This has been sitting in my wordpress unpublished queue for ages waiting for me to get around to finishing the post and publishing it.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.