I love the Christmas gaming season. Today’s example of why – the new fps/rpg mashup set in the Might and Magic universe, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, is up for pre-order on Valve’s online game distribution service Steam. The only bummer is that there’s no discount for pre-ordering, which is unusual for Steam – normally you can save $5 or so for pre-ordering. The game looks promising. The demo, while very short, managed to show off a beautiful game engine with solid fps hand-to-hand combat and interesting physics-based levels. The multiplayer is also interesting. You play on a series of linked maps and gain levels and abilities as you work your way through them. This is PC-based and unlikely to make it to other platforms, but is definitely worth a look if you’re interested in fantasy FPS – ones that feature hand to hand combat are rare, and there hasn’t been one with online play that’s decent since the days of DOS.

I should just turn this into an all-gaming blog, at least for the holiday season. I picked up Okami last Saturday and spent most of the past week playing it. It’s basically perfect and has the most amazing art direction, perhaps the best I’ve ever seen in a game. If you’ve played a Zelda game over the years, particularly the N64 or Gamecube ones, you know essentially how Okami plays – an easy to control combat system but with some depth, a large 3d world that at the beginning is mostly unavailable to you, a gradual accumulation of items and skills that allow you to work your way past the obstacles that initially keep you from further exploration of the world, a cast of whimsical characters to interact with, lots of humor, and an ultimate foozle you need to overcome to save the world.

Okami also adds a few things beyond spectacular art direction. Most notably the game equips you with a calligraphy pen, and at almost any point in the game you can stop time and use the pen to draw symbols which either have specific effects when in combat or allow you to alter the gameworld. Your library of symbols grows over time and includes things like destructive slashes, the ability to ‘fill in’ missing areas of architecture (a broken bridge, a missing water wheel), the ability to cause vegetation to grow, to create wind, move fire or water, and more. It’s a really clever game mechanic and it’s well implemented. While there are occasional issues with pattern recognition, on the whole it works really well.

The game’s vibe is the other thing that’s really great. While the game has plenty of combat, at core your mission is to restore life and beauty to a world that’s under assault. The first time you manage to restore an area and see the animation of a lush, beautiful wilderness sweeping over what had been barren and sterile, your jaw will drop. Plus it’s a core mechanic – you’re constantly bringing trees, bushes, bodies of water and so on back to a healthy state, and pausing to feed the woodland critters. There’s this feeling of wholesome affirmation that I’ve never felt in a game before and it’s really very very cool.

You can’t go wrong with this game if you enjoy the genre. It’s gone from ‘gee, I’m curious about this game’ to ‘this is one of the best ps2 games I’ve ever played, and perhaps one of my favorite console games ever’ in the space of a week. The fact that I’m still playing it is testament to how good it is – usually I love trying new games but quickly tire of them, but this one has kept me captivated all week for hours at a time. Check it out of if you have a ps2. Screenshots and more are over here on gamerankings, but while the screenshots are impressive, you really need to see it in action.

Believe it or not the sea of gaming titles that get released for the holiday season starts releasing around now, and there’s a doozy available. Company of Heroes bills itself as a real time strategy game, a genre I don’t typically enjoy, but really it’s more of a pausable real time tactical game. The ability to pause, the slower pace of the combat, the relatively low number of units you have to control, the fact that they’re bundled into squads, and a decent control scheme all conspire to make this a very manageable playing experience compared to the click-frenzy that you find in most RTS. Couple this with a great graphics engine, excellent physics engine (houses you can level to the ground? Brick walls you can storm a tank through? Unfortunate marines flying through the air after you blast them with a flak cannon at close range? It’s got it all), and a well crafted single player campaign based on the WWII invasion of Normandy, and you have a classic on your hands, possibly one of the best RTS ever made. I’m absolutely loving it.

Of course there are some downsides – as with all games in this genre, the artificial intelligence seems a bit dodgy – lay down a line of tank traps across a strategic point and the enemy will drive around them 100% of the time even if you’re funnelling their armor into a trap, instead of deploying engineers to take down the tank traps, for example – but it’s still generally better than that found in most titles and in fact is still creaming me in skirmish games most of the time despite me recognizing ways to exploit it. It requires some pretty significant horsepower to run with the eye candy torqued up, and it’s beautiful so you’ll want to torque it up, but if you’re machine isn’t up to it your framerate will be below single digits. The most damning problem is the inability to pull the camera far enough back from the action, so sometimes you’ll have artillery or tank fire coming in and will flail about trying to figure out where it’s coming from. This is endemic to this class of games and I wish developers would come up with a solution. If it’s true this is about multiplayer balance, then let me do it in solo and campaign games, for gods sakes, and if it’s about performance, let me decide what’s acceptable performance instead of limiting me.

So – pros and cons assessed, to me even if you’re not a fan of RTS usually, this is worth a look because the pause feature lets you play at your own pace and everything else is generally excellent. If you like RTS, you basically have to get this game. While I don’t like the genre, typically, I do tend to try the demos of all of them, and this is the finest game to come down the pike since Kohan II.

It’s also on sale at gogamer.com this week for ~$35 shipped if you’re interested, check their deals section.