Then a funny thing happened. The n3wbs and I started playing Project Gotham Racing 4 again. This is a series that we’ve played since the first version on the original Xbox. I spent an unhealthy amount of time in a friend’s basement playing Project Gotham 1 in head-to-head racing. We got pretty good at it. We still miss San Francisco which was never included in any of the subsequent games and made for some pretty insane racing. PGR2 was probably the game we played the most as a group. Not Halo. Not Gears of War. Project Gotham 2. We have our own lexicon of terms for racing. Some of the less-colorful ones include, “crop-outing” and “toro”.

I recently made some changes to my room, moving my gear around for better viewing position. So when we started playing PGR4 after a year’s hiatus, I was shocked to discover some strange audio glitches coming out of my speakers. Engine noises had drop-outs. Music would skip. It was the strangest thing. I checked other sound sources at the speakers and listened hard for anomalies. I checked cabling to make sure I hadn’t screwed something up during the reorganization. I tweaked sound settings in the game. I put up with it.

Then I checked the Interwebs. Sure enough, a bit of googling turned up some hits about PGR4 Audio Problems. Weirdly, it’s a result of installing to the hard-drive. Why this should be makes absolutely no sense. It has to be playing the sounds from memory (assuming the engine noises aren’t discretely modeled audio simulations which would be very surprising and worthy of at least several papers) and it has to load them from a disk. It shouldn’t matter where they’re coming from. The only reason I can think of is that using the hard-drive is putting extra load on the processor or I/O buss and that’s causing the glitching. Still sounds rubbish, doesn’t it?

At any rate, I’d like to see MS release a patch for this, but since Bizarre Creations have pretty-much stopped caring about the PGR series (*snif*) that’s very unlikely. I’ll have to suffer and play it from the DVD.

There’ve been a bunch of big game releases in the last few weeks for the Xbox360. The long-awaited Gears of War 2 was the first on my list of games to play after returning from holidayland. I’ve certainly got my money’s worth out of it so far. The single player game is fun, if not overly challenging or complex. Playing it on Hardcore is fairly straightforward and I’ve only had to repeat a couple of sections a few times. It’s improved, as in the previous game by playing with a buddy in co-op mode. Multiplayer is fun, with a batch of new levels and a free download including some favorite maps (though not War Machine, wtf?) from the previous version. The new “Horde” mode is probably my favorite addition to the game, allowing a team of 5 players to fend off wave-after-wave of Locust in increasingly-difficult configurations. We’re up to level 19 currently, and hope to crack the level 20 barrier this weekend.

It’s not perfect, mind you. There are a few puzzling inconsistencies in the game which I’m hoping they can iron-out in a future update. The party system has removed the requirement for players to signal that they’re ready which is nice to have when you have 8 players all taking breaks for refreshments. Gears rewards players who stick with it but I’m unlikely to ever get all of the achievements for this title as it requires a bunch of them to be gotten while playing ranked online play. For a casual gamer like myself, I’m unlikely to do much of that, and those account for nearly half the points.

Still, graphics from the Unreal 3 engine and gut-ripping sound-effects make this a viscerally enjoyable title. I give it a “fun+” rating of 4/5 stars. ****

I was planning on picking up Dead Space also after some pretty decent reviews, but I was deflected by another title, also from EA, called Mirror’s Edge (EA’s site, amazon is currently being a dick about finding it for the Xbox360, so you’ll just have to find it yourself). This award-winning, free-running-inspired game by ace game studio DICE looks great and has a killer graphics engine. The story is propelled along by a between-chapters anime with decent voice acting and visuals that remind me a lot of a couple of the stories from The Animatrix. Soundtrack is also appropriate to the genre with a kind of ambient techno backdrop that pulses in all the right ways.

This is a really cool-looking title and the game play is fast and intense. And therein lies my complaint: It’s too hard. As soon as you’re out of the training session, you’re thrown into this action/detective story-line that has bad guys (“blues”, usually good guys, or “police”) firing bullets at you and you’re forced to either engage them which is usually suicide, or run away from them, which is often suicide. I’d have preferred just a bit more of the running around along the roof-tops to all-out warfare. Even the included “race” mode is hard enough that I don’t see myself playing it much, and requires one of those annoying EA logins that you need to setup first to play it.

Mirror’s Edge is a neat game though, and if you’ve got the reflexes and tenacity, you may enjoy it. The fact that I’m still playing it and looking forward to playing it again despite its frustrating attempts to kill me, suggests that this is a good game. Rated: Fun. ***/5.

Last up on this list is a surprise acquisition. A friend was very insistent that I pick this title up, so, not wanting to disappoint, I put aside my resistance of, wait-isn’t-this-just-Resident-Evil-mixed-with-28-Days-Later-and-a-little-Dead-Rising? and bit the bullet. Where Left4Dead (warning: flash, amazon search is suxxors) differs from the others and breaks new ground is in being designed to be a co-op game from the ground up. Four survivors can play 4 different campaigns (each lasting between 1-2+ hours) in an attempt to escape some zombie-infested territory. The settings range from urban to rural and are quite decently-designed, though are probably less open than they appear. The feeling of unrestricted movement is pretty good though and the areas you’re thrown into are quite large thanks to the Source engine from Valve.

The other neat thing about Left4Dead is the Director. The AI that’s responsible for throwing hordes of zombies at you and playing creepy music. The game has a great cinematic feel to it that if you weren’t so busy fighting for your life, you might have a chance to be pretty scared. The campaigns each culminate in a final fight to escape that is truly harrowing. I have yet to make it out, but I’ve seen the end credits roll when my partner made the helicopter once. I can tell you that my final moments were both incredibly heroic and poignant as I was pulverized by a tank and what must have been hundreds of zombies as I attempted to fend them off so the helicopter could make good on its getaway carrying the precious cargo. “Go on. Get outta here,” I croaked.

These scenes are what make Left4Dead so neat. And because each campaign is going to be different each time based on where the director puts stuff, it promises to have some pretty significant replay value. Rounding it out, is a multiplayer “versus” mode where each team gets to take turns as the Infected trying to bring down the survivors. Haven’t played it yet, but maybe if a few of my friends pick it up (hint, hint) we can give it a go.

Tentatively, fun+, ****/5.

“Dark Messiah of Might & Magic Elements” (Ubisoft)

l like the fantasy adventure genre as a concept. In practice, I tend to get bored with them after awhile. Oblivion was like that, though I must say I got quite a bit of mileage out of it. Also, Oblivion was a great game and almost completely non-linear. You could do whatever the heck you wanted in Oblivion. It did get pretty serious after you completed several of the story-line quests and the world became a dark seething nether-pit of otherworldly hell dotted with swirling gyres bridging the membrane between our world and the planes of hell…

Dark Messiah is nothing like Oblivion. At its heart, it’s a first-person adventure game. I chose an assassin as a character, because I wanted to try being stealthy and didn’t want to futz about with spells too much. The graphics are gloomy and kind of drab, but not in the Gears of War way where they are a crisp and detailed many-shades-of-grey. No, they are almost fuzzy in their lack of resolution. This game looks like it belongs on the previous generation of Xbox.

But that’s fine. Graphics are not its strong suit. The combat is all first-personish. As an assassin, you start out with a pair of daggers which, when armed, are thrust in front of you blocking a good portion of the screen. You can crouch, sprint and parry. When you’re on the attack, holding the right trigger can do power moves. You have an adrenaline meter which when fully-charge lets you unleash a mighty attack cleaving your opponents in twain! You can also kick opponents into conveniently-located spiky walls or off of buildings.

The combat’s not very good. In fact, the gameplay kind of reminds me of Hexen from the Quake 1 era.

But the story! Let’s talk about the story for a bit. You start out as an apprentice to some sorcerer type instructing you through the game’s prologue. He coaches you on killing bad guys (everybody’s a bad guy in the prologue) and gets you through that business. Then there’s some business about a crystal and you’re given a slutty companion who… crawls into your head? Who frequently makes inappropriate comments but helps you get to a castle where you’re meeting a necromancer (aren’t they supposed to be bad guys?) to do something with a crystal (??) … whose daughter is kind of fetching but the slutty companion (in your head!) keeps making comments about…

the cyclops…

Remember in Oblivion how you could go anywhere you wanted and do whatever you wanted? This game is not like that. You can only go in one direction and you have to do it in the order that you’re told. There is no deviation. No side-quests. There are glowy relics which you can collect but they’re not very interesting. Also, the loot is pretty mundane.

Now, to be fair, I’ve only played this for a sum total of about 6 hours. I’m on chapter 4 so there’s some possibility this game is going to “open up” and turn into a fantastic adventure game, but I really don’t think it’s going that way. For a game rated M, it doesn’t seem very mature. There’s not enough blood in the combat and the innuendo by the internalized helper girl is jejune. I do enjoy seeing some of the magic and names from the Might and Magic series – they bring back fond memories of the Heroes of Might and Magic games I played on the PC. But this has none of the strategy or fun of those games.

1 star. If that.

Two years (and several replacements) later, the honeymoon is over. We’ve gotten used to one another and even taught each other a few new tricks. The 360 can play videos streamed from my computers, music, has an HD-DVD drive sitting on the floor beside it. But wait, the drive isn’t even plugged in. The noises that come out of the 360 even when it’s working well are at the least annoying, at worst alarming. Sometimes these noises signal a “disc unreadable” error that’ll require a reboot. Each time that happens I half expect the machine to not boot. And then there’s the hard-drive making those clicking noises usually followed by a crash. It’s getting old.

And that interface? Man is that thing tired. Every time I turn on my Xbox it’s like a kick in the nuts. Those goddamned sliding interface panels annoy the hell out of me every time I see them. I want to go back to the dashboard. Click the big X. A panel slides out (delaying me by a couple of seconds). I press the Y button. The panel slides back, another panel slides out from the other side asking me if I’m sure because it’ll unload whatever awesome game of Halo I’m playing. (another 2-4 seconds) I click “OK”, the panel slides away and then the dashboard comes up. Total elapsed time? Somewhere around 10s.

Every operation is like this. Chat with a friend. Pick some music. Eject a disc. Most operations come with helpful “Are you sure?” panels. This is without a doubt, my most frustrated and frequent complaint about this device. Oh, and the noises.

Worse, I tried watching The Bourne Ultimatum on the HD-DVD player and it crapped-out halfway through the movie. There was an available update for the HD-DVD player which I didn’t dare apply because of all the wonkiness. After some cursing and wringing of the remote, I pulled the disc and watched it in standard def on my DVD player. The movie was OK.

So, thanks Major Nelson and the hard-working team(s) at Microsoft’s super-sekrit Xbox LIVE Server Haven and Data Barns. I’m sorry I dissed you a little. (Will we ever know what really happened? I doubt it).

Also, Happy New Year from all of us (me) at the n3wblog! It’s totally 2008.

It immediately occurred to me that the ‘Soft might have sold a few more Xbox 360s this holiday season and had saturated their network. This is still probably the case, though my overly-connected mind is already envisioning nightmare scenarios that are much much worse than that, and may well signal the end of technology itself, propelling us backwards through time to the dawn of humanity, leaving us struggling with two rocks trying to light a twig to get warm.

Engadget has a funny picture up describing the state of the service. This has apparently been the case for a couple of days now and Major Nelson has given us precious little by way of explanation. Of course, his site’s a little slow right now too, and full of comments (>570 last time I could get in). In classic Microsoft fashion, the Xbox LIVE status reads merely: Status: Up and running. I guess these problems I’m having signing in are a figment of my imagination.

So, since I can’t play Halo, I’m left to think of doomsday scenarios. My current fear is that the current iteration of the Storm worm has somehow infiltrated M$FT’s server farm and is currently wreaking havoc on their machinery and data. Of course, if that were true, they’d never actually admit it because they don’t actually tell people what goes on behind their closed doors. Everything’s peachy. Look elsewhere.

Ain’t the monoculture grand?

Jigsaw Falling Into Place from the album “In Rainbows” by Radiohead

But, I think the title that has left the biggest impression on people, and the one that I have enjoyed the most is Portal included on Valve‘s The Orange Box. A first-person puzzle game built around the titular portal device, the user is a subject in an experiment who must maneuver through a series of increasingly-difficult rooms. The graphics, while not mind-blowing, are sufficient while the sound design is absolutely brilliant. The computerized voice guiding you through the experiments is wonderfully kooky.

So if you haven’t played Portal, go pick up your companion cube and get at it. (the rest of The Orange Box ain’t bad either)