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• Returning to the Return of the Castle Wolfenstein Returned: This Time It’s Just Plain Ol’ Wolfenstein

  Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg covers games from his secret lair in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, typing, reading and playing the days away as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah. There must be a considerable amount of tension around Raven Software’s offices as they prepare Wolfenstein, the latest sequel to the id Software’s grand-pappy of all first-person shooters. After all, the once-cool practice of gunning down Nazis with a beefy chain gun isn’t the uncommon gaming experience it once was. Then there’s Raven, whose talent is eclipsed not only by their recent history of releasing numerous interchangeable genre titles, but also living in the shadow of id themselves. That isn’t necessarily bad news for Wolfenstein, but it does have the effect of keeping expectations firmly in check. Seeing it at Activision’s New York City preview party certainly didn’t raise those expectations. A few minutes of watching Wolfenstein gave a bad impression: another generic World War II shooter with less-than-stellar graphics and straightforward action. It’s when I stuck around for a few more minutes that things started to get odd. For example, there were suddenly Nazis flying through the air in slow motion. Turned out to be anti-gravity. That’s kind of weird. Then there was B.J. Blazkowicz using a magical amulet to “see” Nazis on the other side of a wall. And then shoot them. Not so conventional anymore. Read More... Posted Feb 19 2009, 09:30 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: activision, id, wolfenstein, tron, far cry 2, Adam Rosenberg, return to castle wolfenstein, id software, raven software, jedi knight, wolfenstein 3d

• Whatcha Playing: Far Cry 2

  I know, I know. This is a week of enormous wallet-destroying power, and I should probably be playing Street Fighter IV or something. I’m saving myself for tonight’s release of Noby Noby Boy, actually, but in the meantime I’ll be enjoying something a little bit more mainstream. Surely you won’t deny me the pleasure. And besides, Far Cry 2 is about the best the industry is currently offering to the typical testosterone-filled gaming male at the moment. It’s a confident and meticulously designed work that is happy to eschew the status quo for a better way. Here’s why I think Far Cry 2 is the future of the shooter.* *: Note that I am talking about the single player elements of first-person shooters only. The internet would have you believe that most people play their shooters online these days. This is a lie. The internet is where people play online shooters, so it’s not exactly an unbiased sample. Read More... Posted Feb 19 2009, 11:00 AM by Joe Keiser with | with no comments Filed under: xbox 360, fps, far cry 2, joe keiser, first-person shooters, open world shooters

• John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Open World

  The strange thing about the way we delineate time is that repetition — twelve hours, seven days, twelve months, rinse, wash, repeat — tends to make everything feel cyclical. Come January, we stare forward, looking at the flow of hours to weeks like a one-way street full of fresh landmarks, memories, and conversations. But when we end up back at December, there’s a collective and pervasive sense of déjà vu, an overwhelming feeling that we’re suddenly back in the exact same shoes we were the last time it was December, and we take stock of everything we saw upon that fresh stretch of road as though we’ve come back to the start. We weigh the fruits of time’s passage and immediately compare them to what came before. Maybe that’s why those of us so obsessed with pop culture, who worship at the altar of creation and consumption, gravitate towards retrospective lists; we just can’t seem to help looking back right before we look forward again. I’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out just how to quantify the videogames of 2008, wrestling back and forth with just what to say. There are games that, by the end of my time with them, I downright loathed, that I never wanted to play again, but that I couldn’t shake out of my brain thanks to one aspect of their design. I never managed to finish Grand Theft Auto IV because I was so repulsed by its schizophrenic depiction of character when it put so much emphasis on story (and more on that later.) GTAIV’s Liberty City, though, is something I still think about on an almost daily basis. It is one of the most beautiful and strange creations I’ve ever seen, something more than a photograph, sculpture or film thanks to the way you are allowed to inhabit it. The game’s goals are frustrating to achieve, its characters more personality than people, and its story is at odds with its interactivity. But its world is astounding, just real enough to be familiar, and just other enough to warrant exploring it when its real world inspiration is right outside your door. I hated Grand Theft Auto IV by the time I stopped playing it, but I have to bring it up here because 2008 was the year of the Open World for me. Read More... Posted Dec 16 2008, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, grand theft auto iv, no more heroes, burnout paradise, far cry 2, crackdown, top ten of 2008, mercenaries, elder scrolls, best of 2008

• Heading Home: Revisiting the Curious Case of Playstation Home

  Sony said it was coming before 2008 breathed its last and, hey, here it is. Playstation Home will finally be open to the public as of tomorrow, close to two years after it was announced and a full year after its original release window. But even though PS3 owners across the world will finally be able to download Home 1.0, it still isn’t abundantly clear what they’re going to be able to do in Home once they get there. Here are the things I am one-hundred percent certain you will be able to do in Home on Thursday. Read More... Posted Dec 10 2008, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, grand theft auto iv, playstation 3, home, sony, far cry 2, Playstation home, the watchmen, red bull

• The Big, Scary Numbers of Piracy in 2008

  I’ve been looking at this list TorrentFreak created, the one of the top ten most pirated games of 2008 according to BitTorrent tracking. It is utterly fascinating, but not, as many people latched onto, because Spore is the number one most pirated game of the year. That’s an eye-rolling obvious thing to reveal, the same as if you were told The Dark Knight was the pirated movie of 2008 (Surprise! It is). So the most heavily marketed PC game of the year was the one the most people tried to get for free. So what? No, what’s interesting is how gigantic some of these numbers are. I’m going to go ahead and say this list is almost certainly low-balling the number of people who pirated these games, as only taking into account a certain number of well-managed trackers, as TorrentFreak did, leaves out the private trackers and people who got lucky on bad trackers. And of course, there are the people who went to their local unmarked van for a clandestine exchange using unmarked bills, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s assume these numbers represent a conservative estimate. It was predicted by people paid to predict such things that Spore would sell about 2 million copies in September, and while EA hasn’t released the actual numbers if that turns out to be true that would mean Spore is doing okay. In this case, we’ll define “okay” as “more copies are being sold than being stolen.” After the jump, things will no longer be okay. Read More... Posted Dec 08 2008, 07:00 PM by Joe Keiser with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: the sims, spore, crysis, statistics, piracy, far cry 2, joe keiser

• Where is Prototype?

  The open world game, or sandbox if you prefer, isn’t a genre any longer. At this point, it’s just another method of structuring other genres in a way that gives you more freedom in how to play the game. Open world games aren’t GTA clones anymore; they’re just games with a modern version of the ol’ Mega Man boss select screen. It’s been neat over the past couple of years to watch the open world platform branch out. Crackdown, Assassin’s Creed, Burnout Paradise, Far Cry 2, hell, Spider-Man; all very different games that let you do whatever the hell you please in their world (to a degree) on your way to completion. One of 2008’s more promising games, Radical Entertainment’s Prototype, is a violent action game with a nice open world foundation. It looks gruesome and brutish but it also has some neat ideas behind it, particularly its brand of character customization. Alex Mercer, the genetically altered amnesiac protagonist with a spooky past, eats his felled foes and gains all of their characteristics, abilities, and memories. This lets you come up with all sorts of horrific, bombastic ways to destroy things but it also lets you blend in with crowds, a nice twist on the open world formula of manipulating hordes of NPCs. Sounds cool, no? Read More... Posted Oct 29 2008, 07:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, where is, mega man, grand theft auto, sierra, activision, burnout paradise, far cry 2, crackdown, radical entertainment, assassin’s creed, prototype, spider-man

• Not Quite 4D, But Close: The History of 3D Gaming

  Videogames were born into a flat, two-dimensional perspective and they are bound to an inherently two-dimensional delivery system, but, from their inception half a century ago, they have been trying their damndest to simulate a bonafide world of depth. For half their lifetime, games have let us move into a world instead of just on it and, today, the simulation can be almost unsettlingly real. The racing tracks of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, the jungles and glaciers of Crysis, not to mention Far Cry 2’s African savannah, all feel like our world, even when they don’t behave exactly like it. After all, cars tend to crumple when they run into other cars, and grass tends to bend and warp when you step on it. (Not to mention the lack of robots and aliens in real life. Oh, and getting shot will kill you, not force you to hunt for a medpack.) But even full fantasy landscapes like the lush solar-systems-in-miniature of Super Mario Galaxy create a familiar sense of space. It has been a long, difficult journey to get to this point, though. Edge Online is running a fascinating, densely technical, history of 3D in games and it’s an eye-opening read. The only thing missing from the overview is a footnote in gaming history, but is important all the same. Read More... Posted Oct 28 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, wii, gran turismo, crysis, super mario galaxy, dragon’s lair, don bluth, far cry 2