Dear Computer:

It is with a sorrowful and guilt-ridden heart that I pen to you these words, words that I thought I never would myself utter: I am now the owner of an Xbox 360. It entered my home two months prior, and was gifted to me by my very sweet and kindly mother as a Christmas gift. However, that is not to say that this new console was unexpected or undesired; rather, I directly asked her for one, and had been saving money to purchase one had she not complied with my Christmas wishes. The blame for allowing a new Microsoft console to enter my home lies entirely on my shoulders.

And I am very sorry, personal computer.

But you have changed, dear computer, and I fear not for the better. I am not entirely sure that this was your fault – but I am not in the blame-fingering business. Rather, I’m in the game-fing .. nevermind. I just play games and write about them. Following are a list of complaints that I feel no choice but to levy against you, and I present them here in the hopes that you might address some of them and return to your former glory.

Inclusive vs. exclusivity: My chief complaint, one that has existed for what seems now a decade since I purchased my first computer that did not belong to my parents’, is the nature of your economic status. You are far too expensive.

I understand that the components that make you the monstrous beast that you are do not come cheaply, either in fabrication or design. I understand that your components, when intelligently decided upon and laboriously installed, can provide a vastly more graphic-rich experience than any console can. However, even with these understandings, I feel that you still cost too much money.

To build you, Ataxia, I spent a thousand dollars. I saved money for a long time so that I might construct you, and you did not disappoint; but still, you cost me a thousand dollars, and that is a great deal of money – particularly when compared to the two primary consoles on the market now, the Xbox360 and the Playstation 3, both of which can be owned for $300.

Although the cost of the guts of my computing machine are a good launching point, they aren’t my only concern with the exclusivity of the personal gaming computer. Following close behind is the level of technical expertise required to even use the damn thing. While installing a game and playing it is, generally, simpler now than it ever has been, this is not always the case. For the non-PC-tech-nerd, getting games to work can be quite the chore; does my PC meet the hardware requirements? Check. Have my video and audio drivers been updated recently? Check. Are there sufficient system resources free to play the game after I’ve met the other requirements? Check. So .. why is it still running slowly? How come some of the polygons are stretched across the screen, and why the hell can I not connect to this Borderlands multiplayer game? Dear Ataxia, you are far too difficult to make work.

I could have just bought a new console.

A gaming console would have allowed me to bypass all of this forced education (although I am thankful for it, I cannot help but wonder how many people were turned off from PC gaming as a result), and would have saved me a great deal of money over the years.

Sure, the games are more expensive – $10 more, on average, for a new AAA title – but at least I could have bought them used, dear Ataxia, which is something that you still do not allow me to do. I understand why – because games are much easier to copy and pirate with a computer – but this has resulted only in me spending less cashmoney on games than I would have otherwise.

Sure, I’ve /played/ a great many new games over the years – but I haven’t bought many. I’ve been a poor college student for as long as I can remember, and my budget barely affords me enough to smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink a lot of beer, let alone own new videogames. Instead, I’ve been forced to turn to somewhat more illicit forms of attaining new games – although I’d much rather have purchased used copies at discounted rates.

Instead of allowing me this option, PC game manufacturers, you decided instead to force a series of ever-larger and more invasive forms of DRM down my throat. Remember the Bioshock debacle, in which the game could initially only be installed three times – ever? Or the pain that comes with installing an old favorite game, only to realize that the CD key was missing – and therefore could not be played without purchasing a new copy? Instead of wrestling with the ethics of funding draconian DRM schemes and painstakingly charting the location of all of my CD keys, there would have been – and is – a far simpler solution -

I could have just bought a console.

Granted, piracy remains a major (-ly contentious) issue on the PC. People just don’t want to pay for stuff, but they certainly want to play stuff. But really .. I’m curious, how many fewer games would I have pirated had I been able instead to walk down to the rental store nearby and rent the game I knew I only wanted to play for a few days? The developer’s get their cut from the original game purchase, the rental place gets their cut from my rental, and I get to play the game for an evening for a few dollars. I believe they call this a good value proposition.

Alternatively, I could have purchased some of those games used. Sure, it might generally not be worth the cost of purchasing a used game – Gamestop just loves gouging their customers on them – but they’re certainly a cheaper option that buying the game new, or even over Steam. Unfortunately, DRM schemes, CD keys, and internet activation completely preclude my ability to do so.

What’s more, owning a console – which I am surprisingly more proud of owning than I thought I would be – enables me to play a much wider variety of game. Granted, the PC will likely always be the master of a certain type of game title – the MMO, the sim game, and the RTS/RPG game – but much of the industry has shifted from spending cashmoney to develop titles like these, and have instead focused on more action-oriented games that are better suited to consoles. Even some long-time PC developers, like Peter Molynuex and Epic Games – seem to be developing for consoles only.

The first Fable remains one of my favorite gaming experiences; sure, it had problems, but the thing was so damned charming

Thus far, Fable 2 has been my favorite gaming experience of the last several months.

Yes, I know that I am two years behind. But you didn’t really expect a website about drinking beer and playing games to stay up to date, did you? Oh. Maybe I should work on that.

But even when console releases come to the PC, they’re often ports – and very often bad ones. I understand that not all of the numbers and lines and codes align quite perfectly, but the quality of some ports is absolutely inexcusable. Would patching in real mouse support for the menus be so terribly difficult? Final Fantasy XI was a wonderful example of this; the second-greatest strength of the PC, the mouse/keyboard control scheme, was entirely negated in favor of pressing keyboard buttons to move through menu options, on selection at a time. Although the mouse could be used, the inputs were so laggy that they were actually slower than using the console-style menu manipulation method. That this is at all excusable is astounding to me – but then, having bought both of these games, I find that I am entirely complicit, so I ought to close my beerhole.

Perhaps most indicative of the problems with where PC gaming has gone is the terribly sad case of Modern Warfare 2. Many of the other virtues of PC versions vs. console versions were entirely removed from MW2; dedicated servers, a console, player administration over servers, and, most importantly, the ability to mod the game. Simply put: Infinity Ward released a console game on the PC, and ensured that it played /exactly the same way as the console version/. While not necessarily a bad thing on its own, the ability for players to change the nature of the game to meet a broad variety of playstyles is arguably the greatest strength of the PC – Half-Life would have been a great single-player game, but would any of us be the same without Counterstrike? The enormous plethora of mods and new maps generated by the players in many games have ensured the game was popular and played for far longer than their contemporaries – and yet, some developers, like Infinity Ward, seem to believe that this is a bad thing. To damn the issue even further, Modern Warfare 2 was released as a $60 PC game. To get the same experience -

I could have just bought a console.

And so I did. Well, my mother did, and then she gave it to me. Street Fighter IV plays online brilliantly, with essentially zero setup time. Fable 2 taunts and charms me regularly with beauty and an abundance of cleverness. Modern Warfare 2 .. well, that game didn’t get much play, as I’m not that sort of gamer really. The thing streams music and movies to my television from my PC without flaw, and the Xbox shell operates seamlessly and without pause – something I’ve never been able to say about Windows.

So please, dear computer: remember the stuff that made you awesome, and at least try and return to it. Until then, well .. you can call me Salad Dodger, and I’ll be in Albion.

I hadn’t much interest in coming back to Warcraft. I had invested what I consider obscene amounts of time into a variety of characters, and untold hours of social interaction had been lost as a result (not to mention potential job and education opportunities). But this new system, the LFG System as it has come to be called, sparked a renewed interest in me, as one of the chief problems with WoW when I had left before was simply being able to find a suitable group for a dungeon when time presented itself to play. If the promise of the LFG System worked, this problem would be entirely alleviated.

Almost immediately after renewing my subscription (actually, activating the seven-day trial), I realized that the system more than delivered on its promise. Seris, whom I’d left at level 75, was inside of a dungeon with strangers within moments of logging in, and seconds after exclaiming “Hay guys!,” she was slaying a variety of presumably evil monsters and fully succumbing to the promise of easy-access rewards.

At the time, I wasn’t quite aware of what those rewards really were. Emblems of Something or Other, the small currency bits rewarded upon the completion of heroic-difficulty dungeons – more difficult version of normal dungeons – were doled out regularly and easily, and could be turned in for a variety of awesome armor, trinkets, and jewelry. This much I remember from the previous expansion. What I also remembered from the previous expansion was how painfully long it took to acquire them, and the slow process of attaining upgrades from them – as well as their somewhat lack of variety.

But things are different now; there are not only dozens of options of Emblem items, most of which quite good, but there are, and I cannot stress the importance of this enough, dozens of opportunities to attain these Emblems. A run through a heroic dungeon, with each boss granting an emblem, grants an average of three emblems per dungeon – but each LFG System group also rewards the player with an extra two Emblems, as well as a bag of gold. With Emblem items ranging from costing thirty to seventy-five, and fifty emblems attainable in a mere few hours, getting awesome gear became almost painfully easy – alleviating one of the major issues with The Burning Crusade.

Although WoW is in a better state now than it has ever been, particularly for the casual player without time to dedicate to raid, I can’t help but find some aspects of this system troubling. An idea that I’ve subscribed to for quite a long time is that WoW is the arcade version of other online games; things are faster-paced, more straightforward, and often simpler than in other online games, and I believe that this is, in a large way, responsible for the game’s overwhelming success.

The LFG System has further emphasized this arcade nature of WoW over other games, and has, I believe, diminished the single best aspect of Warcraft; that of the social. No longer do players need to cultivate a good reputation to ensure invitations into groups, as what happens inside of groups generated by the LFG System are, for all intents and purposes, anonymous. This is because any given group might consist of five players from five different realms whom, in addition to not having encountered one another previously, are effectively barred from ever doing so again. This entirely precludes the need for common courtesy and the forging of friendships; although people are, in general, pretty decent, there is very rarely any actual social interaction between them. The five come together for a particular task, namely the crawling through of a dungeon, and disband immediately after. Aside from making jokes and explaining encounters to players new to the dungeon, there is little reason to attempt to cultivate new friendships.

Which, really, is what made WoW shine so brightly for me when it was released. Within hours of the servers coming online, my room mates

DOS Command grew in this fashion until it eventually merged with another guild, and then later developed into an entirely different guild dedicated towards raiding the high-end content of the game. While the guild was never quite on the bleeding-edge of progression, we did quite well for ourselves, and I still consider many of the players I was involved with to be among my closest of friends, favored over many of the people that I know in real life.

I do not believe that I am unique in this regard; to use another entirely anecdotal example, my brother followed a similar path in Warcraft, and some of his closest real-life friends he actually met in the World of Warcraft. I’ve met them too, but his personality is more compatible with theirs than is mine. But then, I tend to be an antisocial prick sometimes, so this isn’t terribly surprising for me. Moving along.

So then – it appears, to me, that Warcraft has traded this wonderful element of potential social cohesion, which arises from small groups of strangers banding together to defeat the Sons of Arugal and results in what I hope to be lifelong friendships, for easier access to the rewards of ever-increasing numbers, to use Kieron Gillen’s perspective on online games.

The LFG System has seemed to have an impact on the isolated community of my server as well; sure, people are more geared and perhaps playing more than ever, but they’re doing so often without their friends. Although entering the LFG System with friends can make the process easier (guaranteed access to an effective tank, healer, DPS, etc.), it is by no means necessary and seems to add an extra layer of complication to the dungeon-running, Emblem-acquiring process. Sure, Seris will group with guildmates for quick runs (as you can enter the system with a full group of your pals), but this does nothing to alleviate the problem of not being able to make new friends in the process.

I think that the other aspect of this problem – of furthering Warcraft as essentially an arcade-game MMO – is the nature of content and what it has come to mean. (The labeling of hard-mode difficulty dungeons as “Heroic” is highly indicative of this issue, but I’ll return to that shortly.) Generally speaking, the first time or two that I entered a dungeon I hadn’t been to before, my eyes were wide with what new treasures and encounters would be found within. Fights were challenging, bosses were something to be taken seriously, and the dungeon was a reward unto itself.

However, Blizzard has created a system in which these dungeons are not in any way a reward unto themselves – they’re merely an obstacle that must be overcome to acquire the real reward, which are Emblems of Something or Other. This might not be true to the leveling individual, but is most certainly true for players at level 80 entering exclusively into heroic-mode difficulty dungeons. Damage classes with insufficient gear are ejected by vote, as well as tanks without X health points, or healers without X level of mana. The actual experience of the dungeon is rendered entirely irrelevant, and is instead something to be pushed through as quickly and efficiently as possible – and essentially something that is never to be enjoyed or savored. Certain dungeons, like the Occulus, actually trigger a response in many players that ought to be anathema to designers – they immediately leave the instance, willing to accept a 15-minute penalty before they can enter the LFG System queue because they despise the dungeon so thoroughly. As an aside, I find it one of the more interesting dungeons; players have to ride around on dragons and use an entirely new set of abilities, but because this takes a bit longer than other dungeons, players refuse to even participate.

“With that said, we plan on making some changes to The Old Kingdom in the next minor patch. For instance, Elder Nadox will only get one Ahn’Kahar Guardian and Jadoga Shadowseeker will only use her Ascend ability once during their respective encounters. In addition, a couple of the stagnant groups of bad dudes between the Befouled Terrace and The Desecrated Altar will be removed, while some of the roaming groups will have their pathing altered. These changes are not to make this instance easier, but rather to make it a slightly quicker run and more in line with some of the other Wrath dungeons.”

In other words, this change isn’t being made to make the dungeon more interesting, more entertaining, or more in line with the difficulty of other dungeons – but simply to make it faster, to lower the wall in front of the player to achieve their rewards. The actual object of the instance, the progress through it slaying spider-things and their overlords because they are evil, and even just simply to have fun, is marginalized in favor of how bloody long it takes. As an aside, this dungeon takes about twenty-five to thirty minutes, compared to fifteen to twenty minutes for other heroic dungeons. Entertainingly, and perhaps damningly, these dungeons, not played for their challenge or lore or entertainment but the speed at which rewards can be achieved, are called heroic.

Still, I am conflicted. I get to do more of the stuff that I love – hurting monsters with swords and killing bosses to get bigger swords – than ever before, and the process is more streamlined than it ever has been. At the same time, the other key component of online games (for me, anyway) – social interaction and making new pals – is almost entirely removed from the gameworld. It’s a difficult struggle; I feel more engaged than ever before (thanks not only to the LFG System but to a plethora of other improvements to the game), and yet I feel more socially isolated than ever before.

I’m not sure if there are many other players that feel similarly about this. A resurgence of old-school guilds with old-school players engaging in the game casually has allowed the social element – at least in guilds – to remain. Perhaps those players are content not to make new friends by playing with them, and to rather keep close those ones they’ve had for years.

How about myself? Well – I don’t know. The claws of the Lich King seem to have wrapped themselves around my greedy, big-number-loving throat, while my heart weeps at the loss of new and engaging social interaction outside of /trade while simultaneously praising my brains for letting it hang out in private chat lobbies with old Warcraft friends. Which will win out?

I’ll think about it later, as my LFG System queue just popped and more Emblems are calling.

And then, immediately after, I realized that it wasn’t – at least, not in terms of what Arntor (that Windir album) does for the theme of the evening. Arntor is an album of dualities, and often ones of polar extremes. Among the most aggressive and screechy of [very] late-90’s black/folk metal, Arntor was nonetheless painted to a canvas of enormous complexity and artistry that can be as blunt as a sledgehammer and delicate as, well, the finesse with which my room mate can pull off a cross-pass scoring goal in FIFA 10. It is this artistry and finesse that I think unites the two and distinguishes it from more American music and past times, such as football and Slipknot.

So: folk metal, 40oz, and FIFA 10 – they all go quite well together. Inseperably well together, as FIFA 10 is a game about isolated, beautiful moments of synchronization that are entirely amplified by the effects of the alcohol. The surprise interception followed by a fast-paced goal-scoring breakaway. The feeling of handling a complex passing situation flawlessly, and finding yourself balls-deep in the goal net with little opposition from the keeper. You know the sort of moments – those ones that memorialize the ridiculously awesome plays of a game’s history, the ones that every fan has seen in the form of some compilation or another. Generally, I am uninterested in these things, but somehow, inexplicably to me, FIFA 10 makes these moments shining and glorious for me. (Even though my room mate is almost always the one on the winning side of such encounters.)

A bit of disclosure, though: I’ve played FIFA 10 exclusively in LAN multiplayer mode with my room mate, so that will predictably color my thoughts on it. However, I’m a bit of the opinion that the function of any arena-based game like this – and any sports game is, by definition, an arena game when it migrates to vidscreen-and-controller status – is to facilitate competition between two (or more) human opponents. Sure, npc-type opponents can be present, but the focus ought always be on the humanoid. It is unlikely that this is an at all fair way to approach FIFA 10, however, as it was pretty clear to me that a fleshed-out LAN experience was not the intention of Electronic Arts. At least, I really hope it wasn’t.

For all of the successes of the actual gameplay of FIFA 10, such as seemingly faithful modeling the flow of a professional soccer game that my room mate is so fond of praising, essentially no framework exists in the LAN multiplayer that would make this experience a cohesive and fulfilling experience. While the single player game has options to create and edit plays, players, and teams as well as the actual behaviors of each of the these, the player in a LAN game is allowed to create a team and choose between home or away colors. Formations can’t even be changed in this mode; you’re permanently stuck with the formation that is defaulted to the team. Although I was not expecting stat-tracking for LAN games, it still would have been nice, although it does appear that these are collected when signed onto EA’s servers with the game.

The controls of FIFA 10, at least with around 10 games played, remain confusing in and of themselves even – and perhaps most especially – during gameplay. Most of the jubilation of actually performing one of the miracle-type sort of plays is knowing that I somehow got the ball and the player to go exactly where I wanted them to, even though I’m never quite sure how I managed to. There are two bogeymen at fault here; the way the game determines the direction the ball will be kicked, and the way the game determines how hard you wanted to kick the ball.

Determining shot strength is perhaps even more painfully delicate, and this mostly seems due to the fact that different measures are used for different sorts of kicks. For example, the level of force needed to execute an effective cross-pass is much higher than the level of force needed to shoot an effective shot on the goal from the same distance. Although this need for precision and multiple sets of power measures may suit some of the more hardcore fans out there, I found it an enormous turnoff.

These complaints aside – FIFA 10 is great fun, especially when played next to a friend and near a large bottle of beer. It’s quite easy to get caught up in the adrenaline-moments of the game and lose track of how loudly you shout when you finally pull off that elusive goal (sorry, Landlord Mary), as well as the intensity of your taunts to your room mate. A rather well-done instant replay features allows for the reliving of beautiful moments or vicious slide tackles, and provides a great capstone for an otherwise overly positive experience.

Game scoring stuff can be found here.

And then there are games like Risen, for whom boss encounters seem inevitable but somehow alien to the experience. Having just completed Risen, I found it to be one of the finer open-world RPG games I’ve played in awhile – and it was brutally difficult, often punishing a slight mistake with a player death. For me, that level of difficulty made the game engaging – for the majority of the game, I felt like I was the weakling shipwreck survivor that the plot told me I was. After tens of hours digging through ruins and working my way up the monster badass food chain, I eventually felt – both through getting damn good at sword play and attaining the sweet loot of the ancient world – that I could kill anything on the island.

It was at this final moment that the trouble with boss encounters began to plague Risen. The sweeping majority of the game is spent fighting beast-type monsters or humanoid-type monsters, with the latter carrying weapons and the former using tooth, claw, and brute force. Each of the variants demanded a different approach; wolves and stingrats require a shield to block, guys with swords quite effective parrying and lunging, and ashbeasts require well-timed dodging and precision strikes with large weapons, as shields are useless against them. For the most part, this system worked well – it required a flexibility on my behalf that wasn’t usually immediately obvious, and only trial and error could defeat various enemies.

Even the very first beast encountered – an evil, cruel-looking and overlarge sea-vulture – was initially challenging. Blind, over-aggressive swinging resulted in pecked-out eyes and blood on the sand. Wolves, when attempted without a shield, lead to being killed while trying desperately to parry. Hell, even gnomes – which look astonishingly creepy – were enormously difficult initially.

And they really are depressed and angry – the vast majority of interactable NPCs encountered are assholes, often cursing at you and occasionally picking fights with you. Their attitude never quite seems forced and never quite feels trite – often, it simply feels believable, which is quite a testament to the writers over at Piranha Bytes. Most people were believable with what seemed to be legitimate struggles. Surprisingly – mostly because it seems to happen so rarely – I never quite felt like somebody’s bitch when I was off running errands for them, and my taking up of their quests often seemed the best thing to do. Not just because of the potential for a reward, but rather because it sounded fun.

While there didn’t seem to be a great deal of optional, side-quest type stuff to Risen, the quests presented had just the right amount of variety, mood, and adventuring to keep me thoroughly engaged throughout. Often, I was more interested in questing for people more to see what they would do than how it would benefit me. Some were entirely social; solving a murder in the Volcano Monastery meant interrogating monks, digging up graveyards, and even becoming a drug dealer. One notably long quest required the befriending of a bar maid, an imprisoned lord, uncovering a smuggling operation and, finally, traipsing around the island with a treasure map, digging up the bodies of mutineers. Although these quests were ultimately of the “Go here, find item, bring it back” variety, my reasons for undergoing these quests were varied enough that it didn’t seem problematic or, more importantly, at all boring.

Scoring can be found here.

As the walls that once housed the fuel containers of a small, EDF-controlled fuel depot fall and trigger a chain reaction of viscerally beautiful explosions before me, a solitary thought dominates my mind: I did this, and I did it alone. No scripting help from the game engine, no computer-controlled character holding my hand and telling me where to place charges and when to run, and no loss of control in the form of a cut-scene – and it is in this independence that Red Faction: Guerilla finds its apex.

But those details end up as irrelevancies as, even though some of them forward the engaging plot, they’re really just encouragements for you to go blow the hell out of something – and Guerilla makes this activity incredibly entertaining. Simple destructions, like swinging away at the foundation of a solar power array that stands a hundred feet tall, often yield unexpected results. Not the sort of unexpected where the rapidly-falling tower crushes you, no, although that occasionally happens – but the sort of unexpected that means that collapsed array falls into something explodey, which explodes, which then makes further things explode, killing a bunch of once-living things and showering the screen in glorious, beautifully-rendered carnage. It’s all really very gratuitous, but somehow it never quite gets silly – the graphical feedback and design ensure that, while things exploding are bright and vibrant, they always look just like you might imagine them to.

That I mention the killing of men secondary to structures is no accident; not only does the game generally only rarely require you to actually kill soldiers, it doesn’t really facilitate their slaying terribly well. That’s not to say that Guerilla is bad as a shootey-game, but rather to say that it’s average. The cover mechanics are straightforward and simple, ‘F’ is depressed to zoom in a bit and center your view, and the left mouse button does the shooting. Enemies find cover, lob grenades, and appear to possess an intelligence that’s almost human – but none of it is quite convincing. Once I pieced together how the enemy AI acquires and assigns targets, I found it pretty easy to avoid too much incoming damage by simply running the hell away.

Only, it doesn’t because you don’t have to do that ‘running away’ part. At least, you don’t need to keep running once your health bar fills up sufficiently. Sometimes, when completely and hopelessly overwhelmed, unlimited flight is the only viable option. But usually, you can kill all of the enemy soldiers. This is because, inexplicably, Alec is bigger, stronger, faster and more accurate than the EDF is. Having a badass protagonist is all well and good (who wants to play a weakling, anyway?), but it runs contrary to every bit of narrative the game throws at you.

Incidentally, you never need to run further than the nearest safe house – Red Faction camps – to ditch any pursuers. Even though these camps have about a dozen freedom fighters/terrorists at them, the EDF simply will not pursue you into them, which makes for a rather jarring experience when three times that many were in hot pursuit. These weird blips happen often, and have the nasty habit of utterly annihilating any sense of immersion that had been previously established. For example, one mission sends Alec to a desolate valley, devoid of all life and containing only a few construction supplies. After beginning the mission, a small Mechwarrior-like suit spawns. Upon entering it, hordes of EDF soliders attack, both on foot and in vehicle, and you are informed that you must kill 60 of them. Alright, no problem – a solid amount of good-fun bloodshed. Once the 60 are slain, however, the remaining EDF – which for me was easily two dozen – all disappear. Although I was relieved that I was going to survive, I was disappointed – didn’t I earn a glorious, rusted-iron-Mechwarrior victory or a painful, humiliating loss? Isn’t that the commitment that I signed up for? Quests like this – that terminate all evidence of their being upon completion – take the responsibility of survival away from both the player and the narrative, and I found that I greatly resented it Guerilla for it.

That’s the rub of Red Faction: Guerilla: really genuinely awesome physics modeling and world-breaking that gives the player total control over his environment, juxtaposed over a narrative engine that repeatedly removes this control and independence away from the player. An interesting, Marxist-fueled paranoid sci-fi thriller with hints of the film Total Recall that repeatedly tells the player how weak he is compared to the EDF and how heroic he is for overcoming them, juxtaposed over an engine that creates a player avatar vastly more powerful than any of the foes he encounters – even though, by trade, he is a mere miner. A beautiful, fully-realized world into which great care has clearly gone into the engineering of, placed overtop of painfully generic looking enemy soldiers that behave in sadly generic ways. This, I suppose, is the nature of life on Mars.

Head over to the Scores section for a more numeric look at Red Faction: Guerilla

But none of them – whether it be another rogue, an implacable paladin, or even the dreaded hunter – could instill in me the raw, unrelenting hatred that seeing a warrior could.

Not just any warrior, but one armed with an axe. And not just any axe, no, but a terribly particular one – the Arcanite Reaper. For a time, the Arcanite Reaper was the penultimate weapon of the warrior class. It was, at the time, ludicrously expensive to craft, requiring not only a host of rare and exotic materials, but also access – and coin to pay – to a blacksmith that knew how to forge the beskulled weapon. Neither the materials nor the blacksmiths capable of forging the thing were easy to be had, yet every warrior quested, fought and killed relentlessly to procure one.

Looking back on the item now, it doesn’t appear to be a terribly powerful weapon: 53.8 dps, +13 stamina, and +62 attack power. When viewed in light of the obscenely-powerful weapons found in Wrath of the Lich King dungeons, the Arcanite Reaper appears a paper clip with a rock stuck to it at best – but Azeroth was a much different place then. Due to a mechanic that was later changed, the speed of a weapon – 3.8, in the case of the Arcanite Reaper – influenced in an enormous way how hard a triggered ability could strike an enemy. Essentially, the slower a weapon was, the harder it could hit somebody – and the Arcanite Reaper was, and remains, among the very slowest of weapons in the game, with the total number of 3.8 speed weapons being easily countable on one hand. The other dominant factor in this calculation was the attack power of the warrior in question – but, generally speaking, if a warrior had the finances for an Arcanite Reaper, he probably also had the time and money to boost his other stats to Seris-killing proportions.

The warrior could not see Seris when she crouched in stealth. The warrior could not stop her from escaping into stealth. The warrior could not even stop the rogue from moving for long enough to kill them. But what the warrior could do was terrible indeed; even with relatively equal gear between an enemy warrior and I, he could kill me in as few as three swings of that axe – and both of us, no matter the warrior that I faced, always knew that. While I might manage to reduce the total health of the warrior by as much as half with luck, I knew that within ten seconds of leaving the comforting, black safety of stealth that I would be dead.

That’s why I decided to make a warrior.

To kill the hell out of rogues.

I never did get Icthus – the warrior – to the highest level. He never did get an Arcanite Reaper – by the time I began heavily investing time into Icthus, Blizzard had changed the way that weapon speed influences damage, so it was no longer the end-all-be-all weapon. This was also because, as I said, I never made it to the level cap with Icthus; rather, Iparked him at level 39 and fought with him in battlegrounds, which limit the teams – an enemy team and a team you were on – to ten players, each being in the level range of 30-39. Ironically, rogues wound up being perhaps my single most dangerous rival on the field of battle due to the way that high-level magical enhancements add to the class, but that’s a rather in-depth discussion poorly-placed here.

While I couldn’t necessarily kill rogues as easily as Seris had been killed, I was still fully capable of annihilating

almosteverything else in the battlegrounds. I was engaging in the practice known as “twinking,” which means that Icthus didn’t get any of his gear on his own – rather, my high-level characters got it for him, and then paid enormous sums of money to place magical enchantments on his gear to make him far more powerful than any level 39 character had a right to be. This had the result of making him vastly more powerful than any enemy found in the battlegrounds, barring those that were “twinking” themselves – and even then, none could compete with Icthus.

Except rogues.

This experience, and indeed set of experiences, I found to be among the most entertaining and adrenaline-inducing that I encountered in World of Warcraft. While my rogue had good gear and weapons, and ran with a pretty solid group of players, she never shined with the burning intensity that Icthus rather regularly did – and it never felt as though she shined as brightly. I believe that some measure of this was due only to my playing the warrior – that absolutely hated thing, that thing I’d been trained to despise, fear and hate since Seris was level 1 – that abominably powerful, bastard thing, the warrior.

But it wasn’t the warrior in and of itself; while a class able to dominate those around him, the warrior’s skillset, his appearance, his attitude – these weren’t the reasons would glow and burn with life while playing Icthus. That reason, I realized years later, was pretty simple: I was playing the hated thing.

I was the hated thing.

Recently, I’ve begun noticing that I often play classes, teams or factions based on similar reasons. While learning to play a new game, I inevitably learn to despise one or two of the class/factions/etc. Sometimes, it’s because they kill me repeatedly, and like Seris and the warrior, I simply cannot find an effective strategy and am thus forced to flee. (I did ultimately find one, but it required that the warrior and I be completely alone until I could bleed him to death with surgical precision – a very rare circumstance.) Sometimes, it’s because their skillset – when effectively utilized – enables them to be so slippery and quick that they are impossible to kill, and able to harry me until I die.

In Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, this Hated Thing came in the form of Choppas and Chosen. Due to how racial factions were designed in WAR, I was unable to play a Choppa or a Chosen – so instead, I played the Knight of the Blazing Sun, counterpart to Chosen, and the Slayer, the counterpart to the Choppa. Although both were axe-and-sword frontline fighters, they fell on opposite ends of the spectrum; Chosen/Knights were incredibly difficult to kill, and Slayers/Choppas were incredibly powerful.

Neither the Slayer nor the Knight were among my first, or even primary, characters – that honor fell to Bloodmoney the Warrior Priest. She was a healer, and died regularly to Slayers, and frustrated herself often trying to kill Chosen. While I enjoyed playing her, absolutely nothing I experienced in WAR brought me the raw, unrelenting joy that Othered Again – my Knight of the Blazing Sun – brought to me when he stood straddling the world like an unkillable titan, laughing as he deflected blows and spells with shield and sword.

Sure, Othered Again could take a lot of damage and hold a line and ensure his allies could annihilate his enemies from the safety of being behind him. Sure, Spacetiger Spaceslayer – the Slayer – could leap into a group of enemies, howl with rage and swing his two axes with a fervor only dwarves could muster, killing everything around him. But neither of these character-defining aspects were why I so thoroughly enjoyed Othered Again and Spacetiger Spaceslayer.

I adored them both because, as with Icthus, I was the Hated Thing.

It doesn’t appear – at least from the open beta – to have the deep complexity or brick-wall learning curve of Tribes 2, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. On the two maps that were available for play, the simplified Tribes combat worked rather well. Armored guys, in traditional red vs. blue style, ran about shooting at each other with a variety of weapons in a variety of different kits pursuing a variety of different objectives. These objectives are a bit neat, a bit like a sidequest in a typical RPG game: go kill the enemy VIP/general, or go and escort ours. Get into this big truck thing with a bunch of giant guns on it and make sure it gets to the correct destination. Find the “intel” – the flag – and get it to the capture point. Nothing particularly new here, but their inclusion into an otherwise typical point-capture FPS game mixed up the gameplay a good bit, as four control points + sidemissions ensured that combat was never centered in any one place.

Which is a good thing, as combat doesn’t seem to have been designed for large scale affairs. Most of the man-killing weapons don’t do any sort of area-effect damage, and individual players can take quite a good bit before dying, so firefights of more than four players per side can get, well, almost stagnant, what with half of them carrying repair tools and healing each other in times of need. So, big firefights are more or less out of the equation – but how do small fights add up?

Among the best I’ve seen in awhile. Finding cover is absolutely crucial, as is knowing your flank and surroundings. While an individual player can inflict great harm on the enemy if well-placed and played, team-work is, as has been the current theme in contemporary FPS games, of tantamount importance. The genuinely bizarre thing about this is that players seem more than willing to work together – it’s not uncommon to be sprinting along a path to an objective only to find a couple of other robot-suit pals running along side you, ready to kill a bunch of people and blow some stuff up with whatever their particular kit is.  Generally, these will be pretty varied from one player to the next: one player may opt for heavy armor, shielding, and a rocket launcer to piss off enemy defensive installations, and others – like myself, most often – kit themselves for speed, stealth, and weapon power, hoping to attain the addage of “One Shot, One Kill.”

Although a mid-range firefight can drag out in excess of thirty seconds, if a bogey drops in on your six with a fast-firing weapon, you’re pretty much already dead. This is due to the lock-on mechanism found within Section 8. Right mouse button to zoom, mouse over target, press E, and you’ll lock onto them, automatically moving your gun or knife or other death implement in whatever ridiculous pattern your enemy deigns to move in – and, generally speaking, you’ll kill them.

But here’s the thing with the lock-on: it doesn’t last long. At best, when kitted for it, you’ll have a lock for about eight seconds, which is usually just enough time to kill someone at relatively close range. At medium range, however, the lock-on by itself won’t kill anything, and at best you’ll chew through their shield and then be left to spray lead in the abstract bullet-patterns like so many other games of the genre. However, choose your lock-on wisely – like after knocking out a good portion of the enemies’ shield – and they’re as good as dead. As a result of this, duels often seem to come down to whomever is at their weapon’s optimal range and who uses their lock-on at the right time.

There are a variety of other means that one can employ to stack encounters in their favor, and this is where Section 8 really shines. You can pick two of the available weapons for your loadout, although here there isn’t anything special – a pistol, a shotgun, a machine gun, an assault rifle, a sniper rifle, and a missile launcher. However, you can take a series of passive modules that spice things up a bit and provide great differences in the otherwise identical sea of guys-in-robot-suits you’ll be fighting. I’ve generally found that I enjoy either the up-close and grizzly assault style of leaping into combat like a maniac with a machine gun, or cooly picking people off from afar with the sniper rifle; as a result, I generally choose to maximize my damage output with anvil rounds, ensure additional accuracy with the gyro stabilizers (which reduce recoil and grant a bit smaller of a firing arc), and spend my remaining two points on the shield booster to give me more time to react. There are other options, too, like the repair field, which increases the speed at which you repair both objects and your comrades, and another one that increases running speed and jetpack recharge. Each player is allowed ten points to customize their loadout any way that they choose.

Finally, there are the useable items. There are not many of these, and two of them – the mortar and the det pack – were not available in the open beta. You can choose the knife, for even grizzlier up-close mayhem than the shotgun or machinegun, which often kills in a single blow; the grenade, which is nice because it doesn’t actually explode unless you toss it nearby somebody; the mini-sensor which, well, it senses stuff, and ensures that little red triangles representing the enemy robot-suit-guys will appear forever on your screen. Until the charge runs out, anyway. My personal favorites were the repair wrench, which lets you heal yourself and your robot pals, and the stealth matrix, which doesn’t actually make you invisible – rather, it removes your little red triangle from the enemy HUD and prevents/removes lock-on attempts. It’s great for running the hell away if you’re not in an optimal position for a fight, or to give you a very prominent edge in a tight duel.

I’ve made mention several times of how everybody looks like they’re wearing a robot suit or something, and they really do. Each player looks identical, whether teammate or not, and although you’re rarely close enough to notice enemy graphical differentiation, some variety here would have been nice. The robot-guy-suit thing doesn’t end with player avatars, however, as almost every aspect of the HUD is modeled after this – and it’s done supremely well, and in a way Section 8 reminds me of a single-warrior version of Supreme Commander. Little red triangles show where bad guys might be, little red diamonds where enemy controlled points are, and it all works very well, but what is fantastic about the robot-suit theme Timegate is working here are the little touches. For example, spawning is relatively unique in Section 8; instead of being reborn at your team’s home base or whatever the generic term is, you are instead allowed to spawn anywhere – absolutely anywhere – that you might choose to click, and you are then flung from a spaceship that hovers over the battlefield.

And it’s completely awesome.

Friction burn flickers on the periphery and the shimmer of your shield envelops you as you fall. At a thousand meters up, you can initiate the air brake, which grants you a modicum of control over your descent. Neglect to hit the brake and you’ll fall and strike the ground far faster, ensuring you’ll avoid enemy anti-aircraft emplacements, and although you’ll take no damage, there is still a cost: you make earthfall much harder than normal, and you land crouching, delayed before you can move. The beauty in this is what happens to the perspective during the hard earthfall: when you land, your vision shifts to pink/blue/green, almost as if the connection between your character as a human and your robot-suit is being frayed. It works wonderfully.

The drop ship also serves another function: to drop stuff for the player.  In the beta, you can only requisition three of the eight or so available items: a supply depot, which bestows ammunition and health, a minigun turret, which shoots at red-colored HUD enemy units, and a heavy suit of armor.  Think a smaller mechwarrior – a minigun on each hand and big fists with which to grab, strangle, and smash your enemies upon the ground with.  That last bit is no fancy wordy trick to make them sound cooler, as the greatest strenght of the heavy comes in having the capability to kill an enemy robot suit in one squeeze.  That, and they’re a huge pain in the ass to kill with anything but the rocket launcher.

As with all running-jumping-shooting games, the player has to do a bit of running and jumping in addition to shooting – and as this is my favorite feature of the game, I’ve decided to close with it. Player movement is relatively slow and ponderous, but this lends the impression that your robot-suit is heavy. However, there’s a great mechanism to get around this; hold down the shift key as you run, and you’ll begin to run a bit faster. Fill up a little gauge on the left of the HUD, and the camera will shift into a third-person perspective as you begin to sprint at super-human speeds. The transition in speeds is really quite striking, and causes the player to feel like an immense and total badass when it is engaged. Leap while you’re sprinting in this mode and engage the rocket-pack – by continuing to hold down the jump key – and you’ll rocket into the air, propelled forward by your incredible momentum, which allows you to make ludicrously dramatic and intense entrances. I can’t imagine a better way to say hai to some pals than this – or to land within the enemy ranks with a machinegun and an air filled with blood.

Trine tells its story – that of an undead uprising, a time of generic, difficult struggles in a typical, fairytale/unimaginative kingdom, and one of companionship from unlikely but-always-come-together-character-types-in-RPG-games. As I played through the game last night, the story seemed to become more and more irrelevant as I progressed through samey-feeling dungeon-y type places. Although the game gave me a series of wonderfully painted-looking story panels (think: the first Fable), there didn’t really seem to be much innovation or cleverness here. The characters themselves weren’t quite RPG tropes. Well, at least the wizard wasn’t – he’s a womanizing playboy, and the game finds him knocked out after ingesting a potion he thought would allow him to cast a fireball.

But not a real fireball – a fireball that wasn’t quite real, but was nonetheless real enough to impress the ladies and the nobles. Which is a lot like what Trine turned out to be – a potion for a fireball, but not really a fireball. Something to impress the vapid, face-value nobles of gaming, and not the crabby critics of the dungeons. And that’s a shame, as Trine feels like it’s often not quite living up to the promise of a physics-based puzzle game.

The shame about the fighter guy was that I found him to be largely useless. Unless surrounded and overwhelmed, I found the thief’s bow to be a vastly more reliable weapon. Due to his requirement of proximity, I found myself getting beat up a lot. I blame the engine more than anything else for this – although control of the environment and puzzle elements often was intuitive and fun, combat felt .. off. As if Trine’s combat were being filtered through a browser game or something. At best, the combat felt distracting and rarely challenging, and at worse .. it was incredibly distracting and irritating. Note that combat is easily an aspect of the game that got worse as I became trashed, although the puzzles also began to take longer and longer. This wasn’t because they were harder, so to speak, but rather that I was drunker, and leaping from one ledge to another became exercises in something approximating hilarity.

This may, of course, have been an intentional design decision to limit the importance of combat over clever puzzles – but that doesn’t mean that the combat had to be more or less static and dull from the onset to conclusion (of the 40, anyway).

Really? What sort of video game – that actually includes a character meant for fighting – gives you a boss-monster and then expects you to have no problem just avoiding him? I’ll tell you: a cocktease of a videogame.

While Trine was initially incredibly magical-feeling and engaging, this feeling wore off over time. It wasn’t the the magical sensibilities of developer Frozenbyte dissipated, but rather that the environments grew somewhat stale. The first area, something like an underground castle, was beautiful – dark and lush red carpets filled the hallways, great lion statues perched, and the sense of depth created around the 2d-platformer was really quite impressive. And then .. the party moves into a cave. And then another cave, and then a dungeon of an actual castle – but the locale feels pretty much the same as it did when you first began playing the game. I guess the color choices for the “magical” game setting must not be a very large palette. Unfortunately, the same goes for the music – while initially captivating, the music becomes so similar that it begins to blend together and really fails to indicate whether or not I’m doing something different in a different place than I was ten minutes ago. The sad result of all of this is that I felt, after playing for six hours, that I was still on the first level and had just been running about in circles.

The meat of the game is delicious and tasty, however, although you won’t find the taste palatable if you don’t like drawing blocks and lines and swinging about on ropes. Although occasionally the thug guy with a sword has to be used to solve things, I found the most elegant solutions often revolved around the wizard. While you can create objects with the conjurer and interact with them with the other characters, like building a ledge high enough so that you could use the thief’s grappling hook, I never really found it necessary. I imagine I stuck with the wizard the most because of the animations – he looks positively /magical/ when casting. I really imagine that Rincewind would have looked just like him as a younger man, and would have moved similarly. You’ll find no elaborate fireball incantations here, no, but rather a wizard pulling at the strings working the guts of the world do enact his will. It’s great stuff.

Really, I can’t give high enough praise to how great the wizard-beardy-sort looked while casting. Fantastic.

Many of the puzzles appear to be solveable in a couple of different ways, if only because the objects that the wizard can draw – a plank and a box, when I stopped playing in a stupor, although there was an as-yet unfilled skillslot – are going to end up arranged in a different way. When working through the puzzles presented, I got the impression that I was solving puzzles in a fashion not-quite-meant by the developers, almost like I was cheating and abusing mechanics to get through the game. I find that this feeling often accompanies puzzle games, but I always leave with a sense that I’m not quite getting all out of a situation that I could be. That said, I’m reasonably sure I wasn’t quite cheating. Intentionally, anyway.

Most, if not all, of these puzzles revolve around Trine’s physics engine. This is, unfortunately, a little bit disappointing, as the physics don’t always quite make sense. I realize that this is a video game, and that processing power doesn’t exist on most PC’s to simulate true physics – but it still felt like physics-lite. For example, when picking up an object with the wizard’s magic, you can’t actually throw it – when the item is released, it simply falls to the ground. This deprives the wizard of a potentially fun weapon – hurling planks at monsters. This was possibly a design decision to bar him from being an offensive force – but if this were the case, then why can I drop boxes and planks onto baddies, killing them? The only time momentum seems to be modeled is when one object is directly connected to another – like a giant, weighted fist chained to the ceiling, or the thief with her grappling hook. Oversight, or design choice? I dunno.

My fixation on the momentum modeling was almost certainly a result of having spent the better part of last week with the excellent-but-not-quite-there-yet indie game Mount & Blade, in which you live or die by the momentum of your weapon. The shift between Mount & Blade – a game with absolutely no magic or mysticism, even including the lack of potions and in-combat healing – and Trine was palpable, and I think that it amplified the magical-ness of Trine all the more. As an aside, it’s kind of weird making a physics platforming game centered around magic – systems as opposed to each other as positive and negative magnetic fields – but it generally works out. Okay so, moving along:

As in almost every other puzzle game, one must sometimes push objects around to get them where you want them. This includes things like beams blocking your way and crates, of course. The physics does weird things with this sometimes – there are multiple ((screenshot for this …)) large objects that rotate in a fashion that makes little to no sense. For example, once in awhile the player encounters a large, cross-shaped and rotatable platform. It basically looks like a large + symbol, with a smaller, perpendicular beam at each end that the player can stand on. When standing on the lower-most ledge and facing the lower branch of the cross, you can actually push towards it, rotating the entire mechanism – while this feels mostly natural in-game, it’s so incredibly jarring to see that it’s difficult to sidestep the unreality of Trine.

Before I forget to mention it: Trine, on my system, alt-tabs /brilliantly/, with almost no delay in the changeover.

Trine was more or less an enjoyable game, and the experience was certainly a valid one when accompanied by a large bottle of shitty beer. The problems that I had with it are mostly technical and minor – things, perhaps, I’d have personally like to see, although I could never quite escape the feeling that each component of the game was a lightweight version of something that could be found elsewhere.

So, the penultimate question: will I return to Trine tomorrow, sober, and unarmed with beer? Probably not.