So, last week I finished Ninja Gaiden 2, a game that caused me a good deal of strife.  On one hand, it’s more Ninja Gaiden–with bizarre art direction, framerate and camera issues.

On the other hand, it’s More Ninja Gaiden and it has the best combat out there.  

So the question is, do I penalize the game for the framerate issues which make part of the game incredibly frustrating?  Or do I want to praise it for being an incremental upgrade to one of my top games of all time.  

This made a rental the ideal way to experience this game, and I found it fulfilling, but at the same time I would have been upset had I paid $60 for it.

It always struck me as odd that Brother’s in Arms Hell’s Highway took place during the ill fated Arnhem offensive. The last major Axis victory of WWII proved appropriate to the somber tone of Gearbox’s third entry in the Brothers franchise.

The story picks up in the middle of things, with characters already established in the first two games, and it threw out a quick previously on Brothers in Arms before the fighting begins. It had a good amount of cut scenes to tell the story of the squad’s daily life throughout operation Market Garden.

The player character, Matthew Baker, was haunted by the ghosts of those lost under his command.

This was undermined by the fact that Road to Hill 30, and Earned in Blood were released in 2005. Years later, it’s hard to remember exactly who was who and the brief callback at the beginning wasn’t enough to smooth this over.

A few technical issues haunt the player however. The game was rendered with the Unreal Engine 3 and shares some of the problems of that engine. Most notable was the bad case of texture pop-in.

Sometimes this leaves faces, maps and other odds and ends an indistinguishable blur at first glance. Furthermore the rain makes people look really weird, like they have ooze on them that’s supposed to represent wet.

That action was quite enjoyable. The return of squad command requires a good degree of mental Juggling to every firefight. Each time you encounter the enemy you have to use your squad to fight them as if they were an extension of you. It takes some time to get used to managing this but after a while you will be doing it as an old pro.

Unfortunately every so often the game throws in a solo mission that plays out a bit like Call of Duty with Cover and it’s kind of blah.

The environments look spot on once again. The last game impressed me for being such an accurate representation of places from Normandy that I could recognize the real locations from the game and I would not be surprised if not a windmill was out of place from how things look in Holland. The level of detail was very attentive feeling.

I did not really want to be bothered to play game’s multiplayer as I got it for the single player. It’s a bit short like the previous games which made it a stellar rental just to play through the campaign. It may be a bit to self-referential for someone who hasn’t played the first two games but all in all I had a lot of fun and hope they do the Battle of the Bulge sequel that seems so inevitable given the hints at the end and course of history for US Airborne.

Newsweek’s excellent level up blog ran this insightful column today which likens the cultural status of video games to that of porn. It’s a comparison I’m hesitant to admit I’ve considered from time to time.

The first thing he points out is that it’s quite possible for most people to completely avoid contact with videogames. Unless you watch a very specific set of channels and programming, sports, star trek etc. you’lll never see an ad for games, if you don’t read a similar spectrum of magazines you’ll seldom see an ad for games in print.

The author argues that you’d be no more likely to tell a woman about your game library than you would your Porn library–and probably less likely. He then places blame on the gaming community at large for defining ourselves in terms of other media. You never hear an indisputably mainstream medium like films or novels brag about themselves as they related to other media.

He also pointed out that while huge numbers of people participate in these two media, even their creators aren’t especially proud of them. One sotry he tells is of the games’ industry’s chief lobbyist being unwilling to take Lara Croft to the hill because he couldn’t show her to congress.

An iconic symbol of the early 90s Gulf War was retired recently. As a military buff who grew up around the early gulf War this was a plane that captured my imagination during the first Gulf War. I remember those early days of the Gulf War where AAA and SAMs lighting up the sky and the stealths flew into Baghad and dropped bombs without a single loss.

It’s just a plane really but it was a piece of my life and a part of why I thought the airforce was so cool for the longest time. I still have a tremendous interest in warplanes and only lost interest in serving in the airforce when i discovered that to fly a combat plane you need to have natural 20/20 vision.

What they play, a website dedicated to family gaming advice, posted this the other day; a list of how kids are going to get GTA. I found the response to it really amusing, including the standard “My dad will buy me anything” and the bizarre “The Doorman in our building is buying a stack of them and we’ll buy it from him.

Basically teenage are going to get to play the games they want to play regardless of how much effort you put into stopping them. When I was a freshman in high school my parents wouldn’t buy me the most outrageous games on my to do list. I didn’t even bother with the kind of little shit activities these kids are talking about. I just turned to my friend the search engine; in those days the internet was a lot less regulated than it is now and you could find pirated copies of games simply by putting in an Altavista search (a search engine that was popular before google). A few hours on the internet and bam I could have any game I wanted.

It always amazes me that people think that they’re really going to control what games their kids are playing. People find a way to do and see the stuff they want to without permission.

Every gamer I talk to these days has one name on their mind. Grand Theft Auto IV, it’s one of the biggest games of the year and it’s bound to be the subject of tremendous controversy. I’m certain, that some news stations are going to be running their typical anti-game screeds about how these games turn perfectly normal children into mass murderers. These are of course ridiculous over generalizations and simplifications of very difficult issues.

First off, some straight facts; each Grand Theft Auto game sold over 14 million copies.The number of criminals which attorneys have linked to these games number no more than a handful. Obviously some sort of 1:1 correlation just doesn’t exist. What’s more revealing is that through the whole Playstation revolution, where 3d games went from a relatively small nerd phenomenon to a major worldwide medium. and continuing into today the rates of violent crimes and violent crimes by young people have been on the decline.

Meanwhile the level of vioelence and the graphic fidelity of that violence has gone up exponentially. There are complicated issues with psychology that I won’t pretend to comprehend sufficently to analyze but the number of studies which have simple findings which showed some sort of light switch like relationship between media consumption and deviant behavior is zero.

I finished The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman on audio book last weekend and it took me some time to get my thoughts in order on the book. The book is a thougtful look at globalization and doesn’t veer to far towards extreme positions.

Friedman describes globalization as the process by which the world became flat, and opened up a huge new world of competition. The first of these he argues was the fall of communism, which he dates to 11/9/88, the date the Berlin wall came down (which he later contrasts 11/9 to 9/11) He then adds a list of other factors including the .com boom and bust, the laying of all the fiber optic cable for the internet, the advent of global supply chains, in sourcing, out-sourcing, off shoring etc.

Friedman argues primarily that the United States is equipped to compete in the 21st century with emerging economies from Asia and Eastern Europe but there are steps which need be taken to improve our position.
Instead of walling ourselves off his prescription is a manadate for more education and portable benefits so people can really pursue the opportunites of the new economy here at home.

I think Friedman in general is on point, manufacturing isn’t going to magically come back to America. We just don’t have the competitive advantages there. Where I think he’s somewhat underwhelming however is he doesn’t provide a very good speciffic prescription for people who are in the process of losing their jobs and some of his solutions have seemed fairly far-fetched in the current political climate. For instance his suggestion of portable benefits seems like a great idea but it also seems pie-in-the-sky as the powers that are aligned against such a scheme seems like a powerful faction.

Well, we lost a good one today, Games For Windows Magazine, was rolled up into 1up’s online coverage. The question has to be asked, is print in serious trouble long term? I mean obviously it’s not over today; it won’t be over tommorrow but is this just the vanguard of seeing more and more publications throwing a for sale sign up on their print presence.

GFW wasn’t your ordinary magazine, it was the most recent titling of a magazine that was 27 years old. In computer games magazines that’s forever. While it was founded in 1981 it’s oldest competitor was founded in 1994. After a few years of reading them, I’ll definitely be missing the glossy pages every month even if i read them online.

It could just be that PC gamers are likely to be online saavy in the first place, and so it doesn’t make sense to cater to them in a print publication, and it could just be that the zero minute nature of news just makes magazines more and more difficult, especially in this era in which everyone has a scanner, but I think it’s something more than that.

Personally I think it’s more about the changing nature of media in general. It’s just really difficult to give me a reason to want to pay for information when there is so much good information available for free. And even if you can get me to do it–GFW did by creating fantastic content that was more focused on being the last word rather than the first word, that doesn’t mean you can get as many people as you can for free.

The Wall Street Journal seems to be able to maintain a pay-for model on the net, but most other publications won’t be able to either.

Before i start working on this featured humorist, first a boiler plate disclaimer. Some of this stuff can get a bit on the blue side. I won’t highlight anything especially outrageous but if you really hate curse words or immature jokes then what’s usually thought of as funny on the internet may not be for you.

I first got turned on to Penny-Arcade when I was a senior in high school, at the time the concept of a regular webcomic was really novel. The first strip I ever read was your girlfriend, tribes and you, which a fellow nerd pointed out to me when we were supposed to be working on some homework.

Well that strip has really been for gaming and nerd-life what the op-ed page of the NY times has been for politics. Anything from comic books, table top games, video games, advertising, computers–any kind of nerd thing or personality has been on the virtual pages of Penny-Arcade.

Over the last few years they’ve moved from just being a funny web comic but they’re emerging as a brand. Several books have come out from Darkhorse Comics publishing the majority of the archives, they have a huge store full of clever shirts and merchandise, and a major conference–PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo in which thousands of nerds descend on Seattle for one of the largest public gaming shows in North America.

There I am, standing on the Dark Portal, where way back in 1994 the Orcs first poured into Azeroth in Warcraft 1. They won the first war in the original game  but two years later Warcraft 2 The Tides of Darkness came out, and in that game and that expansion the Humans with new Dwarven and Elven Allies defeated the Orcs and drove them back to the Portal.  Afterwards  the humans went through the Portal and defeated the Orcs in Draenor as well.  Six years later in Warcraft 3  we discovered the role of Daemons in the conflict and that the Orcs weren’t the true enemy but the Burning Legion.

Now this probably all sounds like a load of gobbly-guk to  someone who’s not into the backstory of the Warcraft universe.  I bring it up thought to illustrate that World of Warcraft is more than a game, it’s not monopoly, it’s a sort of alternate universe  which is filled with players.  The game has an elaborate history and backstory, which gives the game a lot of character.  As I walked up to the Dark Portal It evoked memories of going through the Portal in the Warcraft 2 expansion in 1996; as I walked through and saw the huge Daemons fighting in front of the portal it reminded me of Warcraft 3’s cinematic climax to the Orc campaign.  A lot of non-gamers probably think of video games like some sort of mindless entertainment for nerds and kids; and while it’s that too there it’s also a tool for creating worlds and stories with the player instead of to the reader/viewer.