russian terrorist organization–participates in a terrorist attack.  The character does so not out of any hatred, political agenda, or blind vengeance; they are working to gain the trust of their enemy so that they may learn of their actions and ultimately save more lives.  So no: the game does not have you “playing as a terrorist,” as some critics have decried: you’re playing as a loyal American pretending to be a terrorist for intelligence-gathering purposes.  There is a very specific narrative reason why this level exists.  Not for shock value, but to advance the plot of the game’s story–and to advance it in a meaningful way.

Sure, Infinity Ward could have told this narrative segment by way of a cutscene, telling the player about the atrocities they committed in the name of the greater good instead of having them commit them personally, but what kind of impact would have that had?  None, whatsoever.  Instead, you step behind the gun and see the carnage first-hand.  You hear the screams, you see the wounded desperately crawl for safety, you see the confused straggler fall to their knees and throw their hands into the air and beg for mercy–and then watch as one of your comrades deny them that mercy.  Or, knowing that you must do what must be done, pull the trigger yourself.

This level brings us closer to the actual carnage of a terrorist attack than anything else ever has, and it does so from the most terrifying point-of-view possible: that of the attacker.  It’s a brutally honest experience, and dares the gamer to confront a harsh reality often overlooked in fiction.

We love to talk about heroism, and we should love to talk about heroism.  But we often ignore the evils that inspire that heroism.  We’ll gladly talk about the tragedies of September 11th, 2001 but we like to keep the screams and the blood at a comfortable distance.   There is no shortage of talk about our noble causes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the closest we come to the carnage in the streets is an occasional update on our death toll or a picture of a bombed-out neighborhood from time-to-time.  Why this is, I don’t know.  Fear, more than likely.  We know there are monsters out there and we want to kill the monsters, but we don’t want to know all the dirty things those monsters do.

In Modern Warfare 2, you–for a brief time, and indirectly, but nevertheless–become the monster.  And afterward, you realize just how bad the bad guys are.

Of course, Infinity Ward gives you the option to skip this level–without penalty–altogether, before the game even begins no less.  And if you start playing it and find it too intense, skipping the mission on the fly is just a few button presses away: pause the game and choose “Skip Mission.”  That’s not to say the rest of the game isn’t populated with brutal combat that does not apologize, but at least it’s against people who shoot back.

It must be said, also, that for all the terror that this game depicts, there are true moments of hope and glory in there as well.  Late in the game, you (as a different player-character) and your squad of Army Rangers have to fight across Washington, DC after an atmospheric nuclear detonation renders all electronic systems dead.  Stripped of your most sophisticated equipment, you must battle through a destroyed office building against invading Russian forces, engaging in firefights in the dark.  You eventually push through to the White House lawn, where you soon learn that the Air Force is going to start bombing the city unless they see green flares on the roofs of buildings, signifying that Washington is still in friendly hands.  In a desperate race against time, you fight to take back the White House; you finally make it to the roof and pop your green flares as planes that were meant to bomb the city straight to Hell fly harmlessly overhead.  As you look around, you see green smoke on the roofs of several buildings, and you realize that America still holds the Capitol, that it has not fallen, even in the face of insurmountable odds.

I don’t know about you, but for me it was a pretty stirringly patriotic moment.

Halo is the New Star Wars

Halo Waypoint was released in the past week.  You’ll find it in the Game Marketplace on Xbox Live, but it’s not so much a game as it is a service.  From one place, you can track your progress on Halo series achievements, see how many of your friends are playing a Halo game, and view all kinds of interviews, including full episodes from the upcoming Halo Legends DVD.

People love to pick on the Halo franchise, and admittedly, for good reason.  The games come across as mindless bullet slingers, and with Halo merchandise available in all forms from action figures to WETA statues to Mega Blocks to men’s underwear, it can be easy to get sick of the franchise.  Unfortunately for those who don’t delve into the games and the fiction surrounding them, there is a wealth of complexity in the Halo universe.  The games have surprising complexity in their mechanics, the multiplayer is active and intense (it’s easy to see why so many gamers picked up Halo 3 just for multiplayer), and–in the novels and comic books–one finds deep examinations of the nature of heroism and a gut-checking view of warfare from a grunt’s point-of-view.  It’s deep stuff, really; you just have to give it a chance.

After all, Halo is not the first franchise to be everywhere at all times.  You might recall a huge entertainment franchise that was kind of a big deal for thirty years, until its creator all but destroyed it for some untold reason: Star Wars.  At the height of its popularity (meaning: before it became a kids franchise–not that that’s a bad thing, just saying), Star Wars was everywhere.  Toys, video games, approximately 1 bazillion books and comics, and oh yeah–the movies.  There were those as well; let’s not forget about those.  Nobody seemed to care though.  There were those who liked Star Wars and those who didn’t, but nobody really complained about the omnipresence of the franchise.  People who didn’t like Star Wars knew that it was popular and just kind of lived with it.

Yet, Halo having the same amount of exposure and influence seem to be a problem with people; enough that the overexposure of the franchise is a common topic on the blogs and forums I frequent.  It’s not an invalid complaint: Halo is everywhere nowadays, and there is a great deal of risk in that.  It could get watered down and stretched thin.  But is it really there yet?  Is it really worth complaining about it being milked?

After all, gamers should be excited about the popularity and fandom of Halo.  After all, it is quite an achivement.  Most of the major entertainment franchises out there were kicked off by a big, splashy movie or a long-running TV or comic book series.  Halo is only eight years old and has yet to see the silver screen.  Bungie and Microsoft gave birth to a consistent fictional universe that people love to explore, and they did it with a video game.  Halo is indeed the new Star Wars, in more ways than one.  It’s the big sci-fi franchise for the nerds who think they’re cool and it was launched with this great new media called video games.  It’s going to be here for a long, long time.  Big fan or not, if you’re a video gamer you should be happy about that.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to welding my handmade replica of a BR55HB SR Battle Rifle to go with my Master Chief costume.

Why GameStop will lose the Digital Download Wars

GameStop had a little Halloween special going on via their website.  You could download Ghostbusters for the PC for $9.99.  I had played this game on Xbox 360.  It was boring and repetitive, but it was vintage Ghostbusters; it’s the closest thing to a third movie that we’ll ever get.  For that alone, it’s worth ten bucks.

So I click on “Add to My Digital Cart.”  At the next screen, I get a big surprise: the option to add “Digital Insurance” to my purchase for $3.95.  Not familiar with this concept of digital insurance, I click on “More Info.”  It seems that if I want to recover this game should my computer crash, I’ll need to purchase said coverage; and the insurance is only good for 18 months.

Now, I’ve expressed my feelings about the digital marketplace before; I’m not a big fan of it as the main outlet for video games.  As a supplement to retail, it’s a great thing.  But far too often it’s used to rip off customers, with its pretend currency and charging gamers the same price for a data packet as one would pay for a box, a disc, a manual, and the right to resell said media should one grow tired of it.

But at least when I purchase something from Steam, I can download it again should I have computer problems that wipe my hard drive clean; I should know, because it’s already happened on my less-than-one-year old rig.  I can even get tired of a game, uninstall it from my computer, and months later download it again and reinstall with no problem at all–and at no additional cost.  So other than the whole pesky lack of physical media and wavering the First Sale Doctrine, buying a game from Steam is essentially the same thing as buying a game from retail.

So if GameStop is trying to move in on Steam, why are they not offering the same service?  True, you can’t buy a physical copy of Ghostbusters and get a replacement for free should your house burn down, but this is data we’re talking about; all the digital GameStop clerk has to do is click on an “allow” button.  Plus, consider that your competition–nay, the DUDES DOMINATING YOU IN THIS ARENA–are doing it.  If GameStop is trying to be compete–you know, be competitive–they’re doing a poor job of it.

Sorry, GameStop.  Your days of getting my retail business are limited to when you offer outstanding, must-have pre-order bonuses on games I’ve been salivating over for months (re: not all that often) or when friends and family give me gift cards.  Now, you’ll never get my digital business.  Granted, there’s probably a GameStop exec sitting in his corner office, lighting a Cuban cigar with a hundred dollar bill and sipping on a single-malt Scotch that costs $200 an ounce as he digests his dinner of deep fried bald eagle thinking about how scared he is over the loss of one customer before enjoying a violent laugh; but just you wait until the day that most gamers feel the same way I do.  I don’t know how well GameStop’s digital branch is doing now, but it has nowhere to go but down.

Tricks AND Treats with these Halloween Video Games

Halloween is awesome.  It’s one of the few genuinely fun holidays left, one that’s not obsessed with Olympic-level shopping for over-priced gifts, political correctness, or putting up with THOSE ANNOYING IN-LAWS.  No, Halloween is about partying with your friends, consuming massive amounts of candy, and letting your creativity stretch its legs with that best part of Halloween: the costume.  And even if you don’t go all out with your costume, you at least get to goof off a little bit; surely you can at least put on a black cape and pop in the trusty vampire teeth (yeah, that’s totally what I’m doing this year).

Video games play a pretty big part of Halloween as well.  Sure, when we think video games, we usually think of Christmas–namely because, for most gamers, video games comprise most of what is under the tree on Christmas morning (and it’s one of the few days our families are totally cool with us spending twelve hours in front of the TV, chiefly because of all the new shinies).

But think about it: how many video games scream “Christmas” to you when you consider their content?  How many video games are about warmth and sharing, about giving more than you receive?  How many video games depict Santa and his reindeer?  Sure, there are a few out there, but very few.  Contrast that to the number of spooky, scary, and weird games that are right at home during the month of October: games that make you think of Halloween, as opposed to Christmas making you think of video games.

Here are a few of my favorites–from the past and present–that I like to break out when the air goes chill, the leaves turn, and you get the odd suspicion that there is a vampire waiting outside your door.

Doom

It might not be the original horror video game, but with its demons, occult symbols, and intense violence, it is certainly one of the most viable entries in the genre out there.  Doom is one of the first video games I played that would, at times, instill into me a sense of panic and dread.  The disembodied snarls of some dark beast, the eerie silence of a newly-discovered room, the attacks from all around you, the confined spaces–John Carmack and company knew what they were doing.  Like so many old-school games, Doom didn’t want to empower the gamer; it wanted to make you feel helpless, and few games do a better job of  it.  Sure, Mega Man makes you feel helpless, but I don’t remember any goat-headed enemies in Mega Man; there is just something about that to make you feel extra-screwed.

Resident Evil

I kind of stopped liking the Resident Evil series after the first one.  Oh sure, Resident Evil 2-4 are all well-designed games, and RE5 looks great (I haven’t played it, other than the demo, but I hear it’s a pretty awesome co-op experience).  But most Resident Evil games are action games with horror elements; the original Resident Evil was pure B-grade horror goodness, and for a high school boy who was just starting to dabble in scary stuff, it was the Greatest Thing Ever.  I often credit this game with introducing me to the horror genre, with getting me into zombies and vampires and werewolves and heavy metal music.  I feel confident that I am not unique in this.  It’s also the first game to introduce me to setting and atmosphere as a game play mechanic: the mansion was just as much of a character as the giant snake, those terrifying dogs that crashed through the windows, and the last big boss Tyrant.  And that character was so, so scary: I would even say deliciously scary (and I really hate saying that).

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

If Resident Evil launched a thousand horror fans, then Castlevania: Symphony of the Night launched a thousand goth kids–or at least it should have.  This game was a bit of a sales flop when it first released, but as with most critical successes/commercial failures, it earned the respect of a classic and has been re-released on both XBLA and PSN, allowing it to earn the love and respect from the masses it truly deserves.  As for its Halloween appropriateness, it doesn’t get much better than this: Dracula’s good-natured son rises from an eternal slumber to traverse his father’s haunted castle on a quest to end the Dark Lord’s reign of terror forever.  It’s not really a scary game, but it is certainly a dark one.  The sprawling, seemingly endless castle is populated with a myriad of fantastical creatures, and every gothic flourish you can think of can be found–from ruined turrets to an eerie cathedral to a whole lot of artfully applied blood.  Other than the original, this is the best Castlevania game, and it’s one of the best video games ever made, period.

Left 4 Dead

I could write at length why this is a great game to play for Halloween, but really: do I have to?  You and three other friends have to make it from point A to B in a zombie-infested world.  You’ll creep through deserted hospitals, traverse dank sewers, and make a desperate run across a cornfield in your travels–and that’s just a few of the utterly terrifying places you will go.  At the end of each chapter, you’ll have to get onto a rescue vehicle of some sort, while EVERY ZOMBIE IN THE UNIVERSE is bearing down on you.  In short: this game is concerned with zombies and the killing of them.  Enough said.  With about one hour needed for each chapter, a full play-through is a great way to spend Halloween.

Dead Space

Do you like Alien?  Have you played Dead Space?  If not, you should.  There are all kinds of things that make it scary: constant feelings of dread and loneliness, doubts about the main character’s mental stability, and the old sci-fi standby of an imposing monolith older than time (which, in this case, really does look like something Satan made).  But the blood-red cherry on this horror sundae are the Necromorphs: an alien race that re-animates human corpses.  Zombies?  Well, sure: but horribly deformed zombies that–going along with the whole Satan theme–look far more demonic and grotesque than your typical undead human.  The Necromorphs are the most nightmare-inducing creatures I have ever seen in a video game or movie, and on top of dealing with them, there are moments when you will enter the unforgiving void of space with only a limited supply of air.  As your air gauge dials down far more quickly than you need it to, your pulse quickens and your palms sweat.  This game doesn’t let up for one instance, and it all culminates in one of the most tense final boss battles ever.  A great game to play in the days leading up to Halloween, when the last big battle reserved for Halloween night.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Not really a horror game, but as any Batman fan will tell you: Arkham Asylum is the scariest place on Earth.  With every major villain he has ever faced actively working to break his mind, Batman faces a challenge no less terrifying than anything in any other game on this list.  Chief among the scares is the encounters with Scarecrow: mind-bending battles of will that build up slowly and grow in intensity as they progress.  With bonus material that probes the psyche of Arkhman’s most terrifying alumni (some of it would make Hannibal Lecter feel…uncomfortable), it’s hard not to consider this game a great play for those chilly autumn days where twilight lasts a little bit longer than it should.

So there you go: spooky gaming that is perfect for Halloween time.   Grab a bag of Reese’s Pumpkins and settle in for a long night of gaming–a long night because, you probably won’t be able to go to sleep.

Top 6 Reasons Why Video Games Are Better Than Tabletop Games

As promised, and better late than never.

1.  Two words: the Internet. The Internet is the pinnacle of mankind’s technological achievements.  Whatever species comes after us to reign as the dominant creatures on Earth, the Internet is the legacy that we will leave behind for them.  I really don’t see how we’re going to outdo it (short of curing AIDS or cancer).  It has changed the way we communicate, do business, experience art and literature, shop, and yes–play together.  If you want to get a Dungeons and Dragons group together, you need to find like-minded individuals who are willing to commit to a regular schedule.  World of Warcraft?  All you need is a decent computer and an Internet connection.  There is never more than a few minutes wait to play Halo 3, and even if you’re playing a game that is offline or meant only for one person, you can still use the power of the Internet to converse with your friends.  To this day, it still blows my mind when I play against somebody from France, Spain, Mexico, or the UK (true stories all around).  It’s awesome in a way that words can’t do justice.

2.  Legendary difficulty…changes a man. Video gamers are like the hardcore jocks of the world, and tabletop gamers are akin to the smarty-pants nerds (which is odd, considering that just about every dedicated gamer in existence belongs to the latter class in real life).  They live for competition; for the thrill of sweet victory, be it over the AI or another human.  Game designers know this, which is why so many games are geared to be less like relaxing fun and more like boot camp.  Sure, it hurts.  Yeah, your fingers are sore and knuckles are white.  But after a while, you start to like the pain.  It’s tthat point that you start to see your video game trials as a mark of honor, a well-earned achievement.  If you want to see what I mean, talk to a WoW gamer that is at level 80, or a Guitar Hero player who can play “Through The Fire and the Flames” on Expert.  This kind of dedication isn’t from a lack of character; it’s born from a sense of purpose, a drill-sergeant-intensity that board games just seem to lack.

3.  Video games are true convergence media (is that a term that’s been coined already, and if not, can I get credit for it?). Bibliophiles, like myself, prefer books to movies because they allow you to spend time with the narrative, to get to know it, to absorb imagery and dialogue.  Movies are shot by you at a relentless 24 frame a second–blink, and you’ll miss something.  However, movies have one advantage over books.  Writing, visual presentation, music, acting; it’s all in a movie.  Every artistic pursuit is part of a film.  Now, what does all this have to do with video games?  They also draw on every imaginable artistic practice to see the light of day.  On top of that, it’s all interactive.  Video games are like movies enhanced with the intimacy and deliberate pace of books.  Tabletop games are personal and engaging, but are also flat and limited.

4.  Video games are for doers who like to think; board games are for thinkers who like to do. Both video games and tabletop games take place, essentially, in a virtual space.  With video games, however, there is a greater sense of the real–in much the same way that looking at a Van Gogh painting is more awe-inspiring than looking at a reprint of a Van Gogh painting.  Tabletop games rely heavily on the imagination, which is what makes them so great, but what if you’re not particularly imaginative?  What if your skills are more motor-oriented, and you have deft reflexes, but you have a hard time visualizing what’s going on when you read text or listen to somebody else read?  Do you realize how many people this describes?  Video games are for you; tabletop games may be boring and hard-to-learn, but video games will always present with all the visuals you will ever need and rule implementation you will ever need, letting you dedicate yourself to on-the-fly strategizing and execution of action.

5.  Speaking of hard to learn, video games are not really hard to learn. Sure, memorizing the move set to Street Fighter IV is not an easy task.  The first time one plays a first-person-shooter, there is a whole bunch of stuff to digest; a good number of input commands, the usage properties of weapons and items, and reading on-screen information outputs.  This is nothing compared to learning a board game, where one may play for years and never fully grasp the rules.  My D&D group has been playing for three months, and we still crack open the core rulebooks several times a session.  Sure, there are easy-to-learn board games out there, but the really good ones take time and care to learn.  Plus, the teaching methods for video games are largely learn-by-doing, which sticks with the learner much better than learn-by-studying (the teaching method of board games–you read the rule and then follow them, as opposed to being taught them as you play).  Which would you rather do: read a book on how to kill zombies, and then go kill some zombies, or just go out and kill zombies?  That’s what I thought.

6.  If you don’t have any friends, you can still have a whole lot of fun. Other than solitaire, there is not a single tabletop game which you can play by yourself.  Every tabletop game in existence requires at least two players, and the best games require at least four.  What if your only friend doesn’t like games, or what if they like very simple games?  If that’s so, then you are missing out on a wealth of great entertainment and enrichment–unless you play video games.  Most video games, even in the age of the Internet, are primarily designed as single-player experiences.  You may even find your solo experience better than a social one, wherein the socializing may distract you from the game.  I can attest to this fact, because as a child I didn’t have a whole lot of friends and my family was not largely into board games.  So while I had a sterling collection of tabletop games, I largely played video games.  This may sound depressing, but it’s not.  I had rich, personal experiences that helped build my critical thinking and analytical skills.  I indulged in the narrative of the games I played, being inspired to create my own stories (I wrote fan-fic before it was fan-fic!).  In my teenage years, Resident Evil was all the more scarier because I played it all alone, and more recently I had no one around to distract me when I broke out in a cold sweat while playing Dead Space, or shed tears at the end of Fable 2.  My experiences with video games are enriched when I play alone, much like when one watches a movie alone they find it all the more engaging.  Plus, it’s nice to know that I don’t always need friends around when I want to play-pretend for a while.

Top 6 Reasons Why Tabletop Games Are Better Than Video Games

I’ll be doing a companion piece flipping things around in the next couple of days.

1.  You will never need to upgrade that Monopoly board you bought back in 1985. Oh sure, manufacturers release new editions of board games all the time.  They may even go to the trouble of revising the rules or adding new mechanics to keep the game fresh and exciting.  But if you really, really like the Stratego set or the old-school Clue you have–and you’ve kept it free from water, fire, mold, and the grubby hands of a toddler–then guess what: you can still pull that bad boy out today and play it.  You don’t need to worry about having the right console or OS, you don’t need to worry that the disc has been scratched up, you don’t have to worry about it simply not working because the internal parts are oh so delicate.  And you what’s really cool?  No matter how complex or expensive board games get, you will never have to upgrade your graphics card to play them.

2.  Your D&D Core Rulebook won’t get fried in a power surge.  Your mobo will.  Your dungeon tiles won’t mysteriously vanish into thin air.  Your OS will crash. It’s a known fact: computers hate their users.  They lure you in with a false sense of security, and them BAM! they die.  The OS won’t boot, you get the Blue Screen, or a game locks up on you every time you try to run.  You try every fix, and you eventually end up making things worse.  Time for a trip to Reformat Row.  Or even better: you open up the case to figure out if it’s a hardware problem, and you see a broken fan.  This of course explains the video card spot-welded to its port, the RAM that’s shaped like the letter U, and the black spots on the motherboard.  Game consoles aren’t much better.  In fact, they’re worse.  You can repair a computer without fixing EVERYTHING (most of the time), but the only way to fix a console is to buy a new one.  In D&D–or any other tabletop game–the only thing that hates you is the dice, and they don’t hate you so much as have a cold sense of randomness.  You don’t have to worry about stuff shorting out or burning up, and it’s cool that electrical surges, dust, heat, and general shenanigans won’t make your tabletop gear stop working.

3.  Absolutely no limit on narrative elements, ever. In tabletop games, your head is the canvas, your imagination the brush strokes.  Who doesn’t play a game of Monopoly and imagine city streets, bustling with tourists and workers, beneath glistening towers of steel and glass, those towers housing the corporate pit fighters that the players are meant to represent?  In Warhammer 40K or Magic: the Gathering, I can fight with honor and dignity, using no more force than is necessary to vanquish my foes, or I can grind my enemies into dust–and develop a real personality for myself and my army around my approach.  The low-tech presentation of board games and pen/paper RPGs demands that players use their imagination to spice up narrative and appeal to the senses.  Video games?  Not so much.  If I don’t think that post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C. looks the way it does in Fallout 3, too bad.  That’s the way it looks.  Questions of morality and ethics are determined by black/white, yes/no decisions with no common ground, and all too often once I choose a path I’m bound to it.  Back story for characters is even more limited, often dictated to you or made out of a glorified mathematical formula.  If you want richness of character or setting in video games, you need to write fan-fic.  If you want richness of character or setting in tabletop games, just play.

4.  “It’s never the same game twice” is more than just a tag line on back of the box. Chance is the defining element of every tabletop game: the roll of dice, the draw of the card, the position of a piece.  Board games test adaptability and careful, strategic thought.  Video games test those things, but primarily they test twitch reflexes and have a heavy emphasis on pattern memorization/recognition.  They are linear and overly structured, and eventually lose their replay value.  That is why tabletop gaming will never get old, while one of the trending topics in video game culture is the lack of variety in the works offered up.

5.  A truly customizable experience, while video games create the illusion of custom personalization. Try to house-rule Fallout 3.  Go ahead.  Try and say “You know, I’m just not good at this game, no matter how much I lower the difficulty.  I’m just no good at it.  But I want to explore the game world and enjoy the story and get some victories under my belt, so that I can eventually get better.  I want to learn the mechanics of the game at my own pace.  So I’m going to give myself unlimited action points until I get a feel for the flow of combat.  Yeah, unlimited action points so that I can fight any enemy at any time using V.A.T.S. and not have to rely on pure skill.”  That is, in no way, ever going to happen.  You can, however, ask your friends if they can alter the rules of the new board game you’re all playing together to give you a bit of a fair shake until you’ve got a grasp on the concept.  Or say you want to mix things up a little, make things a little wild and crazy.  Say you want to play a game of Trouble where you can split up your dice roll amongst all four of your pieces.  Well, go right ahead!  What’s stopping you?  You can tailor even the most strict of board games to your particular game play tastes, so long as your friends are cool with it.  Case in point:  how many of you have played a game of Monopoly where you put all of the money collected from taxes in the middle of the board, and should anybody land on the Free Parking space, they get it?  Yeah, that’s not in the rules.  How many of you have played an online game of Halo 3 wherein the object of the game was to see how long one could go without shooting another player, as opposed to racking up as many kills as possible?  Didn’t think so.

6.  Until they really invent HAL, there is no AI that can compete with human intelligence. Contrary to popular belief (and mountains of evidence), humans really are smarter than computers.  A CPU can make thousands–millions–of calculations in the time it takes for you to blink.  It can read and translate lines upon lines of code.  It can examine concrete parameters and make a judgment as to how to act in a given situation.  But it cannot think on its own.  A computer–be it a desktop PC, an Xbox 360, or the doomsday machine that is attached to the little red button in the President’s office–can only work with the intelligence given to it, and there is no room for expansion.  The human brain is constantly evolving, constantly growing, and constantly processing not just cold, hard numbers but all kinds of things we cannot make tangible or graph on a coordinate plane: things like emotions, outcomes, relationships.  The Covenant is dictated by algorithms; my Dungeon Master is dictated by the actions of every member of my party, the result she wants for the outcome she is running, the result the party wishes for, her mood, our mood, the weather outside–you name it.  It all combines to make a singular game experience that never gets stale and never feels repetitive.  That is why tabletop gaming is exciting and expansive.  That is why tabletop gaming will always leave you on the edge of your seat, while video games will sometimes leave you bored.

On Superhero Games: Lay off the Weak Sauce, Will Ya?

Batman: Arkham Asylum is the best game of the year so far, and will no doubt be a strong contender for the official title when the time comes.  Of course, judging by the “Game of the Year Edition” re-releases on the shelf, there were approximately 9,956 titles earning such accolade last year, so I’m going ahead and giving the win to Batman right now.

That doesn’t erase the fact, however, that as good as this game is (“unrelenting in its quality” says Tycho from Penny Arcade), as flawlessly designed and executed as it is, as much as it keeps calling you back even long after you have finished it and found every single hidden gem it has to offer, it glances over one very important fact, something I thank my friend mysticalforest for bringing to my attention.

That point is: you are playing a superhero, not a superhero-in-training.  So, why don’t we get to be a superhero for the length of the game, instead of having to slog away and earn the really cool skills and gadgets?

By the end of this game, you will have an assortment of high-powered technological gadgets that assist you in traversing the environment, opening up secret passages, and disabling multiple enemies.  You will be able to remove foes from fights instantly with bone-breaking takedowns and withstand a substantial (thought still not excessive) amount of gunfire.  By game’s end, you will feel like Batman, doing everything he can do in the comics and films and cartoons, all with minimal effort.

However, at the game’s start, you know a few basic moves, have only a single batarang, and are easily felled by a few swings of an iron bar.

Does this ruin the game?  Not for me.  Watching a character grow stronger as you play a game is immensely satisfying, and considering that a little re-working to the script would make this title easily work as a Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid game, the progression of strength doesn’t feel entirely out-of-place.

This typical element of game design, however, is twisted a bit when you’re dealing with an iconic of a character as Batman.  There are other things to consider besides giving the player a growing sense of confidence and strength: chiefly that this character comes with pre-conceived notions of how they should handle themselves during combat and exploration.  Rocksteady nailed this right from the start, making Batman a perceptive individual with a sharp, logical mind as well as a big, strong man with incredible agility and strength (seriously, Batman breaks his vow to never use guns in the first five minutes of game play, if you catch my drift).  However, part of those pre-conceived notions people have of Batman concerns not just his physical prowess and razor-sharp intellect–it’s also his gadgets and training.

So why do I not have access to said gadgets and training right from the start?  Sure, a simple punch is as strong as it should be, coming from Batman, and I can track objects at the molecular level, but why do I have to earn a takedown move, or improved armor?  Why do I have to dig up a zipline?  Why am I half-way through the game before I can hack security gates?

If the developers had made this a “year one” story, then it would have made sense for Batman to grow in strength as the game progressed.  But this is not a year one story–this is Batman in his prime, with an established history with his allies and enemies.  Batman should be a walking weapon capable of handling himself in any situation at the start of the game.

There are still plenty of ways to make this game challenging, even with a fully-armed Batman.  More confrontations with armed enemies, the danger of an innocent person mixed in with the bad guys you have to take out, more puzzles to solve, and more intricate boss battles would have satisfied the need for challenge all throughout the game, while still presenting a fully-realized Batman.

Arkham Asylum is a wonderful game that serves as a love letter to the source material, and it’s refreshing to see Batman operate in an environment this varied and to have his skills tested so fully.  But please, Rocksteady, for the inevitable sequel, don’t make me have to earn the right to play the character that I am supposed to be playing.

Shadow Complex: Pure, Sweet Goodness

If you need something to pass the time until Arkham Asylum comes out on Tuesday, I highly recommend Shadow Complex, recently released to Xbox Live Arcade.  It’s the best game that Epic has ever made (yes, those would be the guys who gave us both Unreal and Gears of War), and does old-school revival better than anybody else.

Shadow Complex is a sprawling 2D adventure in the spirit of Metroid.  You follow a somewhat linear path through a sizable map, picking up new items and weapons and uncovering secrets along the way.  After picking up new items, it’s highly rewarding to go back to old areas and find new doorways, uncover new passages, and take on enemies that once gave you a run for your money with some high-end ordinance.

As if that wasn’t addictive enough, the dev team has somehow managed to make 2D combat as exciting and engaging as 3D firefights.  Each level is rendered in 3D, so the camera zooms out for dramatic melee attacks, intense turret-shooting segments, and even short cinematics.  Enemies attack from the background and your character returns fire from the foreground.  Explosions affect targets in a full 360 degree radius, so blowing up a barrel in the background can affect enemies in the foreground, if it’s a big enough boom.  *giddy gamer face* Once, I launched a grenade into the background, and while crap was going KA-PLOW-BOOEY I hit the melee attack button and busted out a brutal takedown on the guy that had just run up on me.  It looked as awesome as something out of a Michael Bay film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

It’s a very exciting game with plenty to offer.  Don’t go looking for a deep storyline though, as it goes something like this: wrong place, wrong time…blah, blah….secret terrorist base in the mountains…blah, blah…reluctant soldier forced to use violence…blah, blah….OMG THEY HAVE GIANT ROBOTS…blah, blah….and so on.  However, I do predict a huge twist ending (I’m not kidding: so far, a certain character’s questionable actions is the only alluring thing about the story).

So, yeah: don’t expect a National Book Award winner.  But the game play is solid, and that’s all that really matters.

Oh, one more thing.  There is talk on the Internet about gamers not wanting to buy this game because of the involvement of Orson Scott Card, renowned sci-fi writer and an avowed opponent of homosexual rights.  To each their own, and as a supporter of gay rights, I can certainly sympathize.  But think about this: not only was Card involved with this game about as much as Tom Clancy is involved with the games that bear his name (that is to “tangentially at best”), but by not supporting Card you are also not supporting a bunch of developers, artists, testers, and interns (somebody has to brew the coffee!) who put a lot of blood and love into this game.  If Card’s hand in the pot is the ONLY thing keeping you from buying this game, go ahead and buy the game.  Exercise the tolerance you want Orson Scott Card to have.

After a few hours with this game, you’ll be saying “Orson Scott Who-What?”

The Final Four: the Big Dance for this year’s video games.

Were this March, and were I a sports fan, I would be talking about the semi-finals of the NCAA Basketball Tournament.  However, neither of those facts are true, so I’m talking about the months of September thru December: the last four months of the year.  This is the time of year that most triple-A video games are released, where your Game of the Year contenders hit the shelf, where people like me just sign their paychecks over to GameStop.

Here’s a rundown of the titles I’m looking forward to in this year’s final four (not necessarily listed in order of release):

Batman: Arkham Asylum–Not technically in the final four, because it drops in late August, but the game that will kick off the fall/holiday release season.  Sure to be one this year’s stand-out titles for people who love both video games and comics: a crowd of no small number.  Not only is this the quintessential Batman game, but it shapes up to be one of the better stealth/adventure games out there, with combat that values planning over immediate action and promises to never be the same twice: a rare combination in stealth games, where usually things start to fall into a pattern real quick.  Not even the demo of this game has been the same experience twice, though, so I have high hopes for it being a varied and engaging experience.

Halo 3: ODST–The Halo trilogy was like playing a Jerry Bruckheimer movie set in space, something about which I will not complain.  Halo Wars switched things up by being an RTS game, introducing new characters and having a more straightforward story.  ODST will return to form as a first person shooter, but promises more of a mystery story than pure, guns-blazing action.  Plus, it has a new multiplayer mode: Firefight, which is not unlike Horde mode from Gears of War 2.  An easy Game of the Year Contender, if it can get past…

Modern Warfare 2–This game’s predecessor beat Halo 3 in the Game of the Year running back in 2007, and the Halo franchise owned console FPS territory since the release of the original game.  Modern Warfare 2 looks to be in line to take home the big awards again this year.  I’ll be playing this game, but I’m not sure about multiplayer: I found the original game to terribly unbalanced in multiplayer, with a system that favored early adapters.  Single player was awesome, despite some moments based on pure luck, something I’m hoping won’t be the case this time around.

Brutal Legend–there is no way that Tim Schafer can make a bad game.  Psychonauts may have been the best platformer of the last generation.  Grim Fandango is one of the masterpieces of video gaming.  The heavy-metal fantasy world Schafer has imagined for this game hits all the right spots, and I couldn’t think of anyone more qualified than Jack Black to give voice to the main character.  I’m looking forward to Rocktober quite a bit.

Dragon Age: Origins–My personal pick for Game of the Year, and I’m sure it will make a strong showing.  BioWare knows how to make engaging single-player RPGs.  They know how to tell stories in games.  With every new release, they build on the strengths of previous releases.  This game will be awesome, and with all of the goodies they’re packing in pre-orders and the robust collector’s edition, this is one of those games that might be worth hopping on the bandwagon.

Alpha Protocol–Probably the most unique concept of any game in the final four, this is an espionage game played out as an RPG.  I’m surprised we haven’t seen this before, and I’m impressed with all of the mechanics that developer Obsidian Entertainment is putting into place.  I’ll be honest; it’s not high on my must-have list (neither is Modern Warfare 2, since I’ll just be rolling single-player on that one), but I do intend to pick it up–eventually.

Section 8–I’ve been playing the beta, and all I’ve got to say is “HELL YES.”    Not a terribly complicated game, but a lot of fun.  While it does not re-imagine mechanics and techniques, it totally reinvents the concept of spawning.  No longer do you randomly pop up on the battlefield after you die, possibly to be ganked by a spawn camper or to find yourself disoriented and without a plan, you choose where to spawn on the map.  This is presented as your character descending–head-first–from orbit right into the thick of things.  On the deployment map, you are shown the locations of both friendly and hostile forces.  This adds a very real strategic element to battle, and I don’t think the whole orbital drop thing will ever get old.

Champions Online–I’ve canceled my World of Warcraft subscription because it got to the point where I was just chasing a carrot on a stick, but this might be the change I needed.  A superhero RPG is nothing new (City of Heroes has been around a while), but I’m liking the vibe I get from Champions.  I’m in the open beta, and I’m looking forward to it, but as far as an active subscription I’m going to hold out.  It’s always dicey being an early adapter for an MMORPG.  I imagine those who hopped on Age of Conan or Warhammer Online aren’t exactly giddy right now.  We’ll see how things stand around the holidays (hello Christmas list).

So there you go: my highlights/recommendations for this year’s fall/winter release season, or “Q4″ as they call it in the business…not that I’m in the business mind you.  Not in what you would call an “official” capacity.

Dungeons and Dragons: Where have you been all of my life?

Tonight I had the best D&D session ever.  Yes, I’m new to the game, so that statement has less weight than if I was an old pro.  That doesn’t erase the fact that I wish it could have lasted into the wee hours of the morning.  I assured my DM that I had enough caffeine in the kitchen to kill an elephant, but she shys away from caffeine for a variety of very sensible reasons–probably because enough of it can kill an elephant, which means it could kill her; several times over.

That didn’t stop my party from hitting the Mountain Dew and cookies though.

My usual party of three was joined by two new players, and hence two new characters, giving us a full-fledged party.  We are only missing a cleric to have a perfectly balanced group, but considering that we have a Warlock, a Wizard, and a Ranger–plus a Fighter that chose damage-dealing over defense, and a Warlord that has some pretty cool attack buffs, plus one power that allows an adjacent ally to make an additional attack on the same target the Warlord just hit–we can usually kill enemies before they do any real harm to us.

We proved this in a very exciting, long encounter that had my character, the Ranger, scurrying up on top of a boulder to snipe away at enemies, while the Fighter and Warlord double-teamed another creature with support from the Wizard.  The Warlock sadly maneuvered himself on to a bad part of the board and took some damage, plus had some bad attack rolls, but he laid down a big Eldritch Blast at a key moment in the battle.  Plus, the Wizard rolled a critical on one spell, dealing out 20 damage, and my Ranger finished the battle with a critical hit from his bow.  We killed three creatures and four minions, with only one bloodied character.  A great fight and a satisfying victory.

The role-playing was also quite fun, better than it had ever been.  Our party has an interesting dynamic in that nobody really likes anybody else.  We watch out for each other in fights, but only because there is strength in numbers.  This leads to some interesting banter at inns and on the road, and sometimes some in-game fist-fights.  Some of that could be changing; the Fighter and I actually worked together in a non-combat encounter and talked about in what direction to take our quest.

I can’t wait for our next session.  It might be a table full of newbs, but we’re learning at a decent click.  Our DM is not only infinitely patient with five guys who never grew out of their teens, but she doesn’t try to actively kill the players; a plus in my book.

And I’m not just saying because I want some phat loot.  Remember: I wanted to give back to the villagers.