So How Big Are Video Games?

Below is a smattering of the 25 most popular magazines in the United States. Evidently video games are less popular than being old, having a nice house and celebrities but more popular than current events, sports, and boobs.

1. AARP the Magazine — 24,554,819
4. Better Homes and Gardens — 7,634,197
11. People — 3,615,858
12. Game Informer — 3,601,201
13. Time — 3,372,240
16. Sports Illustrated — 3,252,298
25. Playboy — 2,453,266

Got My Mind on My Money, and My Money on the Mob

A review of 1 vs 100 Live for the XBOX 360

My dream of playing NTN Trivia from the comfort of my living room has finally come true... kind of. Microsoft is currently beta testing a massively multiplayer version of the television game show 1 vs 100. In addition to live games where "the one" and "the mob" are chosen from the thousands of people logged into the game, there are Extended Play sessions where the entire crowd competes on the same 37 questions.

In my opinion, the Extended Play sessions are more fun as they give you real chance to test your mettle against the masses. The contestants on the live show rarely make it more than a half dozen questions, which make competing from the crowd more of a buzzer-racing contest than a true test of knowledge.

As a true geek, I have some qualms with the questions. There have been numerous questions that were wrong because of poor editing. For example -- there is no Major League Soccer team called the Colorado Rockies -- it's the Colorado Rapids. Another is the repetition of questions. Now that I've been playing for a while, it's common for 10-20% of the questions to be repeats. For those who play more frequently, the percentage is probably higher. A third is that there's no sort of provision the keeps very similar questions from being in the same set. I once saw two questions about Scottish soccer and two about the musical Rent in the same round of extended play.

Hopefully Microsoft can get some of these issues resolved, and they don't get greedy by trying to charge for the game even though they show you in-game ads and you have to ante up for a gold membership to play in the first place. If this is true, I'll be wasting ridiculous amounts of time playing this for the foreseeable future.

You Come Here Often?

Microsoft shipped a "coffin" for our dead Xbox. It's just a plain white box with some rather ingenious foam pieces and another packing label inside. There are absolutely no markings on it whatsoever. My wife brought it to the UPS store Friday, and as she plopped the box down on the counter, the clerk turned around and said "Sending in your Xbox, huh?"

Mind you, the packing label wasn't facing the clerk...

Think they have seen a few of these?

My Xbox Done Died

My Xbox 360 died on Monday. I've had it 15 months... 3 months longer than the warranty. Those of you in the know might say "but there's a three year warranty on them now." That's true, but the three years only applies if you get the fabled "red ring of death" where there are three red lights. Mine only has one. Evidently it's the wrong kind of broken, and now I have to pay $100 to get it fixed.

To be completely honest, this is the third Xbox I've had die. The first one I bought got the red ring after just two months of play, so I brought it back to Target for a new one. When I got that one set up, it wouldn't read any of my games, so I brought that one back and got a refund.

A few months later I heard that Microsoft had fixed the problems with the initial batch of Xboxen, and bought the one that just died. So officially that's three dead consoles in the space of two years. Unbelievable. Meanwhile my 11 year old PS2 keeps chugging along happy as can be. I've owned game systems for the last 30 years and I've never had one of them break. Hell - my Atari 2600 even still works.

Ugh.

More Xbox Achievements

In a previous post I listed some of my favorite achievements for Xbox 360 games. In the last four months I've stumbled across a few more.

If you play enough games of the exceedingly addicting railroad card game Ticket to Ride you're likely to earn the Underachiever award. In order to "earn" this, you need to play ten games without earning any other achievements... so it's kind of an anti-achievement. Best of all, this is a secret achievement, so there's no way to scheme to get this one. Well unless you cheat and look on the internet to figure out what it is. Hey wait a minute -- forget what I just said. Oops.

The most amusing thing I've seen in someone else's achievement list was "collected 33% of coloring book pages" from Shrek the Third. This probably wouldn't have been so funny to me if the person who collected it wasn't in his thirties...

The Sounds of Zombies in Space... With Sounds

A review of Dead Space for the XBOX 360

Dead Space is a survival horror game with a twist. Instead of rambling through a mansion or research facility the action takes place in and around the interstellar mining ship USG Ishimura. The protagonist is Isaac Clarke (evidently Arthur C. Asimov was already taken) an engineer who ends up having to battle his way through hordes of disgusting baddies called necromorphs to get himself back home.

The game is pure monster movie horror flick. The necromorphs are really quite awful looking, sounding and acting. There are a couple of monsters I wanted to dispatch ASAP just to stop the horrible sounds they were making. Ramping up the "ick factor" is the fact that the monsters are most quickly dispatched by dismembering them. That's right, there's no quick shotgun blast to the brain-pan for these monsters. You literally have to rend them limb from limb to get rid of them. Yes, it's as gross as it seems.

Adding to the horror aspect is the overarching theme of madness. The plot tries to keep the player guessing as to who is sane. It's ambiguous to the very end, and adds quite a bit to the unsettling ambiance of the game.

Another interesting aspect is the zero-g gameplay that occurs periodically. During these times you're able to run and jump from place to place, dancing on the ceiling like an interstellar Lionel Richie.

There are some problems with the game. The Ishimura is evidently constructed of crepe paper and you have to repair nearly every system onboard in order to complete the game. By the end you really begin to wonder if you'll need to fix the slurpie dispenser in order to get the hell out of dodge. Another is the unrelenting ickiness of everything. It becomes depressing over time, so much so that I didn't want to play through it a second time. The game could have used one or two lighter moments to fix the pacing of things.

As a fan of games where you send zombies and their ilk back to their graves, I thought this was well worth playing. It takes a fair amount of time to finish, but since I really don't want to play this ever again I'm torn between saying to buy or rent this game. Since I'm cheap, I say rent it. You'll probably have to renew it to finish the whole thing, but it's still cheaper than purchasing it.

GooooooooooaaaalrightEnoughAlready

I've been thinking seriously about switching from playing the Pro Evolution Soccer series and giving the long-running FIFA franchise a try. There's a number of things that bug me about PES 2008 -- including the increased grass friction that makes long ground passes difficult and the continued lack of an MLS license.

My biggest gripe is that somewhere between Winning Eleven 9 and PES 2008 the developers changed the shooting controls. In all the previous incarnations of the game you pushed right or left to aim for the right or left side of the goal. Now you push up or down. I spent many, many hours swearing at this game until I figured out what they had done. Why the hell did they do this? Someone at Konami has a smack upside the head coming to them.

I'm willing to give FIFA 09 a try, but one thing is holding me back. It has quite possibly the worst ad in the history of video games.





Why on earth would I want to listen to sixty seconds of someone half-heartedly yelling goal? Lord almighty is that annoying.

Shooting Mutant Hellbeasts is Fun

A review of House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return for the Nintendo Wii

When I saw that this game had been released for the Wii, I was very excited. These arcade games were some of my favorites, thanks in no small part to the controllers which allowed you to point a gun-like apparatus at the screen and blow legions of horrible undead to kingdom come.

The games are a direct port of the arcade games, with all the primitive graphics and unintentionally hilarious voice acting included. I had a blast fighting my way through the genetic freaks unleashed by scientists who tampered in God's domain.

I did experience one huge problem with the game. In order to reload your gun, you need to point it off screen. There were a number of times when the game didn't seem able to distinguish the edges of the screen from off screen, and the gun would get in a perpetual loop of loading -- even though the cursor was visible on screen and I was pulling the trigger. Occasionally this would even happen when the cursor was in the middle of the screen. At times this made the game almost unplayable.

My verdict -- rent this game and shoot things until your wrist is sore from holding it straight at the screen.

Enter the Devastator

A review of Mercenaries 2: World In Flames for the XBOX 360.

In Mercenaries 2 you play as a mercenary (surprising, I know) who becomes embroiled in the military takeover of Venezuela. It's an open-world game where you take on missions from the various factions trying to control the country (the big oil companies, Maoist guerrillas, etc) and generally cause mayhem and destruction on your path to vengeance upon the people who shot you in the rear.

As I played, I kept getting the sense that I'd seen this all before. Eventually it dawned on me -- this game is Grand Theft Auto... with airstrikes. On the upside, the controls are good, and the destruction you can cause is both huge and beautiful. One of my favorite things is the weapons practice where you shoot marble busts. Mmmm... physics-y gorgeousness.

The game also has a sense of humor. Early in the game you're sent to retrieve an experimental vehicle called "the devastator," which turns out to be the scooter seen below.

My final verdict -- it's fun, but it wasn't fun enough for me to buy. Rent it first and decide whether it's something you want to add to your permanent collection.

Image by Encogen

They Wanna Make Me Go To Wii-hab

I'm a fairly avid video game player. I've finished every Resident Evil game. I've finished every Grand Theft Auto game since GTA III. So with all these complicated, violent games in my past, what's my favorite game at the moment? Wii Sports Bowling. I'm horribly addicted. I think I've played every day since we got it nearly two weeks ago. I've already hit pro status, and have a high game of 256.

If fact almost all of the Wii Sports games are fun. There's nothing like smacking a home run, or being knocked out in boxing by your kindergartner. The only game I can't get the hang of is golf, but I've only played it once. There's just no time with so much bowling going on...

XBOX 360 Achievements

Someone involved with the XBOX 360 is a stinking genius. It's certainly not the person that was responsible for the overheating problem that killed a goodly number of the first generation of XBOX 360 hardware. I'm talking about the person who came up with the idea of achievement points.

The achievement points concept brings an entire "game within a game" concept into play, allowing players to chase goals that really have nothing to do with the main thrust of the game. The absolute worst achievement I've collected has to be from The Simpsons Game which rewarded me for pressing the start button. Lame....

My favorite achievement comes from Crackdown which rewarded me for killing five criminals while in mid-air. Normally I wouldn't recommend jumping while using a rocket launcher, but man alive was that fun.

Mass Effect Review

Made by the company behind the fantastic Baldur's Gate role-playing games, Mass Effect is the first sci-fi RPG I've ever played, and it's fantastic.




The main plot line involves a baddie named Saren who wants to wipe out humanity (and everything else) by finding and unleashing a race of intelligent machines called the Reapers. The scope is monumental, the look sleek and futuristic and the soundtrack well composed -- all things you would expect from a game of this type.

However the little things really make this game stand out. There are many subtle nods to actual science such as naming a location after Stephen Hawking and a type of ammo made up of Bose-Einstein condensate. The alien races are truly alien - both in look and behavior. The beefy elcor preface each sentence to non-Elcor with the emotion that is meant to be conveyed because truly understanding their native language requires the listener to be in tune with subtle scent and body posture variations. Are these sorts of details really needed? Of course not, but it certainly helps the immersive feel of the game.


There's lots of action, lots of sleuthing and lots of fun to be had. My verdict: this is a game well worth buying instead of renting, especially if you enjoy a good RPG... or alien ladies in tight-fitting body armor.