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.

It would seem that Team Fortress 2 is updating the game with .. a new class?!  Some details below the cut.

The Guard Dog doesn’t appear to be a terribly offensive class – boasting only a double-firing, triple machine gun that looks scarier than it really is, and a rocket-boosted melee attack. It CAN, however, carry and steal medpacks, ammunition and guns from both the ground and the enemy, so that could be interesting. Sealing the deal is its ability to sniff out dead people: if the Guard Dog sniffs an intact enemy corpse, then it can “track the exact position” of an enemy – even if they’re stealthed, changed classes, or are a disguised spy! Should be an interesting shift in group dynamics if nothing else.

OH AND ALSO:

The dog can piss into the Sniper’s Jarate [read: urine to throw at people] Jar!  Awesome.

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.