Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first. Like other Maxis games, this one has a very charming feel. The character animations, layout, music, and environment all promote a cheerful, capricious atmosphere. And as anyone who played around with the free creature creator demo can tell you, the character creating process is extremely robust. In an extremely nice touch, if you play the game online, the game randomly downloads and populates the worlds with creatures other players have created. You quickly realize that with some ingenuity and imagination, you can most likely create anything you put your mind to.

But that’s also a bit of the problem. The whole draw of the game, constantly evolving, is sort of missing a compelling evolution mechanic. Instead of some sort of an iterative process, you control every aspect of your species’ look and abilities. The only limiting factor is the cost of purchasing new bits for your species from the character creator. You get more of these points by performing actions that lead your species down their evolutionary path, the actions being dependent on what stage you’re in. In the cellular stage it’s all about eating either plants or bits of other animals. In the creature stage it’s about making friends or killing them off. In the tribal stage it’s about making allies or wiping other tribes off the face of the earth etc etc. The idea is to become the dominant species(and later nation) at every level, and as you can see, this can be accomplished through peaceful or aggressive means, or even a mix between the two. This is the only way your actions guide your evolution, and it’s a bit of a pity because it doesn’t even really matter that much, other than the advantages you’re given at every stage that reinforce your respective approach to cementing your species’ absolute dominion over all living things.

So, it’s safe to say user actions don’t really drive evolution. It’s basically you at the wheel the entire time, and aside from your species being set in their appearance after the second stage, you’re never locked into a specific course of action. And it’s hard to argue against more freedom. After all, if players wanted to pretend this was a more evolution oriented game, they could easily engineer the experience themselves. The problem is that the game isn’t just you tinkering with the creature creator, although that might have been a more favorable experience. The rest of the game is for the most part a set of startlingly mediocre games inspired by more refined ones. The impression that you’re playing stripped down versions of Flow, World of Warcraft, Age of Empires, Civilization, finishing off with an amalgam of space sims is prevalent throughout. And there’s nothing remotely interesting about any stage. It’s all been done before, and done better. And when there’s not even a real sense of continuity in the evolution, and the only thing tying these mediocre games together is your little freak species, you have to ask yourself if it’s worth it.

At day’s end, the game’s a bit of a disappointment. Not a colossal one, but perhaps that makes it even more frustrating because it simply could have been better, and evidently so. Hopefully other developers will take note of Spore’s attempt at a compelling amalgam of genre games. Until then, you can calways content yourself with staring at the latest oddity to crawl out from the depths of the internet on to your planet. Or don’t. It can sort of bugger esteem for your creative abilities.

There are many factors that go into how we evaluate games, but at the end of the day, we’re always brought to the same question; how did the game make us feel? If, upon completion, a game makes us feel sad, or frightened, or euphoric, it’s these sensations that will stay long after you forget everything else.

And Left 4 Dead excels in this regard. Playing with friends, you’ll celebrate your triumphs, mourn your losses, and share the same feeling of dread when confronted with seemingly impossible odds. And the reason it succeeds so much is because of the expertly refined gameplay mechanics that encourage co-operation on an intimate scale rivaled by few other game experiences.

The game proper can be summed up fairly simply. Players assume the role of one of four identically playing survivors that have somehow managed to group together and avoid turning into the living dead. Players can either play a 4 player cooperative game against the computer, or an 8 player VS game that pits a team of humans against special zombies. Gameplay is divided up into four distinct campaigns, with each campaign being further divided into five chapters. And while the campaigns are distinct, they all have the same simple objective: get from point A to point B without dying.

Of course, during a zombie outbreak, it’s easier said than done. Survivors face a veritable menagerie of the walking dead. The standard zombies are dangerous in numbers; they only take a few bullets to drop, but if they surround you then things can go bad fast, as their hits impede your movement, making escape nearly impossible as long as they’re attacking. Hunters are similar to the spider zombies from Half-Life 2—they’re given away by their banshee shrieks and are able to pounce and instantly incapacitate a survivor. Smokers are similarly abled, only instead of pouncing they’re able to drag survivors away from the group with their tongue—usually from great distances. In a trickier vein, boomers are able to projectile vomit on survivors, temporarily blinding them and attracting a horde of zombies to their location. Upon their death, they also spray a wall of vomit in a small radius around their bodies, making their disposal particularly tricky. And while these are deadly in conjunction with each other, the absolute star of the zombie horde has got to be the Tank, a monstrously imposing figure that can soak up bullets as if they were were air pellets. Rounding out the team is the witch, a sort of proximity mine that will almost always kill whoever unwittingly disturbs her.

Because each special type of zombie specializes in disrupting survivors, either by separating, incapacitating, or flooding them with zombies, co-operation and staying close are of the utmost importance. It’s no exaggeration to say that the odds of the survivors being completely wiped out increases an order of magnitude for every survivor that falls. And it’s the very necessity of their survival that helps contribute to the sense of camaraderie that pervades throughout. Because, while it’s all well and good to get on well with your teammates, one usually finds themselves a bit more appreciative when they very much depend on them for their very survival. And the game acknowledges this by making it making cooperation a necessity without too severely punishing the weakest link. Survivors are, with the exception of the hardest difficulty, fairly hard buggers to kill. Once they run out of health, they become incapacitated, but still able to fire their pistols. From there they can be revived and downed and revived once more before finally kicking the bucket upon falling once more. Event then though, they can be revived later on in the level. Dying does have consequences; the remaining survivors are at much greater peril and the dead players gets to watch his friends battle desperately to revive them. It’s a fixable problem, but it creates great tension.

Of course, too much tension is never a good thing; it just leads to exhaustion. The developers attempt to alleviate this issue with an AI they refer to as the ‘Director’. It takes into account how they survivors are generally faring, and applies just enough pressure to keep things interesting without becoming tiring. It accomplishes through mixing up the zombie spawns as well as the beneficial items scattered throughout the level. It gets it right most of the time, although it’s prone to doing odd things like loading the survivors down with medpacks when they’re all mostly healthy, or spawning a horde of zombies literally on top of them. The most important thing is that it mixes it up just enough to make replaying the campaigns an enjoyable experience. Good thing too, as they can be completed in around two hours on a challenging difficulty.

So, the actual gameplay mechanics are pretty universally solid, but that’s only half the equation. It’s no use having a good game is connecting and playing with other people is a huge frustration. For the most part, Valve gets it right. It’s easy to hop into a game with friends, or right away if you’re feeling jumpy. Players can join a game in progress, and should they drop, they’re replaced by a sharpshooting, if tactically unwise, bot. Another nice touch is that players are given the option of temporarily handing control of their character over to a bot should they have to use the bathroom or take a pesky phone call. Finally, voice communication is built in and intuitive, with support for open channel and push to talk. The only real frustration I’ve encountered is the fact that players are unable to choose their own dedicated server, leaving themselves vulnerable to the whims of whoever owns the server they randomly land in. This can lead to anything from bizarre server rules and random kicking to unreasonable server locations, prompting poor latency on the part of half or sometimes the entire team. It’s not enough to wreck the game, but on a particularly unlucky night, it can take up to twenty minutes just to find an acceptable server. The problem is compounded in vs games, where the risk of people randomly being kicked increases as the number of players doubles.

Historically, high expectations and Valve games go hand in hand. It’s been a long wait, but Left 4 Dead doesn’t disappoint. The tight cooperative gameplay mechanics and scaling difficulty provide players who prefer co-op a great deal of replayability, and for those with a more competitive streak, vs. mode is just as compelling. The entire game is a great example of how mechanics can drive player behavior, and if it encourages more developers to opt for this sort of open ended yet cinematic co-operative play, then all the better. If L4D is anything to go by, it’s something we could all enjoy more of.

When Fable II suddenly appeared in my library, I was fairly surprised. I wasn’t aware it was even out yet. Aren’t these sorts of games suspended in a state of near imminent release for eternity? The hype machine had completely passed me by. All I was aware of was that Peter Molyneux was sort of regretful for making big promises in Fable I, and also Fable II would have a dog. And have a dog it did! So, that’s 100% of all promises I was expecting fulfilled right there. Things were off to a great start.

When you first put the game in, assuming you have a decent enough telly, you’re apt to be struck by the luminescent beauty that pervades the landscapes. As are games’ wont, the architecture and landscaping get generally less impressive and more dull as the game progresses, but sprinkled throughout there are geuninely inspired layouts that beg a prolonged glance.

And as you wind your way through the game’s early childhood tutorial, complete with good/evil tropes almost directly lifted from the last game, it’s going to be the scenery keeping you engaged. The story, bless its heart, tries hard. It really does. There are times where elements converge and you feel that you’re standing on the cusp of something truly epic, but then the inspiration disappears almost as quickly as it was manifest, and all you’re left with is disappointment and a kobold tentatively trying to smash in your skull. Try as they might, Lionhead still seem incapable of scraping together a compelling story, and while they’re a bit closer to the mark this goround than they were in Fable 1, at times it almost feels like the story was a bother to them. Good ideas are sprinkled throughout, but they appeared to lack the wherewithal to actually follow through with them.

Part of the trouble, again, stems from Fable’s identity crisis. No one in their right mind would say the game takes itself too seriously. The humour has tongue firmly planted in cheek, and almost every item and character is a pun, injoke, or reference. And they do this very well. The atmosphere is very charming when it’s trying to be, and it’s easy to get swept up in its pace…until whoops somebody just died tragically and now you need to feel sad. Or if you’re playing an evil character…twirl your mustache knowingly? The change in tone isn’t quite that abrupt, but when it gets to the point where it feels like the main plot and everything else exist in two different universes, you’re going to have some issues with immersion.

Thankfully, the main plot isn’t all there is to Fable II. Molyneux, apparently still regretful for his big mouth, has littered Albion with several things you can occupy yourself with. Co-Op is an intriguing new addition that allows players, either locally or online, to join each other’s game in progress.  Although the joining character cannot bring his character along, the henchman you’re assigned is able to transfer experience and money back to your own character.  On top of that, you can of course get married, and have a kid. You can take on a part time job. You can still buy and rent houses, along with stalls, shops, inns…essentially anything with four corners and a roof. There are still demon doors, who still want you to accomplish inane tasks for the sake of getting their treasure. There are still silver keys that open silver chests. If you have a mind to, you can keep yourself busy for hours just dithering about the game world without touching the main plot.

And that’s one of the bee stings the game leaves you with after all is said and done. Getting married, having kids, running around with your faithful dog, owning buildings, working, foreverychoiceaconsequence, on paper it seems like it would be a grand ball of immersion. And to its credit, the game attempts to illustrate the ramifications of your actions in a more epic manner this time around. But that aside, like most other aspects of Fable, there is no real follow through. Getting married has all the emotional appeal of picking up a trophy at the shooting range. Jobs are simple QTEs, and your dog, rather than a real companion, quickly becomes little more than a treasure detector. Perhaps this is the trade off for thread-less open ended gameplay elements. For all the freedom it offers, it lacks a compelling nature. Would you rather the ability to marry everyone, or would you rather choose between, say, five people each with fully fleshed out backstories? Are you trying to play The Sims, or Baldur’s Gate?

How you answer that question will largely determine your enjoyment of the game. Everything else is competent. The action oriented real time combat mechanics complete with rolls, blocks, et al are still present. In an intriguing twist, there is no mana in the game; each spell merely requires time to cast. Although in another minor annoyance, there seems to be very little reason to favor the games’ combat spells over the others. If there is a benefit to be gained, the game doesn’t reward its utilization very well. This humble mage oriented reviewer stuck with fireball the entire game and never felt constrained by any circumstance. On that note, the difficulty could certainly stand to be elevated here and there. The game was essentially a breeze from start to finish, which could take anywhere from 15-30 hours depending on how much you stop to smell the roses.

All said, Fable II is a decent RPG with a weak story and a charming sense of humor. It almost feels like cross between western and japanese RPGs with its hybrid open ended setting but linear plot. And some aspects of it are genuinely intriguing, and Fable V might actually be something special if Lionhead ever got its head firmly around the genre’s strengths. But for now, we must content ourselves with another jaunt to the slightly confused, but always sweet world of Albion.

At time of writing, the Hell March 3 trailer for the game in question had over 500,670 views and 27,578 comments on video-sharing site nico nico douga – uploaded under the title gaijin ga souzou shita totetsu mo nai nihon ga detekuru geemu (’a game with a preposterous foreigner-envisaged version of Japan’). We’ve provided a few selected comments for your perusal below:

“Holy shit, we’re awesome!”

“Expect nothing less from the country of technology!”

“Oh shit, there go our state secrets!”

Reception on Japanese internet forum 2ch seems positive overall, with some users likening EA LA’s over-the-top depiction of Japan in Red Alert 3 to From Software’s depiction of America in presidential mech action game Metal Wolf Chaos (and if you haven’t heard of that, you owe it to yourself to see this).

It’s not all good news, though - Korean site CNB News reports on a Korean politician’s condemnation of the game’s 15+ classification for its glorification of Japanese militarism, alleging that the classification board had not taken the historical issues between the two nations fully into account when making its decision.

Some of us wonder whether a game with sonic dolphins and bionic war bears should be taken all that seriously.

Sony said:

“During the review process prior to the release of LittleBigPlanet, it has been brought to our attention that one of the background music tracks licensed from a record label for use in the game contains two expressions that can be found in the Qur’an,”

Because of this, all current copies of Little Big Planet have been recalled and the entire stock of the game is being remanufactured. It is unknown how long the delay will last as there is no new release date announced. However sony has assured us it will be short.

Lets hope it’s before Christmas or sony might take a big hit in the wallet.

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I’m honestly not sure what the hell they were thinking when they made this, but the corniness of this Red Alert 3 video, combined with some rather inventive editing, generates a feeling of…I don’t know what this feeling is. It’s somewhere between embarassment and absolute terror, I suppose. George Takei saying “All your base…” just seems wrong. The man is awesome enough on his own, don’t compromise his intrinsic awesomeness by forcing him to say lines that would only have been funny five or six years ago! You must have seen the second Holloween episode of Futurama! Remember that weird alien getting out of the Space Invaders’ ship and dropping that line? Several years too late, Futurama producers!

Q : Ok I’m very sure that killing/suicide stealing and anything like that is not accounted as an actual sin if it’s only in video games. But I’m still not very sure, when I play video games, I’m not murdering at heart because I would never try to take the life of any living thing. And whatever is a video game can’t die because it’s not alive in the first place, video games are a false alternate reality. Even if the people in video games were able to die, they’re not humans or animals just computer generated data or artificial intelligence. I’m pretty convinced it’s not a sin but please I just need some confirmation.

A : As normally defined, taking the life of another in video games (as in acting or in any other fantasy situation) is not a sin against God’s prohibition to murder. If, however, what is done in the video game is an expression of hatred or callous disregard for human life, then the heart and motives are wrong, and then it is sin in God’s eyes. But if this activity is pure entertainment and not an expression of lovelessness against any fellow human being, it isn’t murder.

For the record, however, obsession with video games can involve other departures from God’s will for his dearly loved and redeemed people. Typically, this can involve a colossal misuse of valuable time and also end up diverting time and attention from more useful and valuable pursuits that better glorify God and serve our neighbor. The same, of course, is true of a lot of forms of entertainment or diversions from useful labor or education (e.g., watching TV, movies, constantly listening to music but doing little other than that).

So remember! Killing in games? It’s OK, but spending time playing videogames at all constitutes a colossal misuse of your time, and that’s a sin.
Source: GamePolitics

Source: RockPaperShotgun