I’d planned to buy an Xbox 360 since the day they were announced – in fact I planned to buy all three of the new consoles, just as I did last generation, but the 360’s continued hardware troubles delayed my purchase well past when I initially thought I would get one. They recently applied at least a partial fix to their issues, so I decided to buy one to coincide with the Halo 3 launch.

Although I thought the original Halo was only average, I had a fantastic time playing through it coop with my buddy Nick on the original Xbox, and we made our way about halfway through Halo 2 playing coop a couple of years later which was also fun.

I never solved Halo 2 because of the premature death of my original Xbox (you can see where my hesitations about buying another MS box comes from), and I had sold off Halo 2, so I bought the 360, a new copy of Halo 2, and pre-ordered Halo 3. I played my way through both games over the last couple of weeks, finishing up Halo 3 last night.

Overall my opinion remains largely the same – Halo is an average FPS with well above average music and audio, well crafted combat mechanics, and level design that ranges from good to awful across the three games. The overarching plot is great in a comic book sort of way, and the guy from Marathon….err, I mean Master Chief, is a great protagonist. Oh, and Halo does do a great job of giving things an epic feel. Riding up a giant space elevator inside a space station that feels like it’s the size of the moon while your buddies follow along after you in a spaceship bigger than a 747 is some cool, cool stuff. Sure, the ‘elevator’ may only be made up of 17 polygons and textured with what could generously be called ‘engraved concrete with glowies,’ and the bad guys may be popping out onto the elevator out of monster closets, but it’s still some cool shit.

I haven’t played much multiplayer yet, but what I have played has reinforced my tendency towards playing online on PC. I can routinely come in the top 5 across a spectrum of FPS on PC, from the Battlefield series of games to the recently released Team Fortress 2, yet in Halo online I rarely come in better than dead last. It’s humiliating and reinforces my tendencies (which I’m trying to overcome) to not play console FPS.

In terms of Halo 3 specifically: it’s been criticized for being too short and for not being true HD graphically. I don’t agree with either criticism. Maybe it’s because I played 2 and 3 back to back, but I thought 3 was just the right length, I thought it brought a satisfactory conclusion to the plot, and I thought the graphics were great, especially the lighting. I don’t care much what the nerds who bothered to count the pixels say, at the end of the day it looks great.

I’ll write more about the 360 as time permits. A short comparison to the PS3 would look something like ‘360 hardware feels cheap compared to PS3, and the PS3 interface is world’s better (I mean really – 360 interface reminds me of a gaudy flea market – ads all over the place and garish oranges and greens, plus things scattered all over the place in a non intuitive way – where did that game just go that I downloaded?), but in the end it’s about the games, and the 360 wins in a major way at that – Halo 3, Dead Rising, Project Gotham 3, and Crackdown, all besides Halo purchased for under $20, and all great fun.

(one last technical note – 360 emulation which allows you to run old xbox games on it is weak. I had constant frame rate problems playing Halo 2 on it, and a terrible graphical glitch which would cause background imagery to superimpose itself on the screen and stay stuck there. I managed to finish the game but there were times I got sick of restarting the thing to get rid of the gameplay obscuring graphical glitches. It was a near thing, whether I finished it or not).

Here’s a great friday fun link – a free racing simulator from BMW, released as part of a marketing campaign for their cars. It was developed by a commercial game developer known for their racing simulations, and you can tweak the settings to the point where this is a very difficult sim. It’s free, runs fine on older hardware, and worth a look whether your tastes tend towards arcade or sim racing since you can configure it either way. Promotional page is here, and here’s

Check out Battlemachy, a flash based shooter. You’re a dude mounted on a Pegasus armed with a spear. The game is mission based and in each mission you can only move on a clearly defined track. Some missions play out similar to space invaders, others are like star castle, and so on. You earn money based on your performance in each mission, which you can spend between missions to upgrade your gear with things like faster flying and shooting speeds. Simple fun with good graphics and a worthy friday fun link.

Here’s a great idea – take the digg approach to ferreting out the ‘best’ of the web and apply it to ‘fastest game demo download links’. That’s Filerader in a nutshell, and at first blush it seems to work as advertised. Users post links to downloads for game demos, mods, and other content, and if the link is fast users vote it up. The better the link, the more votes and presumably the faster you get the content. Worth a bookmark if you regularly grab game demos like me.

Given my mention of Bioshock earlier in the week, and the fact that I’ve repeatedly talked about how System Shock 2 is one of my all-time favorite games, I thought this little recipe for getting System Shock 2 upgraded and running on a modern windows box might be of interest. It includes instructions and links to patches and graphical, gameplay, and sound updates for the original game. If you haven’t played it, even without any of this it remains a superb game and has aged much better than other games of that era (I’m thinking of you, Deus Ex). It also has online co-op which I’ve tried and failed to really interest any of my friends in, though Nick gave it a shot one winter weekend long ago.

You can score System Shock 2 cheaply off of ebay, where it shows up periodically, or via the home of the underdogs, where there are links of questionable legality available to download a copy.

Most long time PC gamers would agree that System Shock 2 is one of those games that belongs in the gaming canon – a classic that any game lover should play, even if just to get a sense of how its design choices informed the games that came after it. I’ve played all the way through it twice, the only non-strategy game I’ve ever done that with, and have replayed portions of it, especially the beginning, dozens of times. It’s really that good. Give it a shot, it’s well worth it.

This has been sitting in my wordpress unpublished queue for ages waiting for me to get around to finishing the post and publishing it. A shame, that, since it’s one of my favorite podcasts. 1up yours covers videogames, mostly from a console perspective but they do pay some attention to the PC market as well. The show’s a bit on the raw side, sort of an aged frat boy (but maybe don’t know it) tone, and sometimes they drink too much and descend into exuberant incoherence, but all in all they do a really good job of covering the week’s gaming news, they occasionally do really good in depth coverage of issues, and several of the hosts have an encyclopedic knowledge of games (Shane especially) that’s really impressive and helps give context to the new games they’re talking about. Check it out using the link above, or find it in iTunes by searching for 1up yours.

I picked up my second PS3 game a while ago, Warhawk, and have been playing it a lot. I was a fan of the original single player only game on the Playstation 1, and I like the new game even more. It’s basically Battlefield 2 for the PS3, featuring versatile Warhawks (a sort of plane/helicopter hybrid) as kings of the battlefield. It’s a multiplayer only game that supports up to 32 players per match. There are 5 huge maps which restrict access to different areas depending on the number of players, and a number of game modes, including Capture the Flag, various kinds of Deathmatch, Warhawk only deathmatch, and Zones of Control, which is basically capture the flag with stationary flags and a different scoring mechanism. I’ve mostly been playing Capture the Flag, and despite how easy it is to fly the Warhawks I find myself sticking to ground vehicles and infantry combat for the most part because life expectancy in a Warhawk is a lot shorter than if you stay out of them – they’re everyones’ target. I’m occasionally winning matches at this point, using my tried and true flag defense tactic that goes all the way back to Threewave CTF on quake – stick back, defend, and rack up the defender kills on folks trying to snarffle the flag.

The game offers a glimpse of things to come in console land in that you can either buy it at retail for $60 with a bundled bluetooth headset, or digitally directly onto the PS3 for only $40. This is something Microsoft is not yet doing on the 360 (they’re only doing it for smaller games), and I like this element of Sony’s online strategy. There are several other games coming this year that will be offered in the same way, and much like Steam on the PC I expect I’ll increasingly be buying games this way.

Unfortunately the game also has a crippling flaw at present. The server browser is an absolute piece of crap. There is no relationship between how many players the server browser says are in a given game, and how many are actually in the game, meaning you try to join servers only to be told the server is full. It can take 30 minutes to get into a ranked server match because of this. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the interface claims you can refresh the server, but as far as I can tell that function does absolutely nothing. Still, like a Pavlovian idiot, I find myself sitting there jamming on the server refresh button endlessly as I try and get into a match.

The game shipped with other flaws and they’ve patched them already, so I have some hope that this will ultimately get straightened out, and to be fair to the game once you get in it’s a blast, but getting into a match is an exercise in frustration and patience. Buyer beware so far as that goes.

Anyway my PS3 handle is Tempus67, look me up. I generally try and play on the official Incognito studio ranked CTF 32 player servers in the evening, and you can usually find me back on defense or chasing after whatever rat bastid ran off with our flag 😉

Bioshock has been getting great reviews, and it deserves it. One of my all time favorite games is System Shock 2, and Bioshock is basically an updated version of the same game in a new setting with a few new features. The setting is a riff on Ayn Rand Objectivism, with a fantastically realized undersea utopia in collapse, nominally overseen by the game’s primary antagonist. The graphics, audio and art design are all superb, as are the writing. The gameplay is FPS mixed with adventure/exploration. I’ll steer clear of spoilers and simply say if you enjoy this style of game, pick this up – games of this quality come around very rarely – it’s been at least 6-7 years since a game grabbed me like this.

I’ll also offer a counterpoint which is that the game is A) dumbed down somewhat compared to System Shock 2 (thanks, console gamers!) and B) fails in any way beyond graphics and sound design to acknowledge advances in game design. Why exactly is the plot being related to me via tape recordings I have to hunt for in the environment? Back when System Shock 2 came out this was a bit more acceptable but we’ve had games like Halflife 2, with reasonably intelligent AI characters to interact with and a story that emerges as you participate in it. Storytelling has moved on but apparently the designers of Bioshock haven’t.

There’s one other issue that had I known of in advance would have been a showstopper for me on this game. The publishers have seen fit to include vile DRM that A) limits the number of times you can reinstall the game you purchased and B) refuses to launch the game if you’ve run certain apps on your machine (in my case, process explorer, which is actually from Microsoft these days). Mind you, it refuses to run even if process explorer is not currently running, and you have to reboot your machine before you can run the game if you’ve run process explorer prior to launching the game. This shit infuriates me and I won’t be buying a PC game from this publisher again. Had I known they wouldn’t have gotten my money in the first place. Meanwhile, guess what – the pirates are already playing the fucking game, in other words as per usual the shitty DRM screws over the legitimate purchasers of the game while serving as little more than an annoyance to the pirates. Fuck you, 2k Games.

These two points are a bit more than nitpicking but still, the game is one of the best of the year and well worth playing through if the DRM bullshit doesn’t bother you.

Rogue Trooper is an FPS with some very light rpg elements that’s available on a number of systems. I played through it on the PC thanks to my gametap subscription. It’s a little better than I expected it to be, and worth the ~$5-10 you can get the game for off of ebay or via valve’s steam download service. The game is clearly a console game, with low poly environments and enemies, not especially detailed character models, muddy textures, chunky movement, and fairly linear level design, and yet despite all this it’s pretty fun if and has an engaging pulpy comic book story to play through. The PC port is also better than most console ports and has configurable controls, supports a wide swatch of resolutions including the widescreen stuff. The lite rpg stuff in the game is cool too. Basically you can collect resources from the enemies you defeat to power up your gear, produce ammunition for your weapons, and develop new pieces of equipment. It’s all predetermined as to when you can develop new gear, but there’s also a nice tension