Atomic Nerds

So, Stingray’s credit card accumulates points with use, which may be redeemed for various and sundry consumer goods, a factoid we had all but entirely forgotten until recently. The card now has a lot of points, which may be redeemed for various semi high ticket items basically for free. Currently getting our attention are the bundle packs for the two current-generation video game consoles we don’t have, which we don’t have because the X-Box 360 pretty much fills our console desires. Nonetheless, either would go nicely replacing their previous-generation counterparts on the entertainment center shelves if, as is the case, the cost is essentially free. (Plus games, but the budget for games remains more or less constant regardless of which system they’re being bought for. It would merely expand our options.) Over time we’ll probably take both deals since using points for either would leave lots left over with the backlog we have now, we’re just debating which to do first.

Pros for the Nintendo Wii: Unique gameplay. A few available titles one or the other of us would really like to play but which weren’t worth getting a Wii just to play. Lower cost in points that would allow us to pick up something else sooner. LabRat is an old-school Nintendo gamer and this is where most of their mainstay series get their updates.

Cons: Unique gameplay doesn’t mean gameplay that works well. The worst reputation for high-quality titles and developers of the three. No extra features, just a game console. Limited appealing games outside of the series mainstays. There’s a reason we don’t have one already, as all of Nintendo’s best creative efforts seem to be reflected in the DS these days.

Pros for the Playstation 3: Most badass graphics engine of current-generation consoles. Also functions as a Bu-Ray player. May offer an alternative/better media management interface over the X-Box 360 for managing our NAS box content. Best reputation next to X-Box 360 for attracting good games/developers, bigger library of titles that at least look potentially interesting.

Cons: No titles either of us is really lusting to play. Neither of us had exactly perceived a Blu-Ray shaped hole in our lives before. Gameplay > graphics for us both, so a dubious bonus if the game stable doesn’t live up. Media management interface may simply be a larger, alternative pain in the ass. Larger point cost.

Yes, yes, we know, our childless yuppie existence is clearly full of profound hardships and excruciating decisions. Other than that, any thoughts?

Geek Mind
Via Popehat we present a game that has sucked up way more of my Friday than it should have. And way more “Oh god damn it, what the hell was the name of that?” moments than I’d care to admit. See a screenshot of a game, name the title. Simple as that.

Oh, and for a free hint if you get Dr. Mario, it makes you spell out “Doctor.”

Not what I originally planned to post either today or yesterday, but I’m still running under some time constraints, so you’ll get your cloning, cross-species-screwing lizards another day.

So, lately the company that runs the world’s most popular online multiplayer computer game, Blizzard, has caused a stir large enough to be noticed outside the gaming world by announcing that from the next expansion forward, in order to post on their official forums, you must do so under your full name as connected to your account. Their stated logic is that this will reduce trolling and other incivil behavior by removing the “veil of anonymity”. I tend to suspect that their actual logic is related to some sort of undisclosed marketing contract or a plan to turn the Blizzard network of games into some kind of Facebook-like social networking system, but this is somewhat beside the point. If you follow the linked story, it regards a Blizzard employee who posted his own full name on the forum in which the player rage was in full tilt in order to prove that everyone was just being silly- and was rewarded for his hubris by having his telephone numbers, address, and pictures of his face being subsequently tracked down and posted within the space of five minutes. Blizzard is now sending a rather thoroughly mixed message as to whether the real-name policy will be suspended for employees, though they haven’t backed down on requiring it for players.

Chastity, a Warcraft blogger, has a rather good post up about why people are upset about this and why it’s not just wrongheaded of Blizzard but the logic itself is rather flawed. The gist of his post is that names aren’t neutral- posting under your real name doesn’t just put your personal details at risk, which few random people will be interested in, it also advertises your gender and ethnicity. This is all well and good if your name is Michael Jones, but it has a fairly major potential impact on how other people interact with you if your name is Juanita Ramirez or Mohammed Sri’vastra or Lashawn King. Assholes who enjoy being assholes will do so even without the cover of anonymity- especially if they are called something like Michael Smith which is effectively nearly as good as anonymity- and giving out extra details even implicitly often changes the character of their assholery and potentially makes targets out of those who otherwise would not have been.

Less specifically, it’s often pointed out that privacy is largely an illusion in today’s world. Up to a point this is true; anyone with a serious desire to know who either of us are can, and anyone who DOES know my real name can come up with a frightening number of personal details with very little relative effort and no laws broken. This is all true, but it is also not the point; whether true privacy is achievable is very nearly irrelevant to those of us who value the “privacy lite” of not using our real names in public forums.

Lots of bloggers blog under their given names. Stingray and I don’t. In part this is because we’ve been using these handles on the internet for so long (I think at least a decade in my case) that our real names are actually far less relevant as identifiers in the community we’re concerned with. When we went to the NRA con in Phoenix as bloggers, when we went to get our credentials the representative stared at us blankly when we tried to use our given names and only handed them over when we identified ourselves as LabRat and Stingray. Likewise, when we went to Blogorado, we got blank stares when we introduced ourselves by those names- they weren’t who we were, at least not to bloggers.

We are not really all that concerned with staying truly anonymous; not only are we aware that’s nearly impossible, we don’t really try that hard. Lots of readers have those names now, because we are fairly free with sending e-mails under those names. As to personal details, a lot of them are posted here- not enough to, say, identify Stingray’s direct employer or locate our street address, but we are not that difficult to find. We don’t mind. Most of the world is friendly or neutral, and we are equipped to deal with the bits that aren’t.

What we, and most especially I, are concerned with is remaining a very limited search string using those names. My own first and last name are uncommon enough individually that in combination, any search of me is certain to find ME and not thirty thousand other Americans that share my name; while I haven’t written anything I’d be truly concerned about having a potential employer or law enforcement official read, I’d rather stay without the entire body of my opinions, hobbies, and politics a Google string away. Part of that is just a general desire not to have the entire story of my life readily connectable to me via that method, but another part of it is real concern- I have at least one psycho in my life with a great deal of tenacity and deeply obsessive tendencies, and while this person could never find anything on me on the internet to do anything more serious with than harass me, I have been quite harassed enough and I’d rather not hand this person any potential further tools to do so whatsoever, even if it doesn’t really look like a tool- and harassment itself is a bad enough experience that I don’t think I’m irrational for wishing to avoid it.

And that’s really the crux of it. As Chastity observed of the comment wars in the Warcraft case,

And of course the comments at WoW.com are the predictable mix:

10% – People saying “this is a problem”
80% – Men saying “My Name is John Smith SEE YOU ARE ALL BEING STUPID”
5% – Women saying “Umm, actually guys it’s more complicated than that”
1% – Women saying “My Name is Jane Smith and I REFUSE TO BE A VICTIM and IF SOMEBODY STALKS ME I WILL SHOOT THEM WITH MY GUN”
4% – Men saying “See! Because that one woman said it was okay that means it is totally okay!”

Whether in the case of my own pet psycho or a totally new psycho that decided to make a hobby out of stalking or harassing, I could, in fact, shoot them with any one of my guns. I’m not afraid of humiliation, or legal liability, or even death, as remote a possibility of anyone taking a sufficiently homicidal interest in me would be. It’s that my entire philosophy of having guns meant for self-defense rather than making meals out of wildlife, and seatbelts in my car for that matter, revolves around minimizing the possibility of ever having to use them. I don’t WANT to shoot anyone with any of my guns, I don’t want to test my emergency driving skills, and on a much smaller and less consequential level I don’t even want to have a chat with some random person who went to high school with me on my tank gearing philosophy in one of my video games- and this does not make me a coward or a hysteric.

ETA: You’d think being one author of a blog that has two would make me more alert to who posts what at other such blogs… you’d be wrong. Fixed.

…And started a Warcrack blog.

Over the last couple of months blogging and producing what I consider acceptable content has gotten harder and harder, and I’m looking to put some of the fun back into it for me. My HOPE is that doing so will lead to the tap for Atomic Nerds content being a little easier to turn on, but at the very least I’ll be completely enjoying myself more often rather than working for a perceived obligation to my readers. I write about every single other hobby I have, so the only reason not to do so in terms of gaming is that what I’m talking about is a foreign language to anyone who doesn’t play themselves. Crossover interest is also likely to be low between this audience and the one a Warcraft blog would have, so solution: throw together a WordPress blog that lives off by itself. That way that stuff stays strictly where people who actually are interested are.

I don’t intend to let this site suffer if I can possibly, humanly avoid it, so we’ll see how this works out. If I think Atomic Nerds IS suffering, I’ll kill the other blog. More likely it will remain a niche side project in the lines of The Arms Room or Retrotechnologist.

For the Warcrack players and people who for some bizarre reason read anything: Paladin Pants

So yeah, I’m… really epically short of things to say. I have a longer post in my mental queue that’s still going through the tumbler, so to speak, but it ain’t happening tonight. I’ve been thrashing every blog and news service I have and didn’t come up with a damn thing I had anything to say about other than “heh”, “damn!”, “oh snap” or something similarly Twitteresque about. So instead I go into gaming nerd mode and see if the readerbase can serve me instead of the other way round. I am well aware the following paragraph will be incomprehensible to 95% of the audience and I apologize for that.

Warcraft-wise, our guild went through a big breakup last fall, with most of our core raiding team either leaving for other guilds or other servers altogether after it became apparent that some people wanted to be hardcore and some still viewed raiding as an occasion to get together with buddies and beer and down some bosses. (We’re in the bosses-and-beer contingent, as is everyone else who remained.) For awhile we couldn’t raid, then we put more effort into recruiting and at least got enough people to start doing 10-mans again, and I somehow managed to end up as main tank.

It has become apparent to me that I am in need of a gaming mouse. While people with better motor skills than I have seem to be just fine with simultaneously moving using the wasdqe system and using ability keybinds with that same hand, I have tiny hands and I can’t seem to handle moving using a combination of the mouse and keyboard; I do certain things with my left hand, and certain others with my right hand, and trying to make the twain meet is causing me to only survive certain fights due to the raid outgearing the encounter. I want a mouse with enough buttons to keybind strafing and moving backward so the right hand is always the movement hand. My current mouse has two “extra” buttons, but they are currently assigned to autorun, which falls under the “movement” subset, and push-to-talk for Ventrilo, which needs to be on a mouse button because otherwise I can’t talk and tank at the same time*. I am aware there is an official Warcraft gaming mouse, but I’m dubious about it; the thing looks way too huge for my little elf-hands and while I want more buttons, I’m not sure I want another keyboard’s worth of them.

I was looking at the Razer Naga as an option. Thoughts? Suggestions? Flames are pointless; I do indeed have the self-awareness to know just how deep into the nerd category buying a gaming mouse takes me, but if I had shame about it I wouldn’t be announcing it to the world in the first place.

*And it NEEDS to be push-to-talk. Otherwise the whole group gets my constant muttered litany of “where the hell is it is there anything going for the healer oh my god wait for two seconds and let me get aggro fucking threatwhore mages NO DON’T STUN IT fucking kitefight oh god bubble her” etc.

When I was a relatively young kid, and I don’t remember at one point, I watched once a very weird but to-me compelling little sci-fi/fantasy cartoon when I happened to catch it on TV. It leaped out at me just because of how *different* it was from the eighties crap factory that was normal fare; even when you’re under ten you have some sense of what’s just like everything else on TV (and in that particular era, it was cookie-cutter variations of a particularly pernicious theme. It was set in a prehistoric era, the characters were talking cats and their nemeses were talking saber-toothed cats, it was weird, and to my mind it was wonderful. And I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was called after I saw it the once. Some years later while bored and hanging out in a library while on vacation, I happened by chance across the book it had been based on; it was even weirder and more wonderful, being specifically set with Miocene-era predators that I recognized from what I knew about mammals of that era, and in retrospect it had some pretty advanced and challenging themes (to then adolescent me) on the nature of intelligence and identity, as well as morality, as the nature of the “good” and “bad” characters was far greyer than I was used to. It also had the weirdest sex scene I had ever read. And once again I promptly forgot the title and the author but not how much I had liked it.

Thanks to the randomosity of the internet- and truly, it is random, for I already can’t remember how I got there- I found it again. The author is Clare Bell, and it’s the Ratha and the Named series. I’m going to order at least the first one; it may not be as good as I remember, but at the very least I can read it again, finally.

Totally unrelated to books or anything nostalgic for me, thank God, have a look at possibly the most disturbing video game series ever created. It’s one thing to have your game be blatantly sexual, and not heterosexual either, but it’s quite another to have one of your characters be a giant naked guy riding in half a planet. Only the Japanese can combine sexuality and sheer weirdness quite like this.

Lately everybody and their brother with a grant looking to make a name for themselves in psych or anthropology (or even economics seems to be trying to get paid to play games get into the heads of people who play MMORPGs. As phenomenon it’s only really sprung up and become anything other than a dank and mold-infested little subcorner of the gamer world for about the last five years, and has only existed outside of MUDs and similar text-based environments for about ten. So it’s not surprising that people are looking to jump in and investigate the kinds of dynamics and psychology you get inside a virtual world where identity is at least partially created, but there’s a small problem dogging a number of them: they’re done entirely by people who have not only never played an MMORPG, let alone a MUD or MUCK, but by people who have played few, if any, video games at all. Some researchers are addressing the problem in a straightforward manner by actually trying to do what the objects of their speculation do, and others… not so much.

So here’s an article from New Scientist that starts out with an interesting enough premise: image the brains of people who play games with an online avatar (in this case Warcraft again), and see what goes on in their heads when they’re thinking about their online persona: How Your Brain Sees The Virtual You

Brain scans of avid players of the hugely popular online fantasy world World of Warcraft reveal that areas of the brain involved in self-reflection and judgement seem to behave similarly when someone is thinking about their virtual self as when they think about their real one.

Gosh, really? This sounds like an interesting result! How’d you arrive that this conclusion?

Disentangling how the brain regards avatars versus real individuals may help explain why some people spend large chunks of their life playing immersive online games, says Kristina Caudle, a social neuroscientist at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire, who led the study along with her adviser William Kelley.

“It’s hard to imagine from an outsider’s perspective what might drive someone to spend 30 hours a week immersed in a completely imaginary world,” she says. More than 11 million people play World of Warcraft each month.

Um, okay. This would be about the point where I started wondering if Kristina has ever played anything more complicated than Tetris, because immersion in an imaginary world really isn’t the point of Warcraft, although some folks who work at it try. The thing is that there are a lot of different kinds of multiplayer online games; they range along a pretty big sliding scale of being a straight-up video game where the units you’re shooting happen to be live intelligences, to being an environment where the point is immersion in a virtual world. Warcraft is farther toward the latter than, say, Counterstrike, but it definitely is more of a traditional video game that happens to inhabit a shared universe than it is a virtual world. If that’s what Kristina wanted to study, she would have been much better off with Second Life- which DOES exist purely for that reason. Unless she considers all gaming to be incomprehensible immersion in imaginary worlds, in which case all I’d say is “the generation of the last thirty years wants to have a talk with you”.

To probe what brain activity might underlie people’s virtual behaviour, Caudle’s team convinced 15 World of Warcraft players in their twenties – 14 men and 1 woman – who play the game an average of 23 hours a week, to drag themselves away from their computers and spend some time having their brains scanned using functional MRI.

Jesus Christ, the sample size is fifteen people, almost entirely male, out of eleven million? I know brain-imaging resources are expensive, but this is kind of… unrepresentative. It’s not numerically possible for it to be even if the fifteen people were each hand-picked to be as different from each other as possible. And I suspect they were hand-picked for being undergraduates willing to turn up for little or no pay. Also, given the demographic data, male and female players and younger and older represent pretty distinct groups- something that would not have been difficult to research beforehand. Blizzard is very free with that kind of data.

While in the scanner, Caudle asked them to rate how well various adjectives such as innocent, competent, jealous and intelligent described themselves, their avatars, their best friend in the real world and their World of Warcraft guild leader.

This is actually an interesting data breakdown in and of itself, but I’m not entirely confident she realizes that only one of these categories represents anything imaginary at all. One’s guild leader doesn’t tend to so much be a cartoon elf to a player as he or she is the voice on the other end of a mic belonging to another person, no matter what their avatar looks like.

When Caudle’s looked for brain areas that were more active when volunteers thought about themselves and their avatars compared with real and virtual others, two regions stood out: the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex. That makes sense as prior research has linked the medial prefrontal cortex to self-reflection and judgement.

No seriously. The other people you play the game with are not virtual. The first time somebody who had a job relating to your not getting eaten by a monster steps away from their keys mid-monster to go attend to their kid kind of drives the point home. I’m starting to wonder if anybody was alarmed that people would be unable to distinguish the strange ghost-voices from real ones when the telephone was invented.

That said, I’m sort of curious what region she thinks might otherwise have lit up when it comes to contemplating your little cartoon representative of yourself in a cooperative video game. I’m also curious if she bothered to parse out exactly what kind of reflection on self and avatar she was asking about; when you’re staring at a character creation screen or running around the city your avatar is representing you, but if you’re in a cooperative group of players- especially one that you play with often, like a guild- YOU are representing you via your ability to play the game well. People stop seeing you as a gnome and start seeing you as a good player or a terribad one awfully quickly when success depends on it.

Caudle’s team also noticed key differences between how people thought about the virtual and real worlds, which must be a necessity for preserving your sense of reality. “Clearly you don’t think of your virtual self as your real self,” she says.

They found activity differed in a region called the precuneus, implicated in imagination. “It makes good sense to me if you’re thinking about things in a virtual world you might get [activation in] these areas,” says Caudle.

No. REALLY? Seriously, though, games are nowhere near good enough to confuse anybody on the point no matter how impaired, let alone people’s senses of reality being normally this fragile.

In the future, Caudle hopes to study volunteers who spend less time playing World of Warcraft to see if there are differences in how their brains discriminate between real and virtual worlds.

It could be that people whose brain activity is more similar when thinking of themselves and their avatars are likelier to end up hooked, she says.

Or how about just more people, period? Including those who spend less OR more time in-game.

As a side note, all of the people I know who I could describe as “hooked”- which, much like the definition of an alcoholic being anybody who drinks more than you do, I’d probably define as people who spend a lot more time playing than I do or can’t handle not playing- don’t see their avatars as extensions of themselves. What they are is hard-core gamers that are extremely achievement-oriented; they’re not spending all that time in-game pretending not to be themselves, they’re conquering every bit of content they can get their hands on and then doing it all again in hard-mode, and then going to the forums to bitch about how dumbed down the game has gotten so that more than one percent of players can do this now. It doesn’t matter whether they’re sporting a female elf priest or an ugly orc warrior or a gnome that stands on their head or what; they’re going to be bedecked with epic gear and achievements within weeks. They’re creations of the game developers’ grasp of operant conditioning- not the lure of imaginary worlds.

Liane Young, a social neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge is interested in what brain activity can tell us about our relationships to our virtual characters. “You have this control over your avatar such that you’ve created this better version of yourself. I wonder whether these neural processes support reasoning about our better selves in some kind of wishful thinking sense.”

Sometimes. And this is why they really need to study more people period, because as it rapidly becomes apparent to anybody who actually spends much time playing the game, there’s a huge range of motivations and rationales behind people’s choices there. Power-gamers like I described above usually like to get the best edge in game mechanics for their chosen class as possible, and usually care little what the avatar really *looks* like. Some people are *exactly* like Young describes and populate their server slots with buffer or prettier versions of themselves. Some think of their avatars as characters rather than self-extensions and create a character that just seems like fun to play with- and some, to judge by the huge percentage of male players that create female characters, just want a more interesting rear end to look at.

The first character in Warcraft I levelled to max was a male Tauren hunter. I may not have brainscan-level insight into my psyche, but I am very goddamn certain that my ideal self is not an eight-foot man-bull that can’t stand up straight and exists to shoot every animal they see. I didn’t create that character to be a visual extension of myself, I did it because I thought a giant cow was amusing to play. I’ve also played dozens of RPGs in which the avatars you control are always given some kind of characterization and background; it’s reflex to me to think of the toon I’m steering around as a character rather than an avatar. (I also have never played Second Life or any MUCK or other environment where that’s the main point.) I don’t role-play and don’t think I’ll ever want to, it’s just the way my gaming world is ordered in my head; if given no information, make some up and design a character to fit, THEN play. I don’t really do anything with it, it’s just a point of reference for me.

And if you asked another player, you’d get a different answer, and probably a different scan if you scanned them all- and asked intelligent questions. Video games may be frivolous fun, but if you want to understand the psychology of people who play them, the road to intelligent questions probably starts with play, THEN speculation.

….but so worth it.

If y’all will excuse me, I’m gonna go find who in the neighborhood plays Alliance and go piss on their mailbox.

That’s what the new Ghostbusters video game is being touted as in some reviews. Is it good? Oh hell yes. Is it good enough to be considered a third movie? Not really.

The basic premise is that the company is still kicking around in 1991, two years after the second movie, and you’re the new hire. I’m not going to say too much about the plot so as to avoid spoilers, but the upshot is another big upswing in supernatural activity. There be many ghosts what need a-bustin’.

In the good column, we have the graphics, the voices, attention to detail, and the story. The plot doesn’t really stand up to movie-length, but as presented in the interactive format it does very well, and it’s a lot of fun. If this had been an in-theater affair, the run time would probably be right around an hour, but adding in the play time and interaction and exploration and achievement chasing pads this out to a healthy 10-14ish hours of play time before you mess with any of the online content (which I haven’t tried at all, I admit). The characters are all lovingly rendered without falling into the Uncanny Valley, and of course one of the big marketing points is that they got the original cast to do the voice work, up to and including Viggo the Carpathain, the giant painting of whom now lives in the firehouse and will dispense verbal abuse if you talk to it. Conspicuously missing is Rick Moranis, but Annie Potts carries the secretary & support staff role just fine without him. All of the environments are just one continuous shout-out to the folks like LabRat and I that basically have the films memorized. The firehouse has a bit of blend from the movies and “The Real Ghostbusters” cartoon series, and knick-knacks and souvenirs are strewn generously about. Be sure to check all your messages on the answering machine, especially after the island level. Tobin’s Spirit Guide is now built into your PKE meter, and updates as you go through the game, and fills in backstory (and combat tips) on the various slimers, vapors, and phantasms you run into. The proton pack has gotten some nifty upgrades too, and you’re Egon’s guinea pig for new tech. Busting ghosts accumulates cash, cash buys upgrades, you know the drill.

In the downside category, sitting squarely in the lime light, is the combat system. There’s an achievement on the Xbox 360 for beating the game on hard mode titled “Are you a god?” Personally, I’m not convinced godhood would be sufficient. Even on normal/moderate, “hard as hell” is being kind. Any time there’s more than one ghost in the fight, you’re going to have a hell of a time trapping any of them, because while you wrangle one into the box, the other will come bump into you, possibly knock you on your ass, and set the ghost you were working on back flitting about the room raping your co-workers’ faces. The Slam Trap upgrade, where if you basically just whack the ghost into the trap directly on target and with enough force, you can trap the spook without the long drawn out sucked-in-by-the-light process, helps some, but isn’t a sure thing. Also, despite everybody knowing that crossing the streams is Bad, Ray, Winston, Egon, and Peter, combined with the already jittery and dancing nature of a positron beam, seem to do nothing but cross the streams, unless you’re off on your own. Occasionally you can get some work done with just one partner, but in a group you’re going to be hearing warnings and the tell-tale whine of power build up non-stop. Further, you and the rest of the guys are ridiculously fragile on normal or hard mode. One good whack and you’re on your ass, two and you’re down for the count until someone comes over to help you up (unless they’re all down too, in which case you’ll be joining the spirit world yourself shortly). Doubly annoying, when you’re knocked down the camera doesn’t offer any perspective adjustment, and trying to swing it around to see what the hell is going on means that as soon as you’re back on your feet, it swings up to look where your adjustment would’ve had you looking if you never fell. Gosh, that sky sure is awesome, anybody seen where that book golem that was eating my face went? Oh, there it is. It’s in my ass, leaving a trail of paper cuts and there we go, time to try the fight again we all died. I wound up abandoning my first attempt after spending over an hour trying to down one boss with no luck. Oh, that’s another glaring hole: There’s only one save file. No multiple careers for you! It’s not like there’s a friggin’ hundred gig hard drive attached that could store multiple profiles or anything, oh no.

Also a bit of a let down are the upgrades to the proton pack. Yeah, they’re up in the pro category too, and they are nifty in concept. The problem is that, aside from the slime gun, they’re not terribly useful, and the slime gun only gets a pass because it’s how you neutralize environmental toxins, solve puzzles, and close a few ghost-spewing portals. Some ghouls are more susceptible to one beam type than another in theory, but in practice it’s faster to just slam boson darts (rockets, basically) and regular proton streams into them until they can be captured or neutronized.

While the game overall is gorgeous, it does suffer a bit from Doom 3 syndrome, and a fair number of environs are just flat too dark to deal with reasonably. Yeah, it’s a ghost game and all, and the flashlight does help some (and unlike Doom 3, you can even have it on and fire your weapon at the same time) but the excessive darkness didn’t add anything other than a bit of “Where the hell am I,” and not in the good tension-building sort of way. There are a few spots where the lip synching was a bit spotty as well. In terms of characters, whoever did the writing for Peter wasn’t much of a fan. Yes, Peter is a wise-ass, but the non-stop stream of snarky comments and one liners was dialed from the movie levels of “I’m an ass, it’s ok” to “I’m one dimensional.” Oh, and he still chases the girl. Two dimensional. Everyone else was in fine form, and well in character, but I’m having trouble thinking of a single scene where Dr. Venkman wasn’t basically serving as a one-liner machine.

The final main drawback is that the game is basically a run-and-gun with great cutscenes and actual reasons to go from one “Shoot this guy, shoot that guy, shoot that big guy” area to the next. If they’d added in some old school Sierra Adventure elements (combine this weird shit, this fight is was easier if you found the secret book of how to whup ass, etc) it would’ve brought a good bit of depth to the party if done well. Instead all we get is the standard collection game, gathering scans of ghosts for the Spirit Guide, and finding rare artifacts hidden in out of the way places. Fun enough, but nothing ground breaking, even though the descriptions on the artifacts were uniformly cool (Haunted Pin-Up Calendar, I’m looking at you).

All in all, I’m probably being a little hard on the game, but that’s because I just love the movies that much, and it’s hard to measure up when jumping into an entirely new medium that only bears passing resemblance to the original format. Overall this game really is a lot of fun (once you set the difficulty to ‘easy’ at least), and the story is cool, if short. It’s great to have the guys back in action, and there’s just no understating how much fun it is to run around with an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on your back kicking ass and wreaking havoc. As much as I just ragged on it, I’m absolutely going to play it again, and I look forward to trying the online content at some point as well. For $35 or so, it’s well worth the price if you’re a fan of the franchise at all. If you’re not, it’s a reasonably competent run-and-gun with a cool story attached, but really, we’re here for the boys in grey, and overall on that front, the game delivers. Ghostbusters: The Video Game is Nerd Approved.

This morning, Tam tossed out a quick list of, according to her, senseless desires. To whit, a current-gen video game system, a double rifle, and one of those popular-as-hell cordless telephones the weenies over at Apple sell, which I will not name specifically lest I attract 5000 spam link-back comments.

First off, how on earth is it not sensible to want a double rifle? I mean, a huge-ass gun designed to put a stop on things roughly the animal equivalent of an armored car? Sure, the price tags are pretty steep but other than that what isn’t to like?

The phone… well, I hate phones. When the phone rings here it’s usually accompanied by a verbal response the likes of which are normally heard when one hits ones thumb with a hammer, or stubs a toe with vigor. Ok, fair enough, maybe that one doesn’t make sense.

But the current-gen game system is the real meat of this. Is the Xbox basically an overcomplicated toy? Absolutely. Is it worth picking one up regardless? You better believe it, and here’s why.

Overlord. It’s always the same, you can never find a competent Supreme Bad Guy. The dumbass lets the hero monologue, or shows mercy inappropriately, or simply fails to just be enough of a dick. Overlord is your chance to fix that. Start out the game as your most loyal minion revives you from the last hero to trounce through and raze your castle. From there, you begin building your horde of demons, an army of ambitious go-getters eager to do your bidding and pillage the land. Available in four colors, use them strategically to solve problems and devastate your enemies. We already did a full review on this, but aside from that I’d like to point out just how satisfying it is watching your imp army gear itself up with found weapons and armor, and spotting your seasoned combat veterans come back to kick ass in your name (the flip side being it’s a shame when that grizzled lil’ bastard eventually eats it at the hand of some damn elf that got lucky, or worse, accidental drowning). Sadly, we hear the sequel isn’t nearly as good, but that doesn’t take away from the awesomeness of the original.

Psychonauts. Ok, again we already did the full review thing, and yes this is technically for the original xbox rather than the 360, but any game where one of the take-home lessons is, and I quote, “Shooting things is useful and fun!” is made of win. Absolutely outstanding writing, good gameplay, and you use a piece of bacon as a communication device. Mmm, bacon.

Ghostbusters. We haven’t done a full review on this yet because we’re still playing. I’ll admit we’re biased, both LabRat and I can pretty much recite the movies by heart, but so far this really is standing up to the claims that it should count as the third movie. The combat system is not without flaws, some quite frustrating, but the story and attention to Ghostbusters canon is absofreakinlutely awesome. There are backstories on the ghosts you capture in your own handy portable copy of Tobin’s Spirit Guide, and all sorts of other neat touches. Getting to run around with the guys (and they did get all the original cast to do the voice acting, too) is just icing on the cake.

Dead Rising. This right here is the king of zombie-related sandboxes. The story mode is a giant pain in the ass, but running around taking on an entire mall full of brain-hungry Zack is its own reward. Ok, this one is kind of a flimsy excuse, but I really love killing zombies. A lot.

Mass Effect. Again, full review. In a dollars-per-hour valuation of entertainment, this thing can easily get down into the pennies range. The game is unbelievably freakin’ huge, and even though it isn’t a truly sandbox-world, there are so many side missions, things to explore, and things you have to go out of your way to encounter that it still comes pretty close. The universe is very well fleshed out (too much so for some tastes), and how you go about exploring it is, mostly, up to you. Build your team up of hard-hitting combat heavies and storm through. Swap out some firepower and get some increased electronics support. See your enemies driven before you as you see fit. Amazingly, the AI for your team is actually pretty decent, too. I wouldn’t want them to balance my checkbook, but compared to the usual game AIs you see, of the “HAY LOOK AT THIS WALL THIS WALL IS AWESOME I LOVE IT SO” variety, they’re way above average. I’m pretty sure my first run clocked in well over 100 hours all said and done, spread over a few months. Now that it’s under $20, that right there is some entertainment value.

Cheap high-def. Granted, you’re not going to be getting any movies made after Sony bought blu-ray’s victory about two years ago, but that just means all the movies released on hd-dvd (such as the beyond gorgeous ultimate Blade Runner collection) for prices I believe the technical term is “damn cheap.”

Netflix. $10/month and whatever movie/show you want on demand in high def? Sounds like a bargain to me.

Hrm. Hadn’t meant for this to turn into quite such a commercial. I’m not getting a kickback from Microsoft so far as I know, but I am awfully glad we picked up that senseless geegaw. Maybe this shameless fluff post will inspire The Muse to wander back for something more substantial soon.

One of the most frequent cracks you’ll ever hear leveled against Massively Multiplayer Online Games (hence referred to as MMOGs) is that they’re “a job you pay someone else for the privilege of doing”. On its face, this criticism is absolutely accurate; no matter how much fun it is or how varied the developers try to make the missions, the process of playing one of these games is essentially that of creating a virtual person that must work at various tasks to achieve progress, with the process being ultimately open-ended and non-conclusive in order to create an incentive for the player to keep playing indefinitely. Grinding through levels is undoubtedly work, and once you finish that process, so is levelling various money-making crafting processions and upgrading gear in order to deal with progressively more and more difficult “end-game content”- until the next expansion comes out and the process starts all over again. And you pay someone else for it! You chump!

The thing of it is, though, ALL games are fundamentally work that you pay someone else to be allowed to do. When I was a kid I forked over around fifty bucks of my carefully saved allowance (several months’ worth, anyway) for Super Mario Brothers 3. I then dedicated the next several months of my young life to conquering the damn game, which as anyone who played the original iterations of Mario Brothers knows was a sheer grind of developing reflexes, muscle memory, and sustained concentration sufficient to keep the goddamn plumber alive through eight worlds’ worth of increasingly ludicrous platform-jumping and pipe-mazes. I resisted the urge to pitch my controller through a window countless times and frittered away God knows how many hours. Best saved allowance I’d spent yet, so far as I was concerned- and I can assure you I didn’t put in all that time and effort and banked frustration just to find out at the end that Mario rescues the Princess and then see which Japanese people were credited with, say, the Goomba sprites.

I did it because, paradoxically, the reward offered up front for doing something- whether it’s navigating a platform jumper or successfully taking down a raid boss or working a job for real money- isn’t always why we really do something. If you ask someone why they work at their job the usual answer is a “duh, you drooling idiot” stare and a “because they pay me”- and unless that person is lucky enough to be in a job they’d work at for free anyway just because they enjoy the process that much, this is surely true. But pay is really only part of why people do particular jobs; if there were a direct relationship between willingness to work and number of dollars paid in the end, people would never quit high-paying jobs or even high-paying entire careers in order to do something that offers them less stress and frustration. Even if you’re being paid enough to spend weeks in the Caribbean every year, if your boss is obtuse and abusive and your co-workers are lazy and irresponsible, it might not be worth it to you to continue showing up and doing something that offers no rewards other than the pay.

One of the best ways to utterly demotivate and undermine anyone who works at anything is to remove the connection between effort exerted and results achieved. If some poor cubicle drone finds there is no difference in outcome for him whatsoever between how hard he works and how well he is treated or even just the simple question of having his effort acknowledged, and the guy down the hall that spends all day playing Minesweeper and does the bare minimum to get along, the odds are that he will quit if he thinks he can do any better, and that he will become equally as unproductive as the Minesweeper addict if he thinks he can’t. Similarly demoralizing and work-ethic-killing are bosses that offer no clarity of expectation and give arbitrary punishments and rewards that relate more to how he’s feeling than the worker’s actual efforts and quality of results; whether you’re a laboratory rodent getting random shocks or an employee of a company that models its management practices after “Dilbert”, not knowing what to do or how to gain rewards or avoid punishment will skyrocket stress hormones and rapidly set up the afflicted individual for a case of learned helplessness.

The real appeal of a game, whether it’s based on pixels, cards, or chess pieces, is that it represents a system with explicit and easily understood rules and paths to success, even if the success represents nothing more than a completely abstract condition. Even if actually achieving that success is extremely difficult and time-consuming, as long as the player still perceives that success to be actually achievable with enough effort, the odds are that he will keep playing, providing he has nothing more rewarding to do. The conditions for victory are clear and are not changed arbitrarily, and the connection between effort and reward is ironclad; even if you fail in an attempt, all improvement is measurable; you survived longer against your opponent, or damaged your opponent more, or stumbled across new possible strategies to try. More advanced games (and old games with particularly good systems) encourage a great deal of exploration and innovation, which extends play time and ways to be rewarded in some fashion. There’s plenty of other things that go into making a game good or bad, but most of the things that make them bad stem from somehow disturbing these elements of clarity and reward-to-effort link- making the game so obtuse to control that only the most lightning reflexes can possibly produce any success, making the game so easy that there’s no challenge (no effort required) for reward, or making it so difficult and opaque that only someone who read the developer’s notes could possibly figure out what the conditions for success are.

MMOGs take this one step further by involving other people, which both increases the potential for reward and for aversion. Cooperating with or defeating other players is simply more rewarding than doing so with an artificial intelligence, if only because the flexibility of behavior is so much greater. AI will always have its limits, but other players are endlessly innovative- both in the traditional sense and in finding ways to be a better idiot. Getting approval from real people is much more rewarding than just meeting an AI’s conditions for success- and getting disapproval stings a lot worse. (No one likes being called an oozing bag of monkey cocks for no reason, which keeps a lot of people off social online environments in general.) This sets up a massive challenge for anyone who wants to develop such a game: protecting players from the worst effects of the bad behavior or incompetence of others while also building in ways to reward true cooperative efforts. That this is pretty difficult to do is reflected in the history of successes and spectacular failings in the genre in general, but since Everquest developers have found a number of sound rules to build in to give the game at least a chance of success. (Don’t require other players to make any progress at all, make global chats easy to deactivate, don’t provide campable spawns, make player-versus-player combat an opt-in system, etcetera.)

At “end-game” stages where players have maxed out the levels and loot attainable through questing, explored the entire existing game world, and exhausted crafting or other make-work economic activities, the social aspects of the game get a lot more important, especially in terms of content that involves getting together a large group of people to achieve goals. In order to protect themselves from fools and predators and maximize their chances of success, players usually form semi-permanent alliances so they can choose from a stable pool of trusted people to work at the content with. I’m only deeply familiar with Warcraft, but in that game, guilds (alliances) often have an application to join- which a lot of people complain is too much like a job application. The reason this is so is that in nearly all respects it’s functionally identical to a job application; both the potential recruit and the recruiting group need to find out if they’ll be able to work well with each other without a lot of conflict, drama, and hurt productivity. Successfully cooperating with twenty-four other people to defeat a series of encounters and gain in-game rewards is rewarding; repeatedly failing because people aren’t taking their role seriously, grandstanding, or trying to screw other people for loot is incredibly frustrating. More subtly, finding out how often the group intends to raid and what the general atmosphere is is akin to sussing out a corporate culture- there’s a lot more profanity and sex jokes in a raiding guild than at a business, but the overall question of environmental compatibility is still just as important.

The function of an MMOG’s existence, and the reason people pay the gaming company to work at it, is to be an artificial good job, one at a well-run company with good incentive plans and skillful managers. If it more closely resembles a bad job, players are LOSING money rather than getting paid- and will quit with alacrity. The degree of psychological value a good job- even one that actually costs money- represents to people is reflected in the millions of subscribers.

In this post, Existingthing mentions an experience with the Tetris Effect, which those of you who’ve played a lot of video games (even if it’s just Solitaire, and I think it happens to some chess players too) are familiar with as the… effects particularly addictive games can have on your perception of reality. I was never a Tetris player, but I went through periods where I couldn’t fall asleep without playing a few rounds of Solitaire or Mah-Jongg on the backs of my eyelids. The worst it’s ever been for me is the Katamari Effect. For those who aren’t familiar with the game- and apparently, ET wasn’t, and now I don’t know whether to laugh maniacally or apologize profusely for the lasting hostility he’s about to acquire toward cows and bears- the premise of the game is basically an attempt to roll the entire contents of the game world up into a ball.* Spend enough time playing Katamari, and you will begin to view the entire world around as things that could be rolled up if only they’re sufficiently smaller than you. (This process is especially sinister if you happen to be driving a full-size pickup at the time.)

I imagine some of you think I need to quit video games entirely and forever and the rest of you are nodding along going “Oh yeah, that one time after forty hours of Zelda, I started attacking bushes for rupees.” Well, we’re not alone. I hope you have some free time, because there was apparently a deep pool of spleen that needed venting among the population over this phenomenon…

*You have to do this because your father, the King of All Cosmos, destroyed most of the night sky while on a bender, so you must replace the constellations and the moon by rolling large portions of earth- much of which is alive and screams while you do it- into balls that the King will then turn into celestial bodies. He’s also an abusive asshole and after awhile you’ll give anything to scrub the image of the Royal Package out of your head. Despite all that, it manages to be an excessively cute and happy game.

For those that care: Night Elf Druid, “Wifkottr”, Steamwheedle Cartel.

Today was very full but very good. We swung by the homebrew store and picked up enough stuff for several more batches of beer (an Irish red, an Australian-style ale, more of the light-and-pleasing ale we brewed before, and we also have stuff for an IPA and a pilsner- should anyone like to vote on which one we start tomorrow), and also hit Best Buy for some action movies and other light popcorn-friendly fare.

While I was there, I picked up World of Warcraft.

Stop making that face. We have been nerds for a very long time and we have no shame of any kind left.

I’ve been feeling the RPG itch for quite awhile, and while we used to play Final Fantasy XI, we quit when it became apparent that it’s just not doable unless you either have enough patience to burn an entire evening just trying to put a workable party together, or enough patience to kill low-level monsters for three hundred hours just to advance one level. I caved on WoW when I heard that it was in fact possible to reasonably solo all the way as long as you picked the right class, or at least to play as a two-man duo. (Stingray initially mocked me all the way home, but seems willing to see how bad it sucks or doesn’t and maybe play with me later. We’ll see.)

So, those of you who don’t play and think it’s for hopeless losers… like I said, we have no shame, so sneering will have little effect. You can’t actually stuff my head in a toilet. For those that DO… Alliance or Horde, and server? At least having the theoretical ability to communicate with friends would be nice. Newbie tips would be welcome, too.

Marko? What say you?

Sasha Nein: “Young man, I hope you’ve learned a lesson here today.”
Raz: “Yes! Shooting stuff is useful and fun!”

OK, I know we’re a little behind on this one, since Psychonauts was first released an eternity ago in 2005, but we’re still enjoying the backwards compatibility on the xbox 360 to catch up on some of the better titles we missed. This is very much a better title.

The game centers around young Rasputin, Raz for short, who is a new cadet at the Camp Whispering Rocks, a summer training camp for kids with psychic abilities. Shortly after his arrival at camp (escaping his psychic-hating carnival acrobat father), the other campers brains begin to disappear and it’s up to Raz to somehow collect enough training to use the psychic powers necessary and rescue the brains and generally save the day.

The gameplay and controls are nothing to write home about; fairly standard all around. I’ve seen some places bitching about the camera controls, but really they weren’t that bad, except in one or two spots. What really made the game though was the level design, the character design, and the writing. Mostly the writing. Consider some of the following:

Dr. Loboto: The bad news is that we’re going to have to remove your brain and place it in an armored tank to shoot down innocent civilians with its psychic death beam. The good news is that your insurance is gonna cover the whole thing.

Ford Cruller: Aw, poor little thing.
Raz: That poor little thing just tried to kill me about eight different ways!
Ford Cruller: Well that’s not its fault. This was once just a normal sized lungfish, minding its own business in a mucus lined air bubble beneath a semi dry lake bed. But judging by the work done on it I suspect Maury has mutated it, accelerated its growth, and has placed an implant in its brain to make it do his evil bidding.
Raz: Aw, poor little thing.

The levels in the game take place within the brains of the camp counselors, who are full-fledged Psychonauts themselves, and in the minds of a few people you find around the camp (or more accurately, in the insane asylum across the lake), as well as a level or two inside your own head (well, Raz’s head – they haven’t quite managed to tap into the player’s skull just yet). One level was interesting and hilarious enough to even have a trope named after it.

The artwork looks like it came straight from the twisted mind of Johnen Vasquez, even though the only link to him is the always marvelous voice talent of Richard Horvitz, who played the main character. In a few spots in the game, Raz even managed to look rather suspiciously like Invader Zim. I’m not really doing the voice acting and writing justice here, so take a gander at the trailer for it:

The PC version isn’t even $10 at amazon. Just remember, if you laugh your brains out, have someone send them to me before you wander off to watch TV. I’ve got a use or two for ‘em….

Grow

Once I discovered this thing, my entire day vanished in a Flash. There are several versions, progressively harder, some longer or shorter than others, but they all kept me muttering to myself angrily until I figured them out.

I don’t know what they put in the water in Japan, and it’s something that’s been questioned over and over, but things like this make me kind of want some even if I DO wind up wearing sailor outfits and giving long, speculative looks at giant squid.

Mass Effect is a ginormous shiny new game for the X-Box 360 from Bioware. The basic mechanic is a mashup of Halo-style first-person space shooter, and sandbox-style RPG. The plot is not entirely free of structure, but if you want to you can play half of the game before ever even starting the third plot-obligatory mission. (And you have a choice of three possibilities for the third plot-obligatory mission, not all of which you need complete.)

Yahtzee hated it, for pretty much all the same reasons we adore it: it’s FREAKINHUGE, to the point where there is no possible way to explore all or even most of the content in a single run-through, it’s very very in-depth in story and character- which can cause a level of talkiness that can annoy even me and apparently made him want to shoot himself in the forehead, and it contains enough options for the customization and tweaking of your character and your character’s gear to satisfy all but the most psychotic tabletop RPG min/maxer. The actual plot of the game happens at about six places. The size of the game itself is exponentially larger, with far more optional side quests than obligatory ones, and more than that the designers went to incredibly anal levels of detail in fleshing out little aspects of the game universe’s backstory and the content of the galaxy itself. All of the planets in each system are examinable, and many of the planets that can’t even be surveyed have some entertaining bit of trivia attached to them. Some writing team very clearly had a lot of fun here, and more than that the writing team is equipped with an impressive store of astronomy: to the extent that can be accomplished given the game’s premise and setting, the physics is surprisingly well done, far more than was strictly necessary.

Like one of Bioware’s previous efforts, Knights of the Old Republic, there is a rudimentary good/evil system in place. The interesting thing is that, unlike KOTOR, it’s not truly a good/evil system, and it doesn’t require you to choose one path or the other. The system is “paragon” versus “renegade”; being an idealistic team player will earn you paragon points, and being an underhanded lone wolf sort will earn you renegade points. It’s far from perfect- it’s much easier to play paragon just because being a blatant hotheaded asshole too often will cost you more than it gains- but it is an improvement over a lot of these sorts of games in that being good is definitely not always the same thing as being right, and also in that it is entirely possible to rack up points in both columns in the same interaction depending on whether you play good cop or bad from moment to moment. (It also affects how much certain of your crew respects you or doesn’t- some aren’t too impressed with a straight goody-goody act and some will be horrified by the Dirty Harry approach.) Ultimately, the only thing paragon or renegade has a *direct* effect on is your ability to access bonus conversational options that play on your reputation and practice as a good guy or a bad one to give you a new (and usually better) way to end a confrontation. No matter if you play the heavy or the paladin, the basic story will still go the same way… but the details will be much different.

The combat is nicely flexible, with basic gameplay options giving you more or less control in exchange for difficulty- very much appreciated by me, because I HATE first person shooters and am no good at them, and appreciated by Stingray, who is the opposite. Beyond that, there are six different character classes, choice of which very much influences the combat experience, and some of which are better for some styles of play than others. (I chose the most tech-heavy class, i.e. the one that would allow me to take cover and fling debuffs at the enemy as opposed to going out and shooting everybody myself.) Very much helping the combat experience is the fact that the game AI for your own team is actually very good: your squadmates are very far from useless, and will make semi-intelligent decisions about which of their abilities to use and when entirely on your own, which is very nice when they notice the hostiles about to jump your ass from behind while you’re busy trying to figure out the best line of fire on the guy in front of you. More interestingly, often your squadmates will work much better or worse in certain combinations; both of us have developed favorite teams for different situations based less on the available pool of abilities than on the likelihood that the two crewmembers will play well with each other. The game recommends a “balance” of the three major ability classes (tech, biotic, and combat), but we long ago ditched trying to “balance” in favor of trying to find efficient team combinations- which often has nothing to do with “balance”. The squad AI does suffer from some irritating recurrent flaws- most notably the tendency to walk into your line of fire or hit you from behind- but it’s not a crippling one. The enemy AI is also good, with the game’s synthetic AI having the interesting feature of improving exponentially with the number of synthetics on the battlefield. Alone or in small groups, they’re stupid; as a large group, they’re frustratingly efficient. The organic AI is more even, with different groups being more or less difficult depending on the “type”. (Hint: the turian pirates are BASTARDS.) Enemy level scales to your level, so there’s no power-levelling in this game. As I said, I really dislike first-person shooters as a rule, but even I could appreciate the amount of the combat that became easier or harder depending on your tactical savvy; reflexes are not the key to victory here, deciding the most logical way to assault the enemy’s position is, and there’s usually more than one good choice.

I’ve seen the vehicle-based portions of the game criticized, but I honestly can’t imagine why; as this sort of thing goes, the armed rover-type vehicle they give you was one of the best I’ve ever played with. Different planets have different gravity levels and terrain types, which can make just driving around different places fun and interesting all their own. Maybe it’s just my lack of wider experience and missing out on truly awesome military space vehicle-age, but at least the Mako is much better than Halo’s Warthogs. Running over mercenaries was fun, too.

As for the much-vaunted romance subplots- you can see somebody’s bare butt if you successfully close the deal, oh boy- I’ll quote the Three Panel Soul guys: this is the only game I have ever played where it is possible to accidentally have lesbian sex. Too bad the “lesbian” was as annoying as she was, having the unique status of being the only crew character I disliked.

Basically, this is a first-person shooter welded to an RPG frame. If you are a first-person shooter guy that normally disdains RPGs, it is very likely that this game will annoy you, as it contains several exaggerations of elements that RPG lovers love RPGs for. You will be screaming “GET ON WITH IT!!!!” before you even get planetside, I promise. However, if you an RPG player that normally disdains shooters for all their twitch gaming and shallowness, you will probably adore this game. I know I certainly enjoyed playing an RPG that did not involve being in charge of a bunch of girls with huge swords, some of which are alleged to be male. This game is a lot closer to being Oblivion in space than it is to being Doom with customizable characters.

Society has lied to you. Diamonds are not a girl’s best friend, and dog is not man’s. Anybody’s best friend, as it turns out, is a horde of manic little psychopaths prepared to carry out your every demand.

Overlord, for the XBox 360 or PC, is another entry in the “What if you were playing on the bad guys’ side in a fantasy series for once?” genre. I haven’t played Dungeon Keeper, which I’m told is the gold standard of this genre, so I have no idea if it’s any better or worse than that, but it’s a fair sight better than any of the others I’ve tried.

Up-front, the problems: There’s no overworld map. At all. If you, like me, have absolutely no sense of direction in-game or out of it, this will lead to a fair amount of pointless wandering around trying to figure out where the hell you are and where you need to go next. The nature of the game requires a lot of backtracking through areas, so this can develop into quite a sizeable pain in the ass until you learn to memorize smaller landmarks. The best way is often to backtrack using the trail of destruction you leave in your path (the environment is highly interactive), but that doesn’t do much good when the smashables and enemies have had a chance to repop, or when you’ve laid waste to the place and are just trying to find out where the nearest way back to your stronghold is.

Repetition: the game is moderately open-ended (which is to say, extremely compared to the traditional RPG model but not nearly as much as sandboxes like Oblivion), so you can end up wasting a fair amount of capital exploring and sticking your nose (or horde) in places you shouldn’t. Upgrading your gear leads to the same. This leads to some tedium with farming to rebuild your forces, but since I live with Stingray, King of Powerlevelling, I know what this can look like when it’s REALLY bad, and this ain’t really bad at all. If I need one of Stephen King’s longer novels to get through the powerlevelling phase of a Final Fantasy entry, I needed a moderately snappy mystery to get through this.

I’ve also heard some rumors of the game being buggy if you actively try and buck the broader order the game wants you to complete events in, but we never ran into any of these problems despite several such. The fact that NPCs have the same scripted lines and speak up if you just pass close by can get irritating if you’re trying to figure something out in a populated area, but this closes the list of unpleasant or tedious game elements.

The perks: Whoever wrote this game obviously loves the fantasy genre well enough to do a good job satirizing it. It’s not an over-the-top parody, but it’s definitely a twisted take on the usual Tolkienish tropes. The dialogue is witty without being strained, the various races are a few degrees off their usual stereotyped selves and act a good deal more like real villagers/miners/forest snobs than they tend to in books, and the plot actually manages to be a satisfying story. As long as you’re not getting the repetition problems mentioned earlier, it’s actually fun to talk to the NPCs, both in the villages and in your lair. The NPCs acting as player-nudgers also manage to do this largely without being annoying, which is a really nice change of pace, as is the fact that the game tells a story without becoming a movie that has occasional playable bits.

The game is moderately open-ended. There’s a corruption-level system which means you basically have a choice between being something along the lines of Machiavelli’s Prince and being a more traditional totally evil bastard. The consequences of your behavior are mostly in the titles you get, the treasures you get, and what form your spells take; go evil and you’ll get more riches but fewer helpful favors from NPCs, and your spells will trade off very high damage for some blood out of your own hide. Go good, and the opposite will be your reward. So far as I can tell, the game is pretty balanced; this is nice, as in most games of this sort I’ve tried, no matter what the programmers intended there’s usually one choice that’s objectively better than the other. (Case in point, Black and White, where all being good really netted you was extremely passive-aggressive worshippers.) You also get a choice in evil mistresses at one point in the game; one will encourage you to be- not exactly good, but pragmatic- and the other will encourage you to be as bad as possible. There’s also more than one way to accomplish most of your goals, ranging from the right spell for the right occasion to huge hordes to strategic use of a small horde to just powering up all your gear and bulling through on muscle. A word of caution, however: learn to use them all, because that last option helps but isn’t a workable solution in and of itself to the end-game, which is a really shitty time to have to pick up Intermediate Minion Management.

The best part of the game is the minions. They’re flexible (with a few slightly rougher spots, the controls on your horde are godly), endearing, and psychopathic. Sweep them around and they’ll smash whatever can be smashed, kill any non-friendlies in their path, collect items for you, and move obstacles. They come in four different flavors, each with specialties- basic smashy-smashy, ranged attacking, stealth attacks, and healing, and learning to use each kind well takes practice and experimentation but is well worth it. Best of all, they’re self-equipping; as they move over the landscape they’ll loot all the weapons and armor they can, drop worse items for better ones, and sometimes customize their stuff in amusing ways. This gives the minions some individuality; you can tell your “veterans” and when you spawned them by the kind of gear they wind up wearing. Eventually they’ll find better stuff and the horde will get more uniform in appearance, but for a long time it’s almost like having teeny little regiments. Plus, I dare you to resist their enthusiasm for killing sheep.

All in all, highly recommended. Perhaps not a reason to buy the 360 in and of itself, but it’s certainly a worthy entry to the library.