No Zytrons In Range

Although Sonic the Hedgehog shares a name with a legendary Genesis game, I’m referring to the Xbox 360 version here. I’ve had this game for awhile and I haven’t reviewed it yet because I prefer to review games I’ve finished. (Or played thoroughly, for those games that don’t really “finish.”) And, despite having Sonic for months, I haven’t completed it because it kind of stinks. There’s a good reason: this game disappoints on almost every level.

First the overview. The Sonic games, at least the original Genesis games, are platformers that focus primarily on speed. Sonic is a blue hedgehog with the power of superspeed, and the ability to roll into a ball and kill enemies using the hedgehog spines on his back. He collects rings and, as long as he’s carrying a few, he won’t die when he gets hit. His enemy is Dr. Eggman (or Dr. Robotnik in some versions), a fat mad scientist who creates chicken-themed robots to kill Sonic.

There are three storylines in Sonic the Hedgehog, represented by the three main characters: Sonic, Silver and Shadow. In addition to those three, you’ll also play as a host of other characters. Sonic partners up with Tails and Knuckles, Silver has a cat partner named Blaze and hangs out with Amy the Hedgehog. And Shadow’s friend is a bat named Rouge. (Shadow is also “the Hedgehog,” he emphasizes that in his intro.) I have no idea where all these characters came from, but suffice it to say they all have lengthy Wikipedia entries: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Silver, Blaze, Amy, Shadow, Rouge. And I’m probably forgetting at least one. (Last time I played a Sonic game, there was only Sonic and Tails.)

The story involves copious amounts of time travel and, I’ll be frank, I have absolutely no clue what’s going on. All I’m entirely sure of is that the requisite kidnapped princess is kidnapped at least three times, and I’m not even halfway through the game. The dialog would be clunky even if the dubbing and animation in the cut-scenes weren’t poorly-paced.

And get used to watching, or at least loading, the cut-scenes: your game is saved at the beginning of them, so you have to load and skip two or three of them before you can actually play. You might as well skip them, since they really don’t have anything to do with the game. For instance, after Amy rescues the princess (for, I think, the third time?) there’s a cut-scene about them both having a crush on Sonic. I think it was supposed to be funny. In any case, as soon as the cut-scene ends, you have to save the city from Dr. Eggman’s robots. It might have been an interesting idea to, you know, show the robots coming in the cut-scene instead of jumping from one thing to another with no transition at all.

A bad story in a Sonic the Hedgehog game really isn’t that big deal and I’d be able to forgive it if the gameplay weren’t also highly flawed. Between levels, you’ll frequently be taken to a city where you can roam around and do quests to earn rings. The rings can be used to buy additional powers for the heros. This wouldn’t be a terrible game except for two things: 1) the game doesn’t have enough save points, so if you die on the next level, you have to do the boring city crap again instead of just the level, and 2) “Loading…”

I should elaborate on point 2 there. Here’s a typical play session:

1. Pick a character from the menu.
2. Pick a level from the menu.
3. Loading…
4. Watch a stupid, poorly-done cut-scene.
5. Loading…
6. Watch another stupid, poorly-done cut-scene that apparently couldn’t have been loaded with the last one.
7. Loading…
8. Enter boring city stage. Run around aimlessly because the map is useless until you find a quest to do. Watch briefing of what the quest involves. (Always very creative, like “kill the robots!”)
9. Loading…
10. Watch ANOTHER briefing of what the quest involves, with the same information as the one we just saw. (This is usually just one or two dialog boxes and takes about 4 seconds to get past, even if you do bother reading it.)
11. Loading…
12. Do the quest.
13. Loading…
14. Exceptionally long and irritating end-level score screen.
15. Loading…
16. Back to the city to wander around aimlessly again until you find the entrance to the next stage.
17. Loading…
18. Stupid, poorly-done cut-scene.
19. Loading…
20. ACTUAL GAMEPLAY! Oops, you hit a hard part of the level. Die and return to step 1.

(I’m exaggerating, but not much.)

Once you enter the actual game, the problems don’t go away. Sonic has questionable physics, to put it politely. Say there’s an accelerator that sends you up a ramp. The ramp has two rows of rings, one on the left and one on the right. If you walk onto the accelerator twice in the exact same way, you might get shot along the rings on the left, you might get shot along the rings on the right, or you might pass between the rings and miss all of them. It seems to be completely random; if you try to control where the accelerator sends you, the slightest touch of the analog stick sends you flying away off the level where you fall and die.

Beyond the questionable physics, there are outright bugs. Silver has a desert level filled with robots who enjoy embedding themselves into the ground and getting stuck. Of course the robots are impossible to kill when they’re like this, and naturally you can’t finish the level without killing all the robots. This happened to me twice in a row, and I think it was only luck that let me pass that room the third time.

The glowing question mark icons are tutorial hints. These have an annoying habit of coming late, or not at all. While playing Sonic, I found a hint that read, “use your homing attack to cross the gap.” Sage advice! Except you needed to use that technique about a dozen times to pass the previous level, so it was not needed. A tip such as, “don’t use that next accelerator, it’ll rocket you right off the level” would have been much more useful. Oh, and did you know the bat character Rouge can climb walls? I sure didn’t, and the game didn’t seem very interested in telling me. I spent a lot of time stuck on that level before I lucked into finding that skill. (I’m sure the next level will have the hint: “you can climb walls with Rouge.”

Playing Sonic is a frustrating experience. If you do manage to avoid the quirky physics, the game has an extraordinarily high “where the hell do I go now?” factor that most modern games have learned to avoid.

The graphics are actually quite good, and I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Eggman’s robot designs. Interestingly, the robots and all the humans in the game are rendered in a very realistic fashion. In fact, they could have been pulled out of this game and plopped down in Lost Planet and would not have looked out-of-place. Sonic and his friends are all about as cartoony as you can imagine, which produces kind of a strange effect when they interact with the realistic-looking city. (None of the humans comment on how freaky the cartoon characters look. They’re more tolerant than I.)

Half of the bosses are Eggman robots, and the other half are other Sonic characters you have to fight. For instance, Sonic fights Silver. Then Silver fights Sonic. (This might be the same fight from two different perspectives, but the plot is too confusing to know for sure.) Then Silver fights Shadow. Presumably, I’ll have Shadow against Silver in a few levels. The other bosses are Eggman robots. Egg-Cerebus has a dumb name, but it’s a pretty well-done boss battle.

The sound and music are fine. I have nothing really to complain about, but it also didn’t blow me away. I enjoyed that the laser sound used was the same sound effect used in Sonic 2 all those years ago on the Genesis.

I’m slightly over halfway through this game, and I’m dedicated to finishing if only to make the money I spent on the game worthwhile. Unless you’re the biggest Sonic the Hedgehog fan in the universe, I’d recommend skipping it. There are the ingredients to a good game here, but they simply don’t come together.

Holy crap this game is fun.

In the Grand Theft Auto-esque Crackdown, the capital Pacific City is under assault from gangs that have become so strong that even the police have been dissolved in their wake. All that remains is the mysterious Agency and their Peacekeepers, who don’t have the manpower or training to take down the powerful gang bosses. There is constant crime throughout the city, keeping the citizenry in a state of fear at all times.

Each district of Pacific City is in the grip of a different gang. The northern islands are under the control of the evil Shai-Gen corporation, whose leader Wang resides in the second-tallest skyscraper in the city. (The Agency headquarters on the central island is the tallest.) The eastern islands are ruled by the Volk, a gang of deserters from the Russian Army who have a large stockpile of surplus vehicles and weapons. To the southwest is Los Muertos, a gang of murderous hispanic gangsters who specialize in customizing fast cars.

To combat this threat, the mysterious Agency has genetically-engineered an agent with special evolving capabilities, which is you. In addition, they’ve provided you with specially-designed vehicles to use in his crime-fighting mission. The Agency Supercar is basically a ramp with an engine, and when you get it up to speed it’ll pass underneath any other vehicle on the road (even huge trucks) and send it flying away. It’s also by far the fastest thing on four wheels. The SUV’s tires grip so well that it will often sweep itself up over guardrails or up the side of tunnels. Meanwhile, the Truck Cab is powerful enough to instantly destroy anything it hits once it gets up to speed.

And when they say “evolving,” they aren’t kidding– the game goes far beyond the level-up system in most similar games. While you start as an average athletic and well-trained police officer, you evolve into (basically) The Incredible Hulk.

The skills are:

• Athletics, which influences your running speed, jumping height and swimming ability. At four stars (the maximum level), you’re able to jump between buildings and fall from great heights without getting hurt.
• Driving, which controls the speed and maneuverability of vehicles you pilot. The Agency vehicles become insanely fast and maneuverable at the four-star level. They also smoothly morph in appearance to suit their level, which is a very well-done visual effect.
• Strength, your physical strength which influences which objects you can lift and throw, and how much damage you do when kicking and hitting enemies. With four stars, you can pick up and throw any object in the game, even huge boulders or buses, and any physical attack is instant-death for all enemies except bosses.
• Guns, which influences the accuracy and damage done by the various guns you find in the game.
• Explosives, influencing the blast radius are power of explosives you throw. Rocket launchers and grenade launchers count as explosives in Crackdown, not guns. At the four-star level, you can explode an entire group of gangsters in a single rocket launcher shot.

The objective of the game is to locate shut down all the gang bosses in all the districts of the city. Once you find a hideout, the Peacekeepers will prepare a short briefing for you describing the gang boss and what kind of guards they have. Expect tons of bodyguards as you venture into the hideout after the boss, and bosses themselves typically are much tougher than the average criminal. When each boss in a district is defeated, you are given calculated odds of beating the leader of that district’s gang. Be careful of civilian casualties, they’ll slow down your skill advancement and the Peacekeepers will come after you.

Like most GTA-style games, Crackdown contains various races throughout the city. Rooftop races are marked with glowing green circles on the ground, and will have you jumping and falling all over the buildings to beat the clock. They reward you with agility points when you complete them before time runs out. Vehicle races are marked in purple, and reward you with driving points when completed. In addition, there are various stunt markers in the city. Driving a vehicle through a stunt marker will grant you driving points, and since most of these are very hard to accomplish, make you feel really good about yourself. (Even with a four-star driving skill, I haven’t been able to get a car through that stupid stunt marker in the shipyard yet.)

In addition, there are some scattered power-ups in Pacific City. Agility Orbs are placed on high buildings, or in other hard-to-reach places, and increase your agility when picked up. From my experience, agility orbs are pretty much the only way to level-up your agility in a decent amount of time. There are 500 agility orbs in the game. Hidden Orbs are, natch, hidden throughout the city and grant you a selection of experience points for all stats.

The graphics in Crackdown are done in a hard-to-describe graphic novel style. It’s not exactly cell-shading, but at the same time it’s not realistic in the way that Gears of War is. The game uses the processing power of the Xbox 360 to render the entire city in every frame, and while I’m sure it’s ramping down detail for far-off objects, whatever simplification it’s doing is so smooth as to be completely unnoticeable. The only slight problem I found with the graphics was how sometimes you would see cars disappear from the road as they turned from “background filler” into “vehicles you can interact with.” But all-in-all, the graphic quality is excellent.

The soundtrack consists of tracks from bands you’ve probably never heard of before, but most of the songs sound great. While driving a car, you can use the shoulder buttons switch radio stations to listen to your favorites, which is a nice touch. (The game also has a jukebox mode in the sound settings screen if you want to listen to the music uninterrupted.) Most of the songs are selected to match the district you’re in. For instance, while fighting the Los Muertos, the music selections are primarily latino. A small caption at the bottom of the screen tells you the name, artist and label of each track if you want to go out and buy it.

One of the best parts of Crackdown is the physics engine. While the physics are entirely comic-book style, the visuals on the screen always look great. Rubber tires act like rubber when they hit something, and objects fly through the air and fall realistically. Like all great action movies and video games, every car on the road appears to be loaded with a ton of TNT, and it only takes a couple of bullets into the gas tank to cause an explosion to sent it flying. You can also target a vehicle’s tires, and send it skidding out of control. The Agency vehicles seem to be specifically designed the show off the crazy physics model.

The game has a few bugs and shortcomings, of course. The tutorial becomes annoying after the tenth time you’ve heard “agent, there’s a road race nearby!” The track info shows, and the shoulder buttons work, even if you have music turned off. The Agency Supercar is almost too fast to control when fully upgraded, but maybe I’m just getting old and losing my reflexes. The end boss in Shai-Gen takes too long to get to.

Crackdown is a tremendous game that any fan of GTA-style games owes it to themselves to get. Don’t let the free Halo 3 demo download the game includes make you think that Microsoft is shoring up sales of a crappy game. This game can most definitely stand on its own. It’s hard to describe the simple joy in driving the Supercar down the freeway at 300 MPH, launching car after car in the air behind you. Or killing five gangsters at once by throwing their own car at them. Or jumping off a 60-story building to land on a 30-story building two blocks away. I’ve beat the game once, and I’m looking forward to playing through it again. Highly recommended.

Game tips:

• There is much less traffic at night, so that is the perfect time to do some of the more difficult road races. You’ll hit fewer civilian cars and get much better times.
• Hidden orbs are frequently hidden in pipes, chimneys and under bridges.
• If you don’t have an Agency vehicle, try these substitutes:
  • Supercar – use a Peacekeeper police car instead. While not as fast, it has good manueverability and survivability.
  • SUV – Use a pick-up truck, which has very good grip on dirt roads but is quite a bit slower.
  • Truck Cab – Try grabbing one of the Volk’s APCs. They’re slow, but have almost as good survivability as the agency truck cab. The Scud truck is awesome.
• The “Freeway Gauntlet” race in Volk is holy crap insane. Use the Agency Supercar, or you’ll end up totaling a dozen civilian cars trying to beat it. Only the Supercar has the hitpoints, speed, and weaving-through-traffic ability to do this one in time.
• Crackdown is entirely free-form. While generally you’ll want to beat each district in order so the difficulty ramps up, there’s nothing to stop you from doing the Volk gang bosses first while ignoring Los Muertos, or from just driving around and completing races or looking for Orbs. I spent hours playing with the car arena in the Los Muertos area, not even working towards any game goals.
• You can’t really beat the Shai-Gen end boss without four-star agility. I wasted a lot of time figuring this out.
• Sometimes it’s worthwhile to give up assaulting a hideout to return to base, grab the Truck Cab, and just road-rage your way through all their guards.

Viva Piñata by Rare takes place on appropriately-named Piñata Island, where piñatas are born and raised to be delivered to parties around the world. This delivery happens via a giant piñata cannon on a tower in the middle of the island. You are given a small plot of land, initially covered with trash and unusable soil, and a shovel with which to start your garden. The nicer your garden is, the more piñatas you’ll attract to it, and the first piñatas come right away in the form of Whirlms once you’ve loosened up some dirt and Syrupents once you’ve planted some grass.

There are many ways to improve your garden and attract piñatas. You are given a shovel and a seed packet for free at the beginning of the game. These can be used to loosen dirt and plant grass respectively. The shovel can also be initially used to smash up junk in your garden and gets upgraded during the course of the game so that eventually it can dig ponds and even cut down trees. There are many improvements available at the stores in town, as well. You can buy fencing, walkways, decorations like fountains and statues, and houses for your piñatas and workers.

There’s also a strange little man named Seedos who walks across your plot often, and talking to him will yield seeds you can plant. If you’re unsatisfied with the seeds he gives you for free, you can whack him with your shovel. This will knock seeds out of his backpack (sometimes mysterious seeds you haven’t encountered before), but he’ll get angry and come back for revenge to plant weeds in your garden.

Each piñata will choose to visit your garden based on certain criteria, related to the type of animal it is. For instance, Flutterflys like daisies, and so they won’t visit unless you’ve planted some daisies in your garden. Many piñatas will only stay if they eat one of your existing piñatas. Pretztails, for example, won’t stay unless they’re allowed to eat a mouse. (The food chain in Viva Piñata is referred to as the “donut of life.”) The Piñata Island wiki contains an extensive database of all the piñata requirements and preferences.

Early on, the tutorial teaches you how to “romance” your piñatas, “romance” being a euphemism for… well, you know, two adult piñatas making a baby piñata. Once the romance requirements have been met for each piñata, you can point them towards each other. Romancing takes the form of a simple mini-game, where you have to guide one piñata to the other, avoiding the bombs and collecting bonus coins. The romancing mini-game starts out trivial, but becomes very difficult as you attempt romance more valuable piñatas. If you’re successful, you’re treated to a cute animation of the piñatas dancing, and an egg delivered into their house.

Once you’re sufficiently leveled-up, you begin to get requests from Party Central. These requests usually take the form of sending a couple piñatas of the same kind to the party. Fulfilling the request in the time limit greatly increases the value of the piñata you send to the party, as well as rains happiness candy down on your entire garden.

Viva Piñata allows you to create new gardens with the money and experience you’ve gained from your last garden, making it easy to try a new garden design or attempt to lure different piñata species than the ones in your previous garden. (Which is important, since some piñatas do not co-exist easily.)

All-in-all, Viva Piñata is an excellent game for every member of the family. It also addresses one of the frequent complaints about the Xbox, the lack of kid-friendly games. I’ve played the game for a couple dozen hours, and I’m far away from completing the accomplishments in the game (which are far more numerous than the Xbox Live accomplishments.) If you have an Xbox 360 and get sick of killing terrorists, give Viva Piñata a try.

A recent Gamasutra article by Scott Nixon espouses the belief that the Nintendo Wii console has a good chance of resurrecting the dead adventure genre. I have a couple of questions about this premise, the first of which is, “why the Wii?” and the second and more general question, “is the adventure genre dying?”

Why will the Wii resurrect the adventure genre? The argument seems to boil down to the controller, specifically that the Wii’s controller can be used as an on-screen pointer like a mouse. This argument because it makes the assumption that adventure games cannot exist without a pointing device, which (with all due respect) is obviously bunk. The first adventure games (the original King’s Quest, for example) were designed to be played using only a keyboard and that control scheme seemed to work fine for them. (Given, most computers when that game were released didn’t have mouses attached to them, but the debate is whether mouses are required, not whether they are handy to have.) More to the point, however, there are already adventure games on Xbox and they are all quite playable without using the Xbox gamepad.

And of course if you take this premise farther, it makes even less sense. Is Nixon saying that racing games played in an arcade are a different genre from racing games played on your home console because the controls are different? Are first person shooters on consoles a different genre from first person shooters on PC? If so, what about FPS games that are direct ports? Obviously Prey on PC with a mouse/keyboard is in the same genre as Prey on Xbox 360 with a joypad. Dragon’s Lair is in the same genre whether played with an arcade joystick, a keyboard or even with your DVD player remote. Similarly, Doom 3 is the same genre of game whether it’s played with a gamepad or a keyboard/mouse. Why would an adventure game be different?

Nixon seems to be ignoring, or is unaware, that the Xbox already has several adventure games released for it, while the Nintendo Gamecube has none. Syberia II and Dreamfall both have Xbox ports. Syberia II is one of the highest-rated adventure games of the last few years, and Dreamfall is a sequel to one of the highest-rated adventure games ever, yet the writer doesn’t make the argument that Microsoft is going to resurrect the adventure genre. Why?

It’s clear that if any company is supporting adventure games, it’s Microsoft for two simple reasons: 1) The way a game is controlled has nothing to do with its genre, and 2) the Xbox has had the lion’s share of recent adventure games. So why the Wii?

Nixon states, “It is no secret that adventure games need to break into the console market to remain (some would say become) viable.” What, they aren’t there already?

I think what Nixon and other “adventure games are dying” writers are actually looking for isn’t “adventure games” but “adventure games like the ones I remember from when I was a kid.” There’s a difference between the two. The vast majority of Lucas Arts and Sierra adventure games were comedies, but most modern adventures are not. (There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but generally that applies to every adventure made after Myst.) Old adventure games made use of hand-drawn backgrounds and character animations, but most modern adventures use 3D for graphics. Old adventure games were cartoon-like and rarely dealt with more mature content, where modern adventures frequently have more adult-oriented content. Adventure games didn’t disappear, they just changed.

I think what they’re really after is nostalgia. What they want more than adventure games is, “adventure games that make me feel the way I felt in seventh grade when I guided a biker through a minefield using wind-up bunnies.”

Of course, this presumes that adventure games are dying. The adventure genre isn’t dying and I don’t think it’s even particularly unhealthy. (About a dozen adventure games are released every year.) The reason we frequently see articles about the death of the adventure genre is that the gaming press doesn’t write about adventure games. Well, they do write about adventure games, not only to declare them dead every few months. Irony.

The Longest Journey, released in 1999, is perhaps one of the finest adventure games ever made. And yet it’s virtually unknown, even amongst fans of the old Lucas Arts and Sierra adventures. Syberia received very good reviews from many gaming publications, but again, where was the buzz about it? (And what buzz there was came from the Xbox community, not the PC community.)

If the gaming press was really serious about “saving” the adventure genre, here is what they can do to help:

• Cover adventure games when they come out. Not just the obligatory review, but the same kind of coverage new FPS games get: screenshots, teaser movies, interviews with the developers, etc.
• Stop comparing new adventure games with old Lucas Arts games. That is clearly an unfair comparison. Lucas Arts has the advantage of nostalgia, and there’s nothing the new adventure games can do to combat that.
• And, naturally, stop writing articles about the death of the adventure genre! Or at least hold them back until there’s less than a dozen released a year, ok?

Gears of War takes place in a futuristic post-apocalyptic world which has been invaded by a race of burrowing aliens known as the Locust. After (presumably) getting their asses handed to them individually, various world governments band together in a Council Of Governments and create a special force to combat this threat, the eponymous Gears of War. Soldiers in this force are called Gears by the few civilians you encounter, thus the title. After bring broken out of prison, Marcus (the protagonist) and his handy robot pal join up with a squad of Gears for an action-packed day. Other characters in the squad include a once-famous football player, a blond mechanic whose name I don’t remember and am too lazy to look up, and Dom who’s basically a blank that exists only to provide a character for player two in co-op mode.

Together with your squad, you are tasked to rescue another squad engaged in a special mission to locate a mapping device which, it is hoped, can provide navigation data to the COG’s new weapon, the light-something (lancer?) bomb. When you finally find them, they are in no fighting condition, so you take on their mission yourself. Standard fare.

Being outside during the night in the post-apocolyptic setting is extremely dangerous, as the Locusts have recruited (genetically-engineered? Brought from their home planet?) killer bats which attack anything they find moving in the dark. In game terms, this means that if you step out of a pool of light you die almost instantly from attacks. This creates a few particularly challenging levels where the goal is to make a lit path to travel down while simultaneously under attack by Locust troopers using strategically-placed propane tanks. (And yes, the game is fair– the killer bats kill the Locust troops as well. So if they did genetically-engineer them, they did a particularly bad job.) The levels where you must travel through the streets at night are some of the best in the game.

There is also a vehicle level as well where you are tasked to drive an APC across a decrepit freeway to pick up the rest of your squad. The APC mounts a UV light to defend against killer bats, but it’s wussy battery can’t power both the engine and UV light at the same time. This produces an interesting situation in co-op games, as you might find yourself fighting with your partner over who gets to use the APC’s energy. It also demonstrates why we should stick with gasoline to power military vehicles.

And of course, Gears also includes the factory level and cave/mine level that seem to be required by law for every shooter made. And the moving train level, which is in about half of them.

Many of the levels include portions where your squad splits up. In single-player, you can choose which way to go and the squadmates go the other way. In co-op, each player takes a different path with one AI-controlled squadmate. These split paths sometimes allow you windows or openings through which you can assist your buddies by engaging the aliens attacking them. Or, if your buddies suck, through which you can be attacked by aliens they should have already killed.

The graphics, as you’d expect from a game intended to show off the new Unreal 3.0 engine and the new console generation, are gorgeous. The raining levels look incredible as the water flows over and reflects light from the rusted metal surfaces. I didn’t notice any clipping errors (a visual error where one object overlaps another) in the game, which is an indicator of the effort put into making the visuals impressive.

Gears of War modifies the usual shooter control scheme in favor of one that emphasizes cover in a way few games do and at the same time makes utilizing the cover simple. Left analog stick looks, and right analog stick moves. The A button is used as the general combat movement button. If held-down while in the open, A will make your soldier crouch and run. When pressed near cover, A will make your soldier dive behind the cover. From this position, you can fire blindly by pressing the right trigger, or peek out of cover to aim by pressing the left trigger. B is used to make melee attacks. With the most common automatic weapon, the B button activates the chainsaw. The X button is used to open doors, activate machinery, or pick up weapons or ammo, and the Y button will move your camera and zoom in to points of interest. If there is no point of interest where you are, Y will aim your camera towards your squadmate.

The right shoulder button is used to reload your weapon in the game. Gears has an interesting reloading system which can almost be considered a mini-game. Underneath each weapon is a dark bar with a lighter grey section, and a smaller white bar. When you tap the right shoulder button to begin the reload, an indicator begins moving across the bar. If you tap the shoulder button again while the indicator is over the lighter grey area, your reload will go flawlessly. If you tap the shoulder button while the indicator is over the white area, your reload will go flawlessly and the bullets you put into the weapon will do more damage to your enemies. If you press the shoulder button too early, you’ll fumble the reload and have to spend a few seconds unjamming your gun before using it again. This is especially devastating for the sniper weapons, as they already take a long time to load. Lastly, if you don’t press the shoulder button again at all, you perform a normal reload. The controls are easy to grasp with a few minutes training.

Bugs! The first release of Gears of War is pretty buggy, especially in co-op multiplayer mode. You’ll encounter situations where you are dead and alive at the same time, creating a comical breakdancing-like situation where you can turn your body, but not get up or move. There are some places where, if the two co-op players aren’t close enough together, a door will close behind the first and permanently separate them. I’m told that multiplayer has many game-ruining bugs in it as well, including one that lets you combat-run while shooting at the same time, but I haven’t played multiplayer myself to experience those.

That said, the single player, at least during my play, was bug-free and Microsoft seems intent on patching all the bugs as quickly as they can.

In summary, Gears of War is a great shooter marred only by some bugs during co-op gameplay. If you have an Xbox 360, you owe it to yourself to pick this game up. The amazing graphics should become the gold standard in short order as the Unreal 3.0 engine spreads to other game titles, and it will because Gears is a great introduction for it.

(Full disclosure: While working for Volt at Microsoft, I performed multiplayer testing on this title)

The story of Lost Planet is basically cliche #16, cliche #21 and cliche #47. That is to say, you are a specially enhanced soldier (#16) fighting to gain revenge for your father’s death (#21) against an evil corporation (#47). In addition to this, you are betrayed by a confidant (#3), also are the only survivor of a fight (#9), and have an incomplete memory of your own past (#11), on a planet where factions battle to control a powerful new energy source (#14). I haven’t yet finished the game, but I’m willing to wager cash that the chick wearing Clint Eastwood’s wardrobe from “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly) you battle will later turn out to be an ally. Which would be #25.

Ok, the numbers are made-up. The point is that either the writer of Lost Planet has never, ever seen any TV show or movie before and therefore thinks the script is brilliant, or that the script was written in about five minutes. Considering the plot holes, I’m liable to think the latter was more likely.

For instance, why is Wayne, the hero, so concerned about NEVEC killing all the snow pirates when he himself, not two missions before, had slaughtered dozens of snow pirates merely to steal their “trailer?” (A “trailer” is some kind of weird Japanese translation for “mobile command center,” but I’m only guessing since they talk about it having an engine of some sort but they never show an exterior shot of it.) And why is his name “Wayne”?

If Yuri has such a terrible reputation as an evil mad scientist, why doesn’t the brother-and-sister team that work with him (whose names I don’t remember and I don’t feel like looking up) know about it? Especially since he doesn’t even use a fake name!

How did they manage to build all these cities and, apparently, an automotive industry without ever realizing the planet was inhabited with giant heat-sucking bugs? Were the bugs hibernating for 50 years or something?

Oh, I also have a complaint that’s not story-related: The controls kind of suck. I don’t know why they couldn’t have used the standard-issue Halo controls that most console FPS games use, but it took me a long time to learn how to zoom the damned rifle (up arrow on D-pad). And they use very easy-to-press buttons for controls I almost never use. (Right shoulder and Left shoulder will quickly turn you 90 degrees. But the camera is fast enough that you never really need to use these, so I don’t get why they don’t use these buttons for reloading or something else used more often.)

Or maybe I’m just griping because I’ve reached the point in the game where you have to kill Green Eye, the giant bug boss who killed your daddy in the opening tutorial level. And you can’t get out of your mech because it’s too cold outside (apparently; even though you’re indoors.) And you have a time limit because there’s only enough energy to run your mech for a few minutes before it runs out of power and you die anyway.

So here’s what I like about the game. The ice-bound planet setting with frozen cities and vast snowy wastelands is great, and actually pretty vast– there are levels where a vehicle is required. The boss bugs are generally very well designed, cool-looking and (unlike bosses in a lot of other games) actually threatening. The wasp-guy killed me three times before I realized there was a third mech you could jump into after he destroyed your first two. The Batman-esque grappling hook you carry around is a lot of fun to use, and there’s a lot of destructibility in the environment.

In addition, the mechs are all really fun to pilot and well-designed, especially the one that can turn into a snowmobile. And the weapon system is great… there are hand-held weapons and mech-mounted weapons. You can carry the mech-mounted weapons, and even fire some of them, but you have to drop your other weapon first and you move real slow with them. The cool thing is that if you want your mech to have dual-chain guns, you can just pull a chain gun off another mech, drop it on the ground, then grab your mech, walk over it, and pick it up.

So all in all, Lost Planet is a pretty good game with a really lame story. Which is pretty much par for the course for most console FPS games. Hell, most FPS games period. But it still upsets me because, of all the low-hanging fruit, the story is the lowest hanging and it still hasn’t been plucked. Sad, really.

Oh, and make sure when you’re fighting bosses, to always hit the glowing yellow weak point (#38)!