A whole gaggle of teams rolled into the lower atrium, geared up to see who could lane the hardest and who could macro their micro the best. What interests me, though, was what was on the sidelines; the games that not everybody cares for. Some people, though, care enough to come to arguably the biggest LAN event of the year and willfully segregate themselves from the rest of the gaming community via esoteric taste. Here’s some interesting little bits of the night, as I encountered them.

Speedy Gonzales

Two guys, one on an honest-to-God Nintendo 64, the other on a PC emulator, both playing through The Legend of Zelda: Orcarina of Time, racing to the Master Sword. I asked them why they would come to a public, group party like this and willfully separate themselves. Simply, they said they just like doing speedruns of this sort, though they both admitted to playing LoL on the side. Without tools, one of them said he’d beaten Super Mario 64 in 30 minutes, something I didn’t realize was possible.

Two Guys, Two Games

Earlier in the night, things weren’t really going yet, but gaming always finds a way. One guy, excited to play Defense of the Ancients 2 (DotA2). Instead of playing Valve’s hot-pants MOBA, he was trapped in a game of the indie rogue-like, The Binding of Isaac. His excuse? “DotA Purgatory”, which was his way of explaining server issues. Sitting next to him was a bit of something more classic. On a Nexus 7 tablet, one man enjoyed a fine game of Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga. Who says the Gameboy Advance is dead?

Keeping it Real

What kind of LAN party would it be without the obligatory retro station? The hybrid NES/SNES console, the RetroDuo, resulted in some good times from ancient times. The game of the day was the semi-esoteric Machine Warriors, a robot fighting game for the SNES. Host to a variety of different mechs, each with their unique movement options, weapons, and the source of at least a handful of friendly matches. All of this through a TV no bigger than a breadbox (like 12 inches). It’s a huge surprise that these people remained dedicated to the consoles and didn’t give in, bring their PCs, and start learning LoL.

Of course, the more/less friendly matches came about with the Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 tournament. Far from mainstream professional play, these few fans of the fighter came and cheered on the new players and jeered the more experienced. Of course, the finals rooted out those less experienced, but it was clear that this cute corner of the sprawling party was at least as excited (and loud) as the nearly silent remainder.

The Many Miscellaneous

There were even more random, unknown things I saw only in passing. Here’s a quick list!

• One person playing Guild Wars 2
• One handsome Adonis playing World of Warcraft
• An animated Fluttershy dancing across an unoccupied PC
• A small (tiny, really) handful of people playing Counter Strike 1.6
• A contingent of Team Fortress 2 players. Not many of them, but it’s hard not to notice Valve’s cell-shaded shooter

Painkiller: Hell and Damnation casts the player as Daniel Garner: a man dead from the beginning and trying to ascend to heaven…or bring his wife back from the dead. It’s never really clear which, and it doesn’t need to be. That’s the beauty of Painkiller; the writing, the acting, and the narrative blend the stupid and the insane like bananas and chocolate. The story exists solely to drive fantastical scenarios with interesting enemies. Why does Death want you to collect 7000 souls? Because killing 7000 monsters is fun. Why is Eve, a scantily clad woman, hanging out with Daniel? She doesn’t add much to the story, but it’s through her you get an excuse to kill Death. Every narrative element exists for the sake of framing increasingly impossible situations. If the game weren’t so much fun, I could fault the story.

Wacky story aside, Painkiller’s main draw is gibbing monsters. Each weapon feels unique and has a devious twist. Since shotguns are too normal, they have a secondary fire that can freeze enemies. Already insane weapons become crazier; a gun that fires massive, wooden stakes also fires a grenade; a gun that shoots five bolts of rebar also launches a dozen or so bouncing explosives. The shooting and general gameplay is a welcome departure from the military-FPS landscape. Sadly, most of the weapons feel like plastic props without any real weight or punch. Most of them slay in a single hit, but don’t feel powerful. Killing dozens should always be fun, but when you’re shooting confetti from a paper-mache gun it can only end in disappointment. It was only after hours of slaughter that the weapons started to feel like they’re made of foam. Regardless, murder should never be boring.

But, at some point, you get numb. For the first couple hours, nailing witches to walls and blowing up insane monks to the tune of screaming guitars is unique. After two or three hours of murder to metal though, slaying starts to feel like a chore. Compounding the fatigue is Painkiller’s AI, which normally wouldn’t be a concern. After all, the fun comes from killing hordes and staying mobile, not from dealing with complicated attack patterns. The AI is so basic that enemies may as well kill themselves. Enemies charge mindlessly at you. Those with ranged weapons stand in place waiting for a swift death. Evading melee attacks is as easy as hopping on anything elevated. Enemies feel like even less than fodder instead of being a focal point for your murderous creativity.

Which is a real shame. When the game works as it does for the first few hours, it works well. This is the general problem with Painkiller; it wears off quick. For example, the level design is straight out of Doom, complete with intricate-yet-open levels riddled with secret items and areas. For an hour or so, it’s great to find goodies and money that unlock more Tarot Cards, which alter how the game plays with things like bullet time, or higher damage resistance. However, after getting just a few powerful cards I stopped caring about secrets. Tarot Cards and personal achievement are really the only reasons to replay a level. Beating a level under a certain time or using a certain weapon unlocks more cards. I was content with just four.

If you don’t care about beating high scores or speed-runs, you won’t find much to Painkiller’s replayability. I’m sure some people find their blood excited at the prospect of secret areas and racing to the finish, but it’s not something I find compelling. After beating the campaign once, I don’t feel like the need to replay it. Considering I beat the campaign in less than four hours, this is something to keep in mind when thinking about your purchase. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary.

If enemies were more varied or the gunplay better, Painkiller: Hell and Damnation would be a strong recommendation. Don’t get me wrong; Painkiller is a great time, but one that runs out of steam unless you’ve got a vested interest in what Painkiller represents: a flashback to old design. That includes all the good, and the bad.

7.5 / 10

The problem with Big Sky Infinity is that the randomized pieces eventually repeat. The structure of the game feels built around reusing content. In the campaign, you kill to earn starbits that you spend on upgrades for more directional bullets, occasional explosives; pretty basic power-ups. In a different game, these persistent boosts could make the player feel empowered as time goes on, like an RPG. But, unlike an RPG, upgrades don’t accrue fast or in any obvious way. Instead, most upgrades seem inconsequential, like a tenth of a percent increase in power or an extra bullet every eight seconds. What could have been replaying for fun and XP feels like the worst kind of MMO grind. Environments are flashy and interesting, but it doesn’t modify gameplay. Bosses are interesting and play more like puzzles, but there’s only a handful. Big Sky Infinity has a habit of repeating itself.

There are twelve different modes, but almost all are identical to campaign, albeit with a slight tweak like a time limit, spawning with random power-ups, or no shooting. Some of these are interesting, but are mostly side distractions that can’t stand on their own. This wouldn’t be so damning if the campaign carried the fun, but no mode ensnared my attention for more than a few minutes. If genocide against BSI’s geometric enemies were more fun, I could excuse how repetitive the whole thing feels. After all, Tetris deals with four basic shapes and is one of the world’s most memorable. But, BSI couldn’t be further from this philosophy of simple variety.

Speaking of avoiding simple variety, there are many, many different types of enemies, which are nearly indistinguishable from one another. Each is meant to behave differently, attack differently, and look different but it’s typically a vague blob of indistinguishable enemies. If they were different, visually, it could be easier to tell them apart and give some a sense of meaning. As it is, none of the enemies have even half the personality as the green shapes in Geometry Wars 2.

That’s the thesis of Big Sky Infinity; flashy and interesting at first, which fades once you recognize that appeal is only skin deep. Big Sky Infinity is, at best, a distraction for a few days. Don’t expect to lose weeks to this middling shooter, but do expect to an excellent first impression.

5.5/10

Squigly, one of the upcoming DLC characters. Isn’t she precious?!

 

1. A Tragic Origin Story. The long-short Skullgirls’ history is Reverge Labs released Skullgirls just about a year ago, but were laid off not long after launch. Some speculate that it was tied to legal troubles relating to an earlier game, but the important part is the firing. Instead of moving on and letting Skullgirls slowly rot and decay from lack of updates, the staff came together and forged Lab Zero Games for the sake of supporting Skullgirls.

How can someone say “no” to a team of people that cares so much about the game, that even after being fired they want to keep the community and game alive? These dedicated developers wanted to see their baby grow and blossom. They cared more about doing their fans right than the easy thing, finding new jobs. Overcoming adversity for a good cause? Sounds like Oscar-bait, to me.

2. A Humble Proposal. When you’re asking investors for money, it’s all about the presentation. If you come off too aggressive, you could look entitled. If you don’t prove you can do good work, it’ll look like you’ll blow it on booze. If you don’t make it immediate or important enough, people won’t bother. Lab Zero Games and their campaign managed to hit all these beats having proven they are great developers, presenting themselves as needing the money, but also not expecting to get it.

By following the formula, LZG looked positively humble, like those bundles that are all the rage. As such, people saw the campaign and thought of all the joy they could bring fans, and all the people at LZG who loved this project, and were shot down before their game had a chance to truly shine.

3. Fans of the Genre. Every community likes to imagine theirs is best, that their cute corner of the internet is somehow special. The timeline for most communities is a swell at launch, and then a slow deflation, until finally reaching the perfect equilibrium for their clique. Maybe it’s how cute it is, or how much attention went to the details, but something about the Skullgirls fandom has the air of being more snowflake-unique than other sects of fighters. Even after nearly a year after launch, long enough for most MMOs to be on their last legs, SG raised $78,760 for breast cancer research to get their game into the main lineup for EVO 2013.

They didn’t win, but came second only to Super Smash Brothers Melee, a title that’s been around for over a decade. For a downloadable game that’s less than a year old to come even second to such a goliath shows that even before their IndieGoGo campaign, Skullgirls fans have some sort of X-Factor, and not the one from Marvel VS Capcom 3. Of course, being a fantastic game probably has a lot to do with the community love.

4. Cute girls, girls, girls. No, I’m not going to say “sex sells” and be done with it. The cast is relatively small, especially compared to the likes of Street Fighter or Tekken. Those fighters have dozens of playable characters, but Skullgirls offers only eight, yet each is unique enough that you could tell who’s who based solely on their silhouette, much like Team Fortress 2, or Pokemon.

Plus, the internet is crazy for cute girls and loves to draw cute girls. A quick search on Tumlbr or DeviantArt turns up thousands of results (many NSFW) going all the way back to 2006. When combined with the next entry, you get a series of characters that make for an effective marketing campaign…because sex sells.

Just some of the fan art from the EVO Drive. Image credit to =rtil

 

5. Grassroots in your grassroots. Tying to the previous entry, sex does indeed sell. But, you need someone to actually push your product. In Skullgirls’ case, the people selling the game’s hotness has often been the fans themselves. The nature of the IndieGoGo campaign is already reliant on grassroots and word-of-mouth, so when you mix these up in the perfect milkshake, what’s the final flavor?

Just the right blend of fans churning out free marketing, and a campaign that keeps a great game going. The fans make the art, spread the word, and do most of the legwork for the campaigners. Once funded, the fans campaign even harder for their favorite concept character to win the elections. It’s a strategy that keeps on giving, and one the fans are happy to be a part of.

More than anything, the campaign was successful because Skullgirls is great, and Lab Zero Games are some talented people with the coolest fans. And really, the only reason I wrote this article was to tell you all to vote Minette!

Combat begins to truly shine with the introduction of the Zan-Datsu system. If you get an enemy’s health low enough, or you’re fighting a sufficiently weak one, you can slice them to bits at any angle and then pull out their “healing unit” (read: spine) to restore your health. Being able to cut enemies a dozen times, any direction, is immensely satisfying. The free-cutting Zan-Datsu system works very well, and feels like an extra neat little way to finish off enemies beyond a boring button press accompanied by a fancy animation.

Nowhere does Rising deviate further from its origins than in boss fights. Gone are the intricate, strategic designs. A few are good fun and give the player a taste of how absurdly strong Raiden is; lifting and throwing a huge robot, for example, feels appropriately epic. On the other hand, there are more frustrating bosses than fun ones. Instead of an interesting strategic quirk, most encounters are little more than “dodge, attack, Zan-Datsu” repeated three times and finished with a quick time event. Some fights feel special and interesting, but they’re an underwhelming minority. The closest thing I’ve found to a Kojima quirk is throwing a certain kind of grenade at a specific boss. Maybe there’s additional layers to some of these fights I never discovered, but if there’s anything deeper I certain couldn’t see it. That isn’t to say boss encounters are all awful, but there’s only one or two that were truly enjoyable. The rest were very “meh”.

If there is one part of the series that has been retained though, it’s the plot devices. Only in a Metal Gear game are you trekking across the globe to find cyborg brains held captive by a bloodthirsty Private Military Companies (PMCs). Only in Metal Gear is there a 10-year-old aerospace engineer. And, of course, only in Metal Gear do you fight a boss that looks like the hulk thanks to nanomachines. Usually the story of a Kojima game focuses on something important, like information control, or nuclear deterrence and proliferation. Rising doesn’t seem to have any real message besides “violence is bad.” The closest thing I can come up with is how it revisits and extends MGS4’s critical look at PMCs, but even there it doesn’t add much to the conversation. It has elements of a Metal Gear story, but without a new message beyond “war is bad” and “PMCs are probably too powerful.”

On a more personal level, much of Rising is dedicated to expressing Raiden’s internal struggle at the constant violence he’s inflicting, balanced against his wish to protect people. It’s great to see a game trying to deal with this, but the way they handle it doesn’t really pan out. He has an epiphany about the kind of person he is and instead of changing, he embraces the darkness in him. But, instead of this having any real bearing on the game or story, it leads to him doing the same things as before except now the player can activate “Jack Mode” where attacks are stronger.

There’s nothing particularly excellent about Metal Gear Rising: Revengence. The combat is fun enough, and the story is pretty interesting, but none of it excels beyond a baseline of “just alright”. Rising doesn’t feel like a Metal Gear game, but the absence of those elements isn’t what makes this so very middle of the road.

7.5/10

Get used to seeing that wheel, because it’s about the only thing you’ll see for the game’s scant five-hour length.

I suppose you could say that by making boring decisions -like if you should go to a planet that is calling for help or ignore it- is technically gameplay. This is technically gameplay in the same way that changing my resolution has me in the game, and has me interacting with it on a basic level. Using BioWare’s conversation oval, you navigate your way through and kill, at most, three dozen enemies.

2. None of the decisions you make matter, from ME or otherwise. To carry on the metaphor, the same way “Choose your own adventure” books only had one real ending with multiple fake or bad endings, every ending of ME2 is essentially the same. You make thousands of choices in ME2, and none of them have any short or long-term impact. I decided to not shoot someone, but now what? They didn’t shoot me, so what did it matter? Why would I even bother playing this? All you ever do is make meaningless choices that lead to more meaningless choices.

Remember this massive, far-reaching decision you made in ME? ME2 seems to have forgotten.

More importantly, BioWare has outright lied to fans, claiming that big decisions made in the first Mass Effect would carry over to the second. Despite importing my save into ME2, I didn’t see a single change to the game. No new encounters, no new quests, and no new cutscenes. Will any of my decisions in ME2 matter for Mass Effect 3? Probably not.

3. Planet scanning is the single worst method for accruing resources and is worse and more repetitive than the most grindy of Dragon Quest games. You see, one of the many choices you can make in ME2 is to scan planets for minerals. Minerals are used as your ship’s primary fuel source, so you need to be scanning constantly, and I mean constantly. This means that just when you’re about to go off and save the galaxy from boring aliens who look like clones from a bad Dr. Who episode, you need to spend ten minutes scouring planets for fuel.

It’s a simulation of virtual work in a virtual world for a virtual ship. It’s the worst thing, but it may have accidentally created virtual reality.

Not only does scanning completely break pacing, but you need these minerals to unlock new weapons to defeat the game’s many, many bosses. Essentially, each planet you go to burns fuel, so you need to scan, but you need to travel, so you need fuel. It’s an infinite loop of horrible design, and BioWare should be ashamed for having pulled out the stellar planet exploration of Mass Effect, wherein you actually visit each world you wanted to mine every world was radically different from the next.

4. You need to buy half the game in DLC. It’s not uncommon for a game to release DLC months after launch that augment the game, but ME2 takes it in a disgusting direction. For months, microscopic bits of ME2 that were removed were trickled out for a premium price. It makes me sick to think I paid $15 for an hour and a half of gameplay, hoping it would redeem the mess that is ME2. Key plot points that are supposed to tie into ME3 were left out of ME2’s retail disk, and were instead sold to consumers separately.

Want to roll with Liara who was in ME and will have a big part in ME3? That’ll be $15.

On top of this highway robbery for barely playable content, BioWare had the nerve to sell the real end of the game nearly a year after ME2 was released. On the principal that this is sinister on par with the X-Men villain Mr. Sinister, I refuse to buy this obviously awful content. Every reviewer who played this and supported this evil practice deserves to have their game consoles confiscated and replaced with a calculator, so they can figure out how much time and money they’ve wasted on garbage.

5. The story doesn’t make sense, isn’t original, and bored me to the point of suicide. Remember in Halo when you found out that an alien race had existed thousands of years before the current galaxy-spanning races? Remember in Metal Gear Solid 1-4 when you find out that the person you’ve been working for has been evil all along? Remember in X-Files when a man who smokes has ulterior motives? If you’ve played or seen any of these-or most games and movies and TV shows- the story of Mass Effect 2 will be as predictable as an episode of CSI: The Hackneyed Script.

Looks like when it comes to Mass Effect 2…I wasn’t effected.

On top of its predictability, ME2’s story is unbelievably boring. When I say “unbelievably”, I mean it. I could literally not believe how bored I was for every second from the first time I pressed start through the end of the game. It took weeks for me to finish the first mission because each time I tried to play it put me to sleep faster than horse tranquilizers. A more boring game there isn’t.

6. The most boring cast in the galaxy. People today aren’t happy with a cast of five characters who are all so similar they may as well be clones. Casts in modern entertainment feel more like Captain Planet or GI Joe than a diverse group of individuals connected by a shared goal or circumstance. Somehow, in today’s overly diverse and “trying too hard” world of casting, every crew member is the same.

What was that? I couldn’t hear you over how cliché I am.

One crew member, Garrus, is a trained killer who will do anything to complete his objective and kill anyone in his way. Another, Grunt, is a trained killer who will do anything to complete his objective and kill anyone in his way. Guess who Thane is and what he does? Here’s a hint: he isn’t a pastry chef. The whole cast is copy-pasted more than my description of Grunt. How can a cast of creatures be so unique looking and sounding, yet be the exact same? BioWare found a way to turn cool, Star Wars-esque aliens into boring space marines.

7. It isn’t an RPG. In the tabletop RPG Dungeons and Dragons you roll a die, or dice, and multiply that by your skill with whatever you’re doing. As you play and level up you put points into stats which give you higher numbers, which help you perform better. It gives you a sense of progress and attachment to your character. I’ll give you so much money if you can guess what ME2 doesn’t have. Instead of sticking with the statistics and traditional leveling system of ME, ME2 has moved towards being a pure shooter. Instead of gaining points, the only things you unlock are new abilities (which are worthless anyways).

What is this missing? Oh, right, everything a character sheet should have.

How is this not classified as a third-person adventure game? With how little shooting there is, it shouldn’t be a shooter. With a total absence of RPG elements, this isn’t an RPG. BioWare again shows that it isn’t above lying to their loyal customers. Dragon Age 2 was excellent (read my Dragon Age 2 review at BeefJack.com!) and had stats, leveling, useful skills, and came out after Mass Effect 2. Did all the numbers from ME2 get pushed into DA2? I’m not sure where they went, but I want my numbers back. Hell, I can’t even see how much damage I’m doing to enemies. How am I supposed to min/max my stats when I don’t have stats? How am I supposed to calculate the best gear in my spreadsheet if I can’t see stats?

8. The combat doesn’t know what it wants to be. Mass Effect was undeniably an RPG. The combat was slow and methodical and the gunplay was rightfully floaty. If you could accurately shoot everything, why would you bother leveling up at all? Mass Effect 2 on the other hand, feels like it’s trying to be a shooter, but is still loose and floaty like an RPG. The very few enemy types (more on that next) there are rush towards the player as if you were given the ability to quickly acquire targets and swiftly murder them, but you can’t.

You wouldn’t know it, but it took the person playing three hours to kill that lone robot. With god mode.

Aiming feels so loose that a slight tap on the right stick sends your character spinning in a circle like a retarded dog chasing the tail he doesn’t have because he already bit it off. Keeping with the awfulness of the rest of the game, you’re unable to adjust your aiming sensitivity in any way. At the same time, cutscenes show you and your team being major badasses. Why can’t I be that cool in real combat? Why doesn’t BioWare want me to have fun? The only reason I can think of is because they’re simply bad, malicious people.

9. Boring enemies. Slowly, over the years, games have been homogenizing types of enemies. Instead of fighting more than ten different enemies in something like Serious Sam, all of which behaved differently and had varying amounts of health, it’s boiled down to “regular enemy, heavy enemy, and massive enemy”. Mass Effect 2 is a shining example of everything wrong with modern game design, refusing even to branch out into different sub-types of baddies. The first foe you fight is the exact same as the last enemy you kill before a boring, time-wasting boss.

One of the three or so enemies you encounter in the game. Guess which one he is! Hint: it’s pastry chef.

Honestly, it’s like they didn’t even try. You fight some robots, then some more robots, a bigger robot, and then smaller robots. Vanquish had exclusively robotic enemies and there were at least half a dozen different kinds, each totally different from the rest. Even Star Wars, the series famous for being recycled and abused, has dozens of different types of robots in their many games.

10. The game amounts to basically nothing. ME2 acts as little more than a setup for ME3. The whole story goes nowhere, and doesn’t add anything to the series besides another number in the title. In the same way that recent movie games try to act as prequels or interquels between movies, ME2 isn’t a real game. Instead it’s a cheap bridge between the fantastic third-person RPG/shooter hybrid ME was and whatever ME3 will be.

Will Mass Effect 3 suck? At the rate these games have gone downhill, ME3 will be banned for being offensively bad, and not just in Germany.

We’ve seen that BioWare isn’t afraid to lie to their customers about decisions carrying over, so if the decisions here truly won’t carry over, why bother? You’re better off starting ME3 from the start, and ignoring the pile of lies and shit that ME2 is. You’ll be spared the constant barrage of bad that characterizes ME2 and won’t be dissuaded from playing BioWare’s other, much better titles.

Between all of these things, how can ME2 be anything but the worst game ever made? Logically, it’s impossible for ME2 to be anything besides the most broken, most boring, worst made, and most horrible piece of interactivity ever wrought by man.

Note: This piece is satire.

Guilt. I admit it. I used to pirate games, and often. When Fallout 3 was nearing release in 2008 I thought about pirating it, and was on the fence between buying and stealing it. My logic was thus: stealing is free and I didn’t have the money to buy any games. It wasn’t until I read a story that Bethesda was putting faith in their customers by including only the most minor of DRM measures in the form of a disk check. As a man who was raised Catholic, guilt can push me to do most things.

Good faith without guilt. A Great War has been raging in recent years; the war between publishers and their customers. The cycle is as follows: a publisher releases a new anti-piracy measure that restricts consumer freedom, like Ubisoft’s recent system of forcing a constant internet connection, and scene groups crack the protection wide open. The publisher raises the stakes with an even more restrictive and powerful DRM measure, and it’s cracked soon after. This reached a boiling point in 2008 when Spore, from the team behind Sims, contained DRM that limited the number of times you could install the game to three. Not three on one machine, but three… ever. This prevented those who had bought Spore from using it how they wished, and set it up so those who stole the game were freer than those who bought it. In this war of attrition between people and companies, I was surprised to hear Stardock come out and say their games will forever have no DRM. Stardock knows the PC, and they know how fatigued people have become with being restricted in what they’ve bought. By including no restrictions on their games they put forth the ultimate show of good faith. In the DRM war, they were one of the earliest who refused to fight.

Incentive to buy, not deterrent from stealing. I know some people loath having a different ID and login for each major publisher, but if nothing else it acts as a reasonable incentive to buy instead of steal. For example, when popping Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit into my Xbox 360 I was told I’d been rewarded for having played another EA racing game. Sure, it’s a small measure, but it’s a means of positive reinforcement. Even Ubisoft is putting in a sort of proprietary second-layer of rewards, on top of XBLA and PSN, with their uPlay system. You play games, earn points, and use those points to buy stuff to unlock in the games. It’s almost like you’re spending achievements or trophies on real content.

If I decide to go legitimate with my games, I get access to multiplayer, leaderboards, and the ability to use some sort of persistent rewards program, be it PSN, XBLA, or a publisher-exclusive system. This clashes with many publsiher’s decision to include a redeemable code for online access; instead of opening access, they’re restricting it. Be it “EA’s “Project $10”, THQ’s Online Pass, Codemaster’s VIP Pass, or the rumored PSN Pass, they’re all efforts to curb piracy (and used game sales).

This all adds up to the sellers of games making it harder for legitimate players to get online, whereas pirates will always find a way to play together anyways. Granted, it’s not exactly a high hurdle to getting online, but it’s still annoying for each new game having to enter a code, especially on consoles. Hell, with Steam managing everything I haven’t had to type a code into my PC for years. The PC, which used to required a code for EVERY new game now rarely does, and console games which used to never require a code now do more often than not.

Going the extra mile. High-quality promotions surrounding the game are great ways to get people to buy. If I can pre-order a game on Amazon and get $10-$20 credit towards any other game, I’m much more likely to buy over renting. With one promotion I can support the creators and get some cash for the next game. This same logic can be used to encourage platform loyalty, and can be seen in Batman: Arkham Asylum making The Joker exclusive to the PS3 version and Valve’s decision to give a 100% free copy of Portal 2 to those who bought it for the PS3. Sure, if you only own one platform you’ll feel ignored, but when the right mix of publisher and console comes your way it feels great. Valve and Eidos didn’t need to do give free content, but I’d wager giving stuff away for free keeps people from stealing.

Reasonable pricing. Say I want to take my first dip into the Xbox 360’s library. Microsoft (and Sony and Nintendo) have smartly lowered the price of older, bestselling games to the $19.99 range. For games that weren’t popular enough to quite hit Greatest/Platinum Hits range and are now rare, what incentive do I have to pay what they were four years ago? Why shouldn’t I just pirate it? Not only is it free, but it’s guaranteed to work, and I won’t have to buy second hand. After many months post-release, sometimes the only available copies are used, and the publisher gets nothing of that. The game is more expensive than it should be, and isn’t even new, so why not pirate? Well, it’s illegal and morally wrong, but that’s not a code that everypony subscribes to. The best way to curb piracy of older games is to price a game lower relative to the release date and make sure it’s available. Just look at the PS2 HD collections hitting the PS3: these collections contain the incentive of higher quality visuals, very reasonable pricing, and supporting the people who made it. Also, trophies.

Twisted Pixel recently lowered the price permanently of their latest game, Comic Jumper, from $15 to $10 I was a little shocked. You see, I have a fear that as the digital age approaches the lack of physical scarcity will keep the price of everything artificially high. If there is no physical stock and no reason to clear space for new merchandise, why have a sale? Twisted Pixel permanently lowering the price falls into the categories of good faith, persistence (leaderboards, XBLA’s achievements), and reasonable pricing, so good on them.

There’s really no way to stop piracy. A wise man once said, “If you outlaw something, it doesn’t mean people will stop doing it. All that will do is make the people who do it into outlaws.” When you break it down piracy is stealing, and stealing is the idea that you can take something without paying for it. If we lived in the world Star Trek’s matter-replicating replicators we’d have people stealing intellectual property instead of products and money. As long as there is anything one person has that everybody else doesn’t have, there will be some form of stealing. All these laws being passed against piracy are meaningless, and a formality at best. The best insurance to get consumers buying someone is to be nice to them and give them free shit.

Not pictured, how all of the information in these books is freely available online or how much of a sucker you would be for buying this. Ever.

I ask you, with Steam’s built in game overlay and web browser, how much longer can this model survive? To be honest, in the digital space, I believe they’ll be around forever. I can go to a free walkthrough on GameFAQs that’s got typos and may not be very well written, or I can buy a professionally edited, printed, and written guide with pictures and good production value. Additionally, many strategy guides come in collector’s editions, massive hardcover tomes that feel more like nerd cred than being a primary use for game hints. Sadly, the premium price has kept me from buying any, except one I found at a going-out-of-business sale.

2. Brick-and-Mortar video/game rental shops. Netflix and Redbox are doing a pretty good job of burying the few remaining nation rental chains, but video games have always been an important part of the equation. Of course, Gamefly is swooping in to fill that specific niche, but it just isn’t the same. As a child of the 90’s, there was a magical feeling to visiting a Video Update or a Hollywood Video knowing you’d be walking out with a new video game for the next three days. Of course it was expensive and the selection weak, but it was cheap enough that my parents preferred it.

Blockbuster is too big to fail and Netflix is a fad. Also, late fees.

Back in the day, there was even the option for you to rent an entire video game system. Can you imagine that? Going to a Blockbuster to rent an entire game system without having to invest hundreds of dollars sounded like a dream. Does a new release catch your eye, but is platform exclusive? Just rent a PS3 and play inFAMOUS 2! The death of rental shops is heralded as great progress by some, a nationwide tragedy by others, but feels like the next logical step to me.

3. Cheat devices. No, not the client you run while you play Counter Strike to blink around the map (you asshole) or the hack you use to see where everyone is in Call of Duty (you piece of shit). Old school cheat devices, specifically the GameShark, Game Genie and Action Replay, were key parts of the past. As a kid, knowing someone with a GameShark meant I could get Mew without having to go to an official event. With Game Genie I could do all the Sonic 2 cheats without writing down or trying to memorize what sound effects to trigger. Of course, these also needed a physical book which held all of the cheats, released every so often with all the new game’s codes. It was the “sell them the razor so they can buy the blade for years” strategy, and worked. Until the internet came in and shit all over any sense of propriety. For more details of the internet ruining things, see entry number one, and then slap yourself for having already forgotten about it.

Thanks, GameShark! You made my 11 year-old self’s day.

The way these old cheat devices worked, generally, by getting between the game and your console and then changing data as it passed between them. In the modern age, and even last generation, the movement towards optical storage keeps any sharks or genies from modifying any data. Still, some kept going through the 2000’s, like with Action Replay, which would modify save games on memory cards, but even those are on the way out. Instead, I see the future of cheating/game modifying being done through software means.

4. Our Nostalgia. This comes from a few different directions. The easiest target is Sega, who asks people around the world “Hey, remember Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis? Well now you can play it on [LATEST CONSOLE HERE]!” Some games are annualized, like Madden, but I think the Sonic games on the genesis are the only games to be annualized without ever actually changing. Taking a cue from Sega, Nintendo has been flexing their download muscle in recent years, releasing many classic titles on their Virtual Console service.

Do you guys remember playing this as a child, and last year, and the year before that, and every year going back to 2001? DO YOU?

Even for more recent games, like anything worthwhile from the PS2, we’re starting to see HD collections popping up all over. Can you have nostalgia for a mere five years ago? If you did, Sony will happily murder it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as sometimes nostalgia blinds us from how god-awful our childhoods were. I remember, like many, that Sonic Adventure was super great, but without our nostalgia glasses I can see that there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Thankfully, Sega is around to re-release anything that’s been even almost successful to remind us that it wasn’t that good; it was just the brightest bulb in a box of shattered lights.

5. Stereotypes. As a large man with a thick, luscious beard I may not be the best to speak on this. Then again, by virtue of having existed for so many decades, video game stereotypes are starting to evaporate. Does the fratboy Madden/Call of Duty/Halo fiend get called a nerd because he’s prestige’d four times? Is the normal, productive, married couple shunned because they like to run heroic dungeons together? Times are changing, and owning two out of three game systems doesn’t make you a massive nerd any more than having two computers in your house makes you a programmer.

Or owning a punctuation suit guarantees you’ll always be yelling forever.

Of course, as with any other stereotypes, those who fit them will always exist, but the world will slowly become less aware of them. If everybody plays games, yet a portion of people who play are, coincidentally, basement dwelling creatures, so what? A few people who collect stamps are sure to be serial killers, but that doesn’t mean they’re related. Similarly, someone can be a below-ground mole-person without having any interest in video games at all.

What we know today has destroyed and overwritten what we knew yesterday, and what we’ll learn tomorrow will crush whatever we did today. In the name of progress, all of these things are going to either have to die or evolve. In the case of rentals, they changed with the times, and those who didn’t are dead and dying. Top-quality strategy guides will always have a place for those who want the best, even digitally. Cheating no longer takes a hunk of plastic, but digital knowhow instead. What is a nerd? Tomorrow, it won’t be someone who games, but just someone who is obsessed and driven by something, be it football or art or math. Tomorrow is yesterday, and today is a bulldozer.

inFAMOUS 2 has you play as Cole MacGrath who, in the first game, gained the ability to shoot different electricity based attacks after a plot-driven explosion gave him his powers. At the end of inFAMOUS Cole was warned about The Beast: a horrible monster that would cripple the entire U.S.. inFAMOUS 2 starts with Cole fighting and (the most minor of spoilers here) getting his ass thrashed by The Beast. He escapes and travels to the New Orleans-inspired New Marais with his best friend, Zeke, who betrayed him in inFAMOUS. His goal in New Marais: find the man who designed the device that gave him his fantastical electric powers in inFAMOUS in hopes that he can give Cole additional powers to defeat The Beast.

The Beast is formidable. Who do you know that can spawn volcanoes?

As you play you make decisions that affect your karma; essentially a light side/dark side meter with choices generally being stark black or white, though some grey area creeps in for certain decisions. These choices and your general behavior will affect which powers you can unlock, and lock out the opposite karma’s equivalent. For example: if you’re playing a good character, you’ll be restricted to good and neutral versions of powers with the evil versions locked. For many of the powers, there’s a regular version and then several good/evil versions meaning even if you play the middle of the road you’ll still have access to at least the base level of everything.

The Good

Feels good, man. When I walk away from an especially immersive game I can’t help but feel like part of the game managed to rub off on me. Maybe I’m weird, but I get that feeling from inFAMOUS 2; thinking I could almost hop off a local bridge, ride on top of a car, use the car to launch myself into the air, and then float to safety. The way you fall and float feel just close enough to reality to make me envious.

Companion surprises. When I first saw you’d team up with Kuo and Nix, who are respectively aligned as good/evil and are even colored blue/red, I sighed so hard it hurt. How much more cliché could the karma choices get? Yet, as I played and got to know these two, I started to see that they aren’t just archetypes but felt like they were people. Initially, you see that Nix is a rule breaker and a maniac, but you learn why she’s like that, and I won’t lie: I thought about switching my karma from good to evil just so I could hang with her more often.

The differences between Nix and Kuo are definitely jarring…

Acting! What really sells the companions, and the rest of the characters, is how good the acting is. I rarely felt any of the dialogue or delivery was smothered in cheese, at least not in a serious situation. Random folk on the street say silly things, but I never felt any performance was too hammy.

Writing done right. On top of the acting, the writing in inFAMOUS 2 is mostly great, with dialogue that feels believable a majority of the time. The exceptions are some of the lines Zeke delivers which fall flat, but even those feel purposeful because Zeke is kind of a dork. They’re well-done and sound like they’re coming from just a lame guy you know. Additionally, it is mildly ridiculous how “gravely” Cole’s voice can sound, especially when you hear him speak like a normal person only to shift into his “I’m being serious and almost growling” voice.

Shocking. The powers you have at the start, which by the way number many more than inFAMOUS, made me feel powerful. Despite what you may have heard, not all of your powers are unlocked at the start, though many are. What you have to work with and what you eventually earn made me feel like a superhero, though nobody who could be considered “God-tier”. I felt about as powerful as Spiderman, but not quite as weak as Dazzler.

Animated. To me, one of the biggest faults of infamous was how horrible all of the in-game cutscenes were. Everything was jerky, nothing looked even close to being realistic, and it looked like facial animation was on par with paper bag puppets. inFAMOUS 2 though has what I’d consider modern cutscenes, with smooth body animation and pretty good faces. Normally, I wouldn’t mention this because it’s sort of assumed that people will move and act like people, but inFAMOUS was hideous.

Benefits of electrics. By making Cole use electricity for everything Sucker Punch has avoided several of the problems I feel shooters generally run into. You see, inFAMOUS 2 controls like most other third person shooters but plays a bit different than contemporaries. Instead of bullet holes, missed shots arc electricity around the environment. Instead of a finite number of grenades or rockets, all your powers use a shared pool of electricity with more powerful abilities. This keeps inFAMOUS 2 from running into what I feel many ammo-based games hit: where you need to work around what ammo the game gives you, instead of playing how you want. If I want to kill guys exclusively with the sniper rifle, why can’t I? “Because it would break the game”, I am told, so I stopped getting sniper ammo and ran out. By basing the whole experience around electricity SP gives players freedom to use what they want, when they want.

The Bad

Repeat, repeat, repeat. If you don’t like the way the game plays, namely the basic shooting and climbing, you’ll dislike the missions. Almost all side quests are some spin on “kill dudes”. Some missions start like they’ll be stealth, but turn into combat at the end. Occasionally you’ll get a few missions that focus on you traveling as fast as you can across a distance, or not touching the ground, but these are the minority in inFAMOUS 2. Once you’ve cleared the entire map and enemies cease to spawn, there isn’t much to do. Of course there are collectibles, but once those are exhausted New Marais turns into a playground without any toys.

Sticky camera. New to inFAMOUS 2 is the Amp, a melee weapon-stick-thing. When using it the camera zooms way in to show off how great you are for beating fools, but sometimes it gets stuck inside of something, or an enemy will jump away right after you engage them in melee and zoom extremely far out. It happens often enough that I found myself avoiding melee combat when in a narrow alley, or when an enemy was near a wall. Even outside of melee the camera sometimes gets stuck inside a car, or behind a porch. It’s far from crippling, but is a minor annoyance.

After my first play through I immediately wanted to start another save just to see the other ending. After beating most games I don’t revisit them for months, maybe years. Less than a week after finishing inFAMOUS 2 I started my evil/hard save. The few problems I had with the first have been scrubbed away and replaced with a nice coat of polish that makes inFAMOUS 2 feel truly done.

In an immediate departure from the first, Portal 2 opens with a bang. I always felt the first Portal was very subdued, slow and methodical so the big, flashy opening of Portal 2 surprised me. Looking back, this bigger, louder opening sets the tone for the rest of the game. You’re still solving puzzles, but it feels like you’re somehow more active. Maybe it’s the bigger environments or the more talkative characters or the detailed scripting or the better animation, but Portal 2 just feels more grand.

Once I really got going, what stood out most was a certain feeling of doneness that Valve games typically have. During my entire play I only encountered one bug, which I caused trying to break a scripted event. Besides the single bug, Portal 2 is the most polished, finished feeling game I’ve played in years. There was no day-one patch fixing a dozen bugs like many games seem to do. True to Valve time, Portal 2 came out when it was ready and not a month before bug testing started.

I’m calling it right now: Cave Johnson, founder of Aperture Science, is going to be my favorite character of this year and he doesn’t even technically appear in the game. Those that do appear though, are excellent…all two of them. As a credit to Valve’s ability they managed to flip-flop, almost completely, my feelings for Wheatly and GLaDOS, where endearing love turned to anger for one, and anger to love for the opposite. It really is a love/hate with both of them; I could never really hate GLaDOS, nor Wheatly. Valve turns GLaDOS into a sympathetic character, and makes Wheatly into something to hate, which is not something that at the start of the game I thought was possible.

It’s hard to talk about Portal in any capacity without mentioning the humor. Portal 1, because of how short it was, meant Valve could squeeze in all their ‘A’ material and were extremely selective on what to include. Because of Portal 2’s longer length, it feels like the bar of quality for humor is lower. Portal 2 is funny, don’t get me wrong, but it felt like everything intended to be funny wasn’t always hysterical. Most of the humor got at least a chuckle out of me, but I wasn’t losing my mind at a consistent level of hilarity as with the first. It isn’t even what I’d consider “hit and miss”, as much as “hit and hitting not quite as hard”.

New to Portal 2 and absorbed from a team of college students who had a cool idea [Valve hired the indie developers who came up with the gel physics idea -Ed], there are different gels that alter how you get around. There’s blue gel for bouncing, orange gel for running and white gel for making a surface portal-able. They’re introduced in the later part of the game one by one and, as is typical of games, are eventually all used with each other and then used with the rest of the game’s elements in the final test chambers. These add a new layer of complexity to solving things, but a part of me feels that introducing these gels so late almost waters down the pure portal-driven puzzles of the first game. On the other hand, there’s only so much you can do with a single mechanic, and the gels add some welcome variety.

The story of Portal 1 was a little bare, and though there were a few twists in there (the biggest being the ending song, arguably) it was nothing like Portal 2’s near-constant twists. Each bit of story encountered is totally unexpected, and the plot as unpredictable as an unmedicated psychotic. In the first ten minutes of some games, you can tell exactly what the end entail. Portal 2 is the total opposite of that, led me around by the nose and kept me oblivious to what would happen next all the way through the end credits. To say this is an emotional rollercoaster is a tremendous compliment to rollercoasters everywhere.

The only majorly detrimental thing I can think of to say is that if you’re a stickler for getting the absolute greatest “value” from your game, specifically the highest number of hours of gameplay per dollar spent, Portal 2 is a bad investment. If you’re more concerned with quality however, you can’t go wrong with Portal 2. It’s the kind of game that you play through every year once the solutions to the puzzles fade from your mind. In a way Portal 2 is like a really fancy cup of coffee. There are cheaper, more cost efficient alternatives but they aren’t nearly as tasty or enjoyable. The price-per-ounce is greater than cheaper alternatives, but each ounce is worth the price, and tastes great too.