Check out the review of the Novint Falcon over on Ars Technica. I’ve known about this thing for a couple of years and been curious about it. It’s an input device for computers with sophisticated force feedback and the ability to measure input motions in 3d. It’s finally going to be available at retail for at or around $200. This is exactly the kind of of silly tech device I love to waste my money on it, so of course I’m considering it. There’s an au courant notion in game design that the success of the Wii means people are looking for tactile, immersive gaming experiences. The Novalint’s invention actually predates this, but it’s arriving on the retail scene at the right time and along with the potential for a whole new class of input devices to match the nunchuck and wiimote from nintendo. This has all been tried before, and mostly failed, though special purpose devices for golfing and racing games have done well enough. Truth is it’s really unlikely I’ll pick one up, but I still think it’s a pretty cool little gizmo and I hope it’s a harbinger of interesting devices to come.

I’m posting this week’s Friday Fun link a couple of days early because if you act by Friday you can get it for $8.95. Valve picked up the rights to publish the excellent little rhythm puzzle game that uses your mp3 tunes as the source for the levels it presents you with. It’s good fun, was a finalist at this year’s Independent Games Festival, and is an absolute bargain at under $9. Consider supporting creative independent game developers by buying a copy. As added incentive, it’s (the first?) Valve published game to support their new framework for xbox live-ish achievements. Details are over on Valve’s site. or you can check out the game on the developer’s site.

Today’s Friday fun link is less of a game and more of a sort of kinetic toy. It’s a java applet that lets you introduce various elements into a small environment – wind, ice, soil, fire, stone, etc. The fun is in how the elements will interact with each other. Pour down some stone and soil, add seeds, sprinkle on some water, viola, you have a little ecosystem. Now channel your inner calvin and maybe pour down some gunpowder and introduce a flame. Whhoooooosh! The graphics aren’t much to speak of, but they’re also not the point – the fun is to be had with the tinkering. Check it out.

Here’s a friday fun link quickie – Seizuredome, a robotron-esque shooter with whimsical asian pop culture inspired graphics and a soundtrack only a (Japanese teenager?) could love, that you can can download and play on windows in less than 2 minutes. The gameplay is fast paced, simple to understand, and fun in that classic arcade style. Games are quick t00 – at best they last only a couple of minutes. A perfect friday fun link – grab it and get blasting.

Kongregate has been around for a while, and it’s finally coming into its own. It’s a gaming portal site that attempts to collect all the flash games on the web and wrap them up in a social networking framework with achievements, friends lists, daily and weekly challenges, and more. It’s all free to participate in, and it’s more compelling than it sounds – I’m increasingly addicted to logging in and playing a few rounds of games like Desktop Tower Defense and Endless Zombie Rampage on my lunch break or after exercising in the evenings. It’s even displaced some of my regular Team Fortress 2 sessions. Many of the games incorporate a variety of challenges and achievements into the Kongregate framework, which earn you points and cards to be used in their upcoming collectible card game. The whole premise is clever, too – they subsidize development for games, they reward game developers with cash for developing popular games, and they reward the players for helping rate these games.

I really hope this succeeds for them on a broad scale. They should work on integration with the gaming consoles to build an even broader audience. Meanwhile, if you want to give it a shot, accounts are free and take only a moment to setup. My username is Tempus on the site, and at present I’m a 4th level… space potato? Who knows what that icon is.

Oh…and this week’s challenge is to win their new Campaign Game, which is sort of a mashup of risk and chess. The chance to watch an animated bobble-head Hillary Clinton bitchslap a bobble-headed Rudy Guiliani makes it worth checking out, trust me.

I finished the latest Ratchet and Clank game last week. This represents a number of firsts for me – first Ratchet and Clank game I’ve finished (despite owning all of them, and despite making it literally to the last boss battle on the first one and far into each of the others in the series), first PS3 game I’ve finished, first next generation console game I’ve finished, and the first game I’ve finished in 2008.

I’ll keep this brief and simply say if you like action adventure games, or have enjoyed previous Ratchet and Clank games, get this game. It’s great, and a nice rebound after the mediocre (but still fun) 4th game. The graphics are fantastic, the trademark humor is there in fine form, the creative weapons are there with some clever new ones (the best being a disco ball grenade – toss it and all the enemies on screen proceed to boogy down while you lay into them), and the level design is good. Best of all from a 40-year old gamer’s perspective, they hit the difficulty level just right. I have less time than I used to and found the game somewhat easier than previous installments, making it possible for me to play through to the end before losing interest or becoming so frustrated that I moved on to something else.

The game is also good enough that it made me pine for more, so now I’m playing through Up Your Arsenal (my previous favorite Ratchet game) again, with an eye on solving it. It’s worth noting you can pick all these previous games up for very cheap ($10-20) and they work fine on PS3 60GB, the model with full backwards compatibility. They even support widescreen/480p.

Most of the folks who read this site probably don’t care too much about this topic, but indulge me, I’m going to rant for a minute, and if you can stick with it please consider boycotting the companies mentioned above during your holiday shopping this year.

Hardcore gamers have known for, well, forever that there’s an inappropriate relationship between publishers and the publications reviewing their games, what with the “exclusive” reviews that often wildly overrate the games, the fawning multi-page previews for upcoming games which are always remarkably positive, and the occasional industry insider expose calling out the print/web publishers for this stuff, but this past week really brought this all to an uncomfortable head.

The exact facts haven’t been confirmed, but the gist of what happened is long time editorial staffer at gamespot.com Jeff Gerstmann was summarily fired for his negative review of the Eidos console/PC game Kane and Lynch. This game is Eidos’s big holiday release, they had a large advertising contract with gamespot for the game, including a reskinning of the entire site, they were reportedly incensed, and threatened or otherwise intimidated either gamespot or its parent cnet.com to the point where they reacted by firing Jeff.

It should go without saying that you just don’t pull shit like that and expect to maintain any credibility or pretensions of journalistic integrity, and consumers should reward all companies involved with zero of their holiday shopping dollars and zero of their web browser traffic.

For what it’s worth, I’ve played Kane and Lynch, and while it has some promising ideas (well…1 anyway, the multiplayer was conceptually cool) the gameplay mechanics are so poorly executed as to be broken, the graphics are just mediocre, and the enemy AI is brain dead – it’s at best a 5 on the gamespot scale of 1-10, and Gerstmann actually gave it a 6, more than it deserved in my opinion.

It’s also sad that gamespot had been one of my preferred sites to check for reviews on games, but not anymore, they’re banned.

I’ve intentionally not linked to the game or sites in question here, but a few links for the curious:

A joystiq.com piece that summarizes the story as of this morning.

A youtube archive of the video review of the game by Gerstmann, which is supposedly what got him fired.

A stickied thread on neogaf that outlines the sites and companies to avoid doing business with as a way of protesting this corrupt BS.

Eidos publishes a lot of games, so for busy shoppers, the games to avoid this holiday include the Kane and Lynch game (it sucks anyway), anything from the Tomb Raider series, anything from the Hitman series, and their recent Battle of Midway game. There’s tons more game series listed in the neogaf thread as well – these are just the most likely holiday purchases.

Hopefully if enough gamers complain long enough about this the publishers print and game will get the message about preserving editorial freedom from the ad sales guys. Whoever made the call to fire Jeff at gamespot and or cnet should be canned themselves. I’ll also note that some folks think everyone should leave Eidos alone, that they were essentially doing what all publishers do by cajoling and complaining and threatening to protect their products, but pressuring Eidos by boycotting their products is another way to apply pressure on gamespot/cnet from my perspective, and it helps send a message to all publishers about where to draw the line in terms of PR/advertising relationships.

First, an embarrassing admission for a dedicated gamer to make: I’ve solved only one Zelda game, the second one on the original Nintendo machine, which was called Zelda II: The Adventures of Link. I came very close on my favorite of the series, A Link to the Past, but a move to Maine way back when and the loss of access to the Super Nintendo my family had at the time ended that run. I never owned a Nintendo 64 until well after its time had passed so I didn’t play the two legendary Zelda games that came out for that platform until years after they were past their prime and I was just interested in seeing them in action and less interested in playing through them. I had a gamecube and played a good bit of Wind Waker but ultimately the endless sailing about in that game put me off of it.

I never played any of the Zeldas that came out for handhelds until I picked up Phantom Hourglass about a month ago for the DS. I was skeptical about it even though it was getting pretty good reviews, mostly because I figured the stylus-based controls would suck. As it turns out, they actually work really well – the only problem I had with them was finding myself constantly obscuring my view of the action with my hand as I dragged the stylus around. Instead what sucked was the premise that I must return to the central ‘dungeon’ of the game, repeating sections I had previously cleared in order to get to the deeper levels each time I acquired a new ‘key’, while on a timer. Designer who came up with this idea? Fuck you, I sold your shitty game on ebay. Don’t. DON’T. DON’T make me repeat the same stuff over and over and over again, nothing puts me off a game faster than doing that. It’s not charming, it’s not clever, it’s not novel, it’s just boring, frustrating crap. Yeah, I know you tried to alleviate this a bit by making it possible to skip past parts of the earlier levels as I acquired the standard Link toolset (boomerang, bombs, bow and arrow, etc) but it was too little too late. Better luck next time, and meanwhile if anyone has tastes similar to mine and can’t stand repeating areas in games – stay far away from this one.

Call of Duty 4 is great, both in single player and multiplayer. I finished the single player game last night and it was a fantastic ride. It’s a very linear, scripted experience but for almost all of it that works very well and effectively makes you feel like you’re the star in a blockbuster Hollywood action movie. The graphics are great, controls are tight, audio is superb, technically the engine is rock solid, the pace is frenetic while never overwhelming, the ‘feel’ of the weaponry is just right, and the plot and writing are decent. The end is also great. A lot of times in FPS games you end up fighting some uber cheesey boss battle, but the last level and conclusion in CoD4 are about as good as it gets. About the only criticism I can come up with is that the game is fairly short. I didn’t track exactly how long it took me to finish, but I’d say roughly 6 hours. I didn’t feel cheated because of how engaging the whole experience is, and because the multiplayer is also fantastic.

On the multiplayer side the game reminds me most of an update to the old Urban Terror quake 3 mod I was so fond of, mostly because generally the MP maps are relatively small and feature building to building skirmishes with modern weapons and great weapon physics. There are newish features to the MP though, the quasi role playing system being my favorite. As you play you earn points for killing other players and achieving map objectives. These points allow you rise in level from a lowly private up through the military ranks. Higher ranks entitle you to new weapons, addons to your weapons