God damnit. The next generation MS or Sony console better steal liberally from the Wii's controls for shooters. Watching dudes play these games is like watching someone play a piano while wearing mittens.

Weapons in GOW felt like popguns. Rapid fire bb's. "Yay". The only two things truly satisfying in the game from a shooting pov was pistol headshots and point blank shotguns. Everything rapid fire sounded weak and had zero stopping power.

I hated shooting guns in that game, which resulted in me playing the game like a complete retard, always using cover to get close for melee.

They need to fix the guns and make it feel like you're actually hitting something when you do. Gouts of blood don't tell me i've done any damage when the dude i hit is still continuing just fine through his grenade throw animation.

Then again this is a problem in basically EVERY console shooting game that isnt a Tom Clancy title; rapid fire weapons take precedence over semi automatic because it gives the player greater chance to wrestle the inaccurate controls onto a target.

Sigh.

So i'll be getting Gears 2 for the same reason i got Gears 1. It's going to be a great rollercoaster. I'm just never going to return to it again is all.

I'd like to see a poll of games that are super hard but feel good to play anyway.

I love playing Dead Rising for kicks, everything about that game short of the friendly AI impresses me, but the time limits and ridiculous escort missions just annoy me to such an unbelievable extent i feel no joy in playing it for winning. I always just wind up running around ignoring my objectives, kill a few zombies, and then shut it down.

So i'd have to say Dead rising. It's just too much.

You don't know them? 50/50 chance they know eachother, meaning they have a tribe and you're not in it, ergo you need to work for acceptance. Until then you're nobody.

People hate being nobodies; a lot of people get defensive about their nobody status and feel like outsiders; sometimes being an outsider can result in feelings of agression towards the insiders.

Enter anonymity. Perfect excuse to exercise those feelings of agression in a "safe environment".

To me it's always this balance that creates hostility. In a group of friends, abrasive talk is lined with understanding. In a group of strangers it's cause for concern.

I've never played games with people that didn't know eachother and experience the XBLA potty mouth hysteria i've seen if i've been playing with friends and an outsider has joined up. It's double crap if a group of outsiders show up. Then we have tribal warfare.

The absolute best we can do now is hope for the SPIRIT of the game to be carried through faithfully. I for one am STOKED to see what they come up in terms of production design. 2 hours of top notch hollywood Bioshock makeover sounds like 2 hours of non-tedious sex to me.

Another game like this is DEFCON; gameplay didn't hold up for long, but the music and sound keeps me coming back.

I want to boot up Bioshock or Splinter cell chaos theory for the same reasons.

Ahh game soundtracks. How you've kept me afloat.

Two thumbs up. He's right all over. I just love the game anyway.

PC game piracy is music piracy. You have to make games easier to pay for, you have to provide an excellent service through which to pay for and acquire them, and you need to increase value for paying customers.

I've bought more games through steam than any other channel in recent years. I think that's a good indicator.

Let's instead discuss the less cool sounding composers that do equally spectacular work. Bill Brown's Undying soundtrack was unbelievable, another composer i'd love to do Fallout 3.

I felt, at the time of IWD2, that Zur's work was a weak followup to IWD (which was worth playing for the music alone), but anyone that questions Zur's compliance with the vision and mood of that game are out of their minds. It was a spectacular soundtrack for an underrated game, and i'm stoked that someone of his caliber is doing Fallout 3.

I honestly feel that anyone that thinks Soule is the right choice for Fallout have no idea what makes the Fallout sound. The bleak tribal ambient of Fallout 1 and 2 are sounds that simply aren't part of Soule's repertoire. Zur is less slick, but he has broader range.

Giant thumbs up, those stupid sports event fingers, only they're thumbs. Awesome ones.

Also, as a musician, i am appalled. Yech.

It seems as though the more fancy bullshit they try to pull with it graphically the less responsive it gets, but apparently that's not predictable either.

So disappointing. Ah well, i guess i can replay marvel ultimate alliance again. Sigh.

Visually it was pretty amazing; like a gangster steampunk dockworker (dockpunk?) thing at times. It was just a great world to run around in.

Damn Marathon. I still remember the serial by heart for all the times i had to reinstall the thing at uni after admins deleted it from the powerpc workstations.

I have to admit, every time i see some fancy boxing my heart skips. It's part of the artform for me still. My favorite moment as a games consumer was spending my own saved up allowance on Monkey Island. That box art was so gorgeous i wanted to put it up on my wall.

The state of the art was so rotten for the XBOX, with those ugly ass green/black dvd cases, i would immediatly discard the cases and use a cd folder instead.

I actually miss the old days of copy protection. The Lucasarts style code wheels were awesome; the Sierra manual table lookups not so much. It became another gauge of quality; wether you can tie the packaging and physical content into the game experience without being overly intrusive.

In recent times there hasnt been a single piece of packaging i wanted to keep or display. At this point i welcome digital distribution.

Speaking of digital distribution, if i find out who decided XBLA games would just randomly "time out" and require periodic connections to Live to stay purchased i'll finally find good cause for my voodoo doll experiment. Thanks MS, for further punishing me for being temporarily offline.

IGN reviews are hilariously poor whenever a reviewer actually likes a game. It's strange. When they deal with crap it's like they make an effort to justify their negative opinion. When they deal with something good they just instantly give up trying to justify and just gush all over it.

I trust Eurogamer blindly. Any game review referring to a gameplay experience as "being kicked in the cock by a bull" has my respect. Edge, Gamespot, Gamespy and IGN can go burn.

It looks like a slightly higher tech blend of FEAR and Project Snowblind, with less emphasis on the parts of FEAR that really stood out.

FEAR, for its time, was the ultimate CQB action game. Personally i wish they'd steal liberally from Condemned 2 and really evolve the combination of melee attacks and gunplay. Oh well.

In any case their social circle have been characters in the strip since years ago. What you're doing, in essence, is complaining that characters in a comic strip talk to eachother about eachother. Oh no! Blasphemy!

It's a free online comic. You're entirely allowed to ignore it, much like they're entirely allowed to not give a flying fuck wether you're entertained or not. That's the beauty of it.

I will always, ALWAYS advocate the use of unnecessarily dramatic prose in opinion pieces. It adds color, which is good regardless of what shade of Lovecraft you wind up with.

They'd get a sell out of me for sure

Nintendo make very, very simple games. They rarely go to lengths to tell stories or deepen their characters, and as such, as we grow up and the graphics gain fidelity, and other developers drop things on us like Bioshock or GTA4, we grow to expect Nintendo games to somehow match brawn with that.

I can't tell you how vital it is for Nintendo's future success that they don't ever go there. They are in such blistering command of polished simplicity it's staggering to watch, and while we, old and weary, may be clinical about it and brush it off as soulless and calculated, at the same time it is like condemning Beethoven for not writing more light hearted waltzes.

I'm excited about the Wii, not for its advances or regresses or whatever it is that Nintendo are trying to sell us, but because for the first time in a long while they're out of their element, and they're trying things out; Right now they're plodding along trying to do the same schedule of franchises they do every year, but at the same time they do mad things like the wheel, the balance board, the channel metaphor.

Before i was like.. Oh well.. Better luck next time Nintendo. Now it's turning into christ almighty i can't WAIT for the next one! I'll be hugely impressed if Nintendo doesn't sink their profits into some serious r&d, and eventually we'll reap the benefits of that, even if it does wind up some kind of shoe you wear on your head that projects images on your balls. It's so WEIRD all of it, and that, to me, is what gives it its soul.

It means even though i'm better than someone else there's always a chance of fortune rolling in their favor. It increases their enjoyment of the game, and thanks to the awesomeness of synergy, that increases mine as well.

Then again this is 100% true for same-screen multiplayer and probably completely false for online.

With MKDS i refused to play randoms for all the snaking, so my experience there as well was with people i could communicate with through MSN and the like on the side. Hearing your opponent tell you "you wouldve won if it hadn't been for that blue shell" softens the blow immensely.

It's such a double edged sword for Nintendo. It's nice to be able to tick off "online mario kart" on the list of the Wii's achievements, but it's also the kind of thing that most readily displays how little Nintendo actually know about online multiplayer and how the atmosphere of same-screen multiplayer is deadly hard to replicate online.

Nintendo will have to learn, eventually, that their old franchise games may not translate flawlessly to online play without some resonant changes to the core gameplay. For MKW they'd benefit from the ability to turn weapons on/off when you create a game much like with the Worms games of old. I know i personally would appreciate a "pure" MK experience once in a while without any items whatsoever.

It's ironic and telling that the best online multiplayer game Nintendo has ever published, Metroid Prime Hunters, was created by western developers. I'm surprised they didn't learn more lessons from that one.

The blue shell in MKDS didn't catch this hailstorm of hatorade if i recall correctly, and to me it was like a simple part of the game to occationally get fucked over by a blue shell, just as much as i'd fuck others over in the same way.

It's a big part of the roulette of Mario Kart. Item balance has very little to do with this game. The only balance there is is that you're less likely to get screwed at the back than at the front, and personally i like it that way.

The thing with the blue shell is that it's only "acceptable" if it's extremely rare, and in a smaller field of racers that was the case. In the new expanded field you run into nuke items ridiculously often, and it breaks the natural flow of the game. MKW is the first Mario Kart game i've played in which i've been hit by *several* nukes in quick succession, and there is simply no excuse for that.

Blue shell is like Gorlax in smash bros. When he hits it's just a big fat dumb event that makes little sense in terms of balance, and thats its awesomeness. Nothing like throwing a giant pokemon at someone followed by a resounding "In your face! IN YOUR FACE!"

Blue shell. The ultimate weapon.
We just shouldn't be seeing it every race like we do now.