No Zytrons In Range

Another one of those things that I have a love-hate relationship with is World of Warcraft. The good news is that Blizzard actually makes an effort at Vista compatibility. (Unlike, for example, Valve who doesn’t even try.) The bad news is that Blizzard has no fucking clue how to actually make their product compatible with Vista.

WOW was built with the assumption that it would be able to read and write files from the Program Files folder at will. This assumption was wrong when it was built, and it’s especially wrong now that Vista is out. Windows 2000, BTW, has the exact same limitations for regular users as Vista does for administrative users, so it’s not as if this is new or anything. WOW has simply always been broken on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.

The solution before was always just “well, run as administrator.” To this I reply: screw you. I’m sick of video games, which pretty much by definition never do any administrative tasks, relying on administrator permissions. WOW does nothing but shove tons of data through the Internet, both directions. With administrator permissions, that means WOW can, at the instruction of some random Internet server, completely fuck with any file on my system. The same applies to any other Internet-aware video game, and I’m sick of it.

Security aside, using the wrong folders also breaks the multi-user model of Windows. It’s impossible for WOW to have different settings for different computer users, because they only have one copy of the settings file. It’s also impossible for different users to run different sets of Add-Ins, because there’s only one folder that Add-Ins can be put in.

Game developers: Windows 98 was a long, long time ago. Please spend a few seconds to learn how NT permissions work before releasing a game to the unsuspecting public! You’re doing nothing but adding security holes to people’s computers and breaking OS built-in multi-user features. Stop it.

So back to WOW. WOW decides to store its configuration data in a “WTF” folder (no kidding, Blizzard!) inside its Program Files folder. This is wrong; that data should be stored in “Users/[User]/AppData”. Additionally, Blizzard puts interface add-ins in the Program Files folder. This is wrong; that data should be somewhere like “Users/[User]/WOW Add-Ins”. (For those reading closely, in this paragraph I’ve just outlined exactly what changes Blizzard needs to make for full Vista compatibility.)

Obviously Blizzard knew their way was wrong, because they tried to fix it. How? In the most half-assed way possible, of course.

Blizzard moved their entire install to “Users/Public” (or presumably “Users/All Users” in XP.)

That user account is supposed to be used for files you want to share among all users on a computer, for instance, custom desktop backgrounds or maybe a music library. (You’ll note that’s where Vista puts all its sample media, so all users can access it.) It’s not intended for programs. In fact, nothing in the “Users” folder is intended for programs! Wrong, wrong, wrong!

And even worse, apparently Blizzard didn’t even bother to test if this would fix their issues. It doesn’t, it makes them worse! The problem they were trying to fix their auto-updater getting blocked by UAC prompts, what they ended up with is a situation where WOW is silently prevented from saving its own configuration files, and so it appears to be working just fine, except every time you log out, WOW forgets everything it ever knew. This includes making you agree to the EULAs over and over and over again.

Are you trying to tell me that nobody at World of Warcraft knows how NT permissions work? A 15-year-old system? At least Valve can use the excuse that they don’t even bother to try.

Blizzard, you’ve really earned this:

P.S. And whenever you see issues like this and look into the forums, people are always blaming Vista. As if Microsoft did something wrong by making their OS more secure. It’s almost enough to get me to break out that crazy pills image again.

I’ve owned Dark Messiah of Might and Magic for awhile, buying it from a GoGamer.com 72 hour sale for dirt cheap. It’s definitely reinforced my recent decision to always prefer the Xbox 360 version over the PC version.

Why? Well, I started installing Dark Messiah about a half-hour ago, and while I’m typing this it’s still installing:

• Put in the DVD. If I had the Xbox 360 version of this game, I’d actually be done by now. But since this is a PC, there’s an installer involved.
• It asks me which various pieces of shit software I want to install along with it; I know the actual answer is “probably none,” but since I don’t know what exactly “PlayLinc” is, and whether it’s required by the game or not, I make the stupid decision to install it anyway.
• Now there’s about 15 solid minutes of just copying files from the DVD to my HD. It’s funny, because I happen to know the Xbox 360 port of this game is identical to the PC version. My PC, hardware-wise, is actually superior to the Xbox 360 in every possible way– it’s faster, both CPU and GPU, it has more disk space, it even has a faster DVD drive. Yet the Xbox 360 version spends approximately 15 seconds installing, maybe 30 if Live has to patch it.
• The main installer, even though it’s not all the way finished, starts up the PlayLinc installer. Neither of these installers actually tell me what he hell PlayLinc is, or why I would want it. But, oh well, I made my bed and I might as well lie in it. I hit go. Because I’m dumb.
• PlayLinc’s installer triggers a really, really nasty “this program is doing something very bad and you should not let it” dialog from Vista. Basically, it’s trying to install a low-level driver for some reason, with no security certificate. (That means that, for all Vista knows, this driver was developed specifically as a rootkit or a virus.) I deny permission. But wait, why did I see this dialog at all? (Well, to be fair, Dark Messiah’s software requirements say “XP only,” probably specifically because they knew they wouldn’t be able to sneak their crapware driver past Vista.) What does the driver do? I dunno; at no point did PlayLinc even tell me what it did, much less the driver it attempts to sneak past me.
• Now Steam becomes aware of the game, and asks me to enter a long and complicated serial key. It’s 25 characters long, and printed in a font that makes it impossible to tell whether characters are I or 1. (They’re I. I found this through trial and error, of course, meaning I had to type this code in twice.) Xbox games don’t have serial keys; you put the disk in, you play. You want multiplayer? It just works, no serial key at all. You want Xbox Live to give you patches? No serial key needed.
• We’re about a half-hour into the process now, and just before the point where I started typing this rant. Steam gave me this lovely dialog:
  

  It’s looked like that for the 5 minutes it took me to decide to type this post, the time it took me to type all the previous bulletpoints, the time it took me to take a screenshot of the dialog and uploaded it into WordPress. It still looks like that. The progress bar hasn’t moved one single percent! Of course, it is doing something– it’s totally pegged one of my CPU cores to 100% and it’s thrashing my drive like crazy. Since the first installer knew I had Steam already, why isn’t the game already installed “into” Steam? Whatever that even means.

So it’s now been 45 minutes and change, and I’m still not playing Dark Messiah. I’m not even looking at the first cinematic. If I had the Xbox 360 version instead of the PC version, I’d be on level 5 by now. If this were Portal instead of Dark Messiah, I’d be done playing by now!

PC games need to be installed, even though the Xbox 360′s inferior hardware can play the exact same games with no installation.

PC games need serial keys entered to play online and patch themselves, even though Xbox 360 games with online play require no serial keys.

PC games that rely on Steam suck ass, because Steam sucks ass. Xbox Live has no such ass-sucking problem.

PC games frequently install hacks and nasty crap onto my PC. Things like seedy and unnecessary device drivers, or low-level hacks like PunkBuster. Ask yourself why any video game requires Administrative permissions to run. Xbox 360 does not have these problems, I don’t worry at all that playing a particular Xbox game will make my 360 software unstable or slow it down.

When are PC gamers going to get sick of this bullshit and demand higher quality products? There’s no technical reason the PC can’t do every single thing the Xbox 360 is doing, PC game developers just don’t care. At all.

I’ve now had plenty of time to finish this post, add links, edit it, format it, preview it several times. And that Steam progress bar hasn’t advanced a single pixel.

Update: Since Steam is still installing (15 minutes after publishing this post originally) I actually looked up PlayLinc on Wikipedia:

Playlinc was a game browsing and messaging platform that enabled multi-player game play, voice chat and game management. Playlinc is no longer in existence.

Ah, so the random crap I just installed on my computer apparently is “no longer in existence.” Oh how I wish that were true.

Update 2: It’s now 4 hours later. Steam never finished after two hours, so I gave up on it and uninstalled the whole shebang with the intention of starting the entire install over again. In the process, though, I learned that once I plugged the serial key into Steam it is actually capable of downloading the game from its own servers, apparently. So I got the download started, and now it’s at 70%. Whee.

(Make sure you un-mute it to get the whole experience.)

For the un-Flashed, this is a video game currently featured on the John McCain homepage called Pork Invaders.

It’s a pretty faithful clone of Space Invaders, with the following exceptions:

• The iconic invader spaceships are replaced by little pigs. Which is actually more like pre-pork than pork. Or maybe it’s pork chops shaped to look like little pigs, that would add a much-appreciated nuance to the game world. Oh, by the way, there are three levels of pigs, just like the three levels of invaders in the original, and they’re worth different point amounts like in the original, but in this game they all look identical.
• The red UFO has changed into a barrel. Of pork. A “pork barrel,” as it were.
• Shooting pigs and pig-derived meats will earn (or save, presumably) tax dollars. The pork barrels are still worth ??? points. Unlike the original, your points are measured in millions now. (It says so right on the game screen.)
• The bullet fired by your tank is turned into the word “veto.” You can still only fire one bullet/veto, at a time, though.
• Your tank isn’t actually a tank, but instead is a generic-looking McCain logo. When it explodes, it looks identical to the explosion in the original Space Invaders game which is really jarring and weird.
• At the end of each round, you’re presented with a cool factoid about how much John McCain hates pork.

I don’t even know what to think about this. It’s so retro, it could possibly be cool. But is it retro because McCain’s website is run by some hipster 20-year-old with an ironic t-shirt, or is it retro because McCain called somebody into his office and said something like, “those kids like playing the Space Invaders, don’t they? Why don’t we make a Space Invaders game for them?” Sadly, I think the latter is more likely.

The concept of the game aside, though, the execution is pretty lazy. Why are do all three invaders look identical? Is the McCain logo really the best thing they could find to represent a tank? And how come they didn’t bother to change the explosion when it got hit into something more appropriate? If you made this game, or know the person who made this game, put me in contact with them, because I have a lot of issues.

Oh well, I’m looking forward to seeing what the McCain campaign turns Frogger into.

Two of the people I know actually read this blog on a regular basis are aware that I play World of Warcraft. And one of them requested I write about getting Epic Flight form, so here we go.

My main character is a druid, which is great because they’re about the craziest and most flexible character classes in the game. They can be DPS casters with a (Moonkin), they can be healing casters (Tree), they can be DPS melee (Cat), or they can be DSP tanking (Bear/Dire Bear.) In Moonkin and Tree forms (and non-shifted, of course) they have mana and spells. In Cat form, they have Energy like a rogue. In Bear form, they have Rage like a warrior. So druids are really like Mages, Priests, Rogues and Warriors in one class. And the really amazing part is that they’re good at it! Druids specced and equipped for healing can give Paladins or Priests a run for their money. Druids specced and equipped for tanking are practically as good as Protection-specced warriors. Druids specced and equipped for cat-form or DPS casting… well, they’re just ok.

In addition to the above listed shapeshifts, Druids have a bunch of others that are handy in other situations. There’s one that allows you to run at almost-mount speeds (Travel), one that lets you breathe underwater and swim 50% faster (Aquatic), and of course in the Outlands there’s a form to fly (Flight.) This comes to why I’m writing this extremely geeky blog post.

Normal non-Druid characters have to ride a flying mount, but Druids actually transform into a flying mount. This has several advantages:

• There’s no “cast time,” so you can switch to Flight form any time you’re not in combat. This is extremely handy when you accidentally step off a cliff that’s just a little bit too tall: Druids can switch form in mid-air and “catch” themselves.
• Since Druids become the bird, instead of riding the bird, they can still perform all the regular Druid things. For instance, Sacora can skin animals as a little bird. (I guess the bird holds the knife in its beak?) Also, she can harvest herbs. (Maybe the bird does it with its little claws? I dunno.) While doing these, the Druid doesn’t need to shift out of bird form, so when you’re done harvesting or skinning you can just fly away.
• When upgraded, Flight form is the fastest thing in the game. (More on this below.)

Sacora, my Druid, has Herbalism as a profession, which means I spend a decent amount of time driving her to herbs in the game to harvest them and sell for gold. The faster you can move in the game, the more herbs you can collect and the more gold you can earn. Now, druids already have an advantage in that they can harvest herbs without shifting out of Flight, but to really get the herbing going, you need to buy the fast flying mount skill.

It costs 5000 gold.

After several months of saving (then giving up on saving and spending, then saving again) and one large loan, I finally had enough gold to purchase the fast flying mount skill and a gryphon mount to go with it. Now we’re in business: with this skill and a fast flying mount, you actually move the same speed or faster than the game’s taxis. (Whether it’s faster or not depends on the specific route, but it’s always at least the same speed.)
This isn’t the ultimate, though. Druids have a Flight form, but they also have an Epic Flight form. With this you get all the speed of the fast flying mounts, plus a 10% speed bonus, plus all of the abilities that come with the normal Flight form. Including the herb harvesting ability. Cool.

The quest chain for this requires that you’ve first purchased the fast flying mount skill. It begins with a Druid trainer in Moonglade, as so many Druid-related quests do. (Just in case Druids weren’t cool enough before, they also have their own area on the map which is nothing but Druid-related quests and services.) So I head there and start questing on the Epic Flight form chain. With my friend’s help, we slam through about half the quests one evening, and I start on the rest in the morning. I do two or three myself, and then recruit some guildies to help with the last few more difficult bosses. Everything’s going good, and I’m actually having a lot of fun playing WOW for the first time in a long while.

Then I come to the last quest. This quest involves going into a dungeon set to Heroic difficulty, summoning a boss, and then killing him. You get Epic Flight form, and the rest of the party gets the miniscule chance (less than 2%) of finding, then bickering over, one of the rarest and coolest-looking mounts in the game. The problem is that to enter the Heroic dungeon, you first have to have the key for it. And to get the key, you first need to build up rep with the faction that holds it. And thusly the questing comes to a dead stop.

That last quest entry might as well have read, “spend five or six hours killing Arakkoa for feathers, turning them in groups of 30 for rep. Try not to die from boredom.” Sure, there are other ways to get rep, but I’d already done all of the quests for this faction so that wasn’t an option, and doing dungeon runs with a group of random people in the game is never any fun and probably would have taken longer to boot.

Listen to me, Blizzard: Video games are supposed to be fun. Grinding for rep is not fun.

So that put a damper on the incredibly fast pace we had been completing this long quest chain up to the point. And of course, I learned my lesson that if I’m having a lot of fun playing WOW, it’s probably only because I haven’t gotten to the part in whatever it is I’m doing where it becomes an utter snore-fest. But the good news is that we managed to get in the dungeon with a mostly-guild group, we managed to down the boss and get me my Epic Flying form (and the super-rare mount didn’t drop), and I added a couple new people to my friends list, including another Druid who actually knows a hell of a lot more about playing the class than I do. So it all turned out alright.

And now Sacora’s got purple feathers, some earrings or something, and I’m faster than anything else in the game. Rock.

P.S. I apologize for writing 1100+ words about WOW. I can’t guarantee it won’t happen again. Also, yes, I apparently do requests.

Recently in World of Warcraft, I managed to complete the quest and get my level 70 druid Sacora to the Ogri’la faction area. (I know; I’m slow. Leave me alone.) One of the daily quests in this area is named “The Relic’s Emanation.” To complete it, you must kill a guard or two, then feed a crystal into a machine and play a mini-game. Once you’ve reached level 7 of the mini-game, you gain the Apexis Emanation and the quest is complete.

The mini-game is Simon.

That’s right; you have four colored tiles that are triggered in sequence and you must repeat back the sequence. They are Red, Blue, Yellow and Green and each one plays a unique musical tone. Simon. The loveable game everyone had in the 80s:

So I put down WOW and pick up a new game I just bought: Bioshock. Working through the tutorial level, I get to the part about hacking turrets, security robots, and cameras. To successfully hack a machine, you must complete a mini-game. Guess which one?

Pipe dream.

That’s right. The quintessential pipe-clearing game I played in 1990 on my green-screened Gameboy, that’s the mini-game you have to complete. Pipe Dream:

What’s the deal? Has the world run out of games? Or is Blizzard and 2K not very creative? And did they really think that people wouldn’t remember Simon or Pipe Dream?

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)