Alphazero

The failed underwater utopia of  Rapture is the real star of this shooter. The world is beautiful, even after its downfall. As you shoot, zap, freeze, burn, tornado, and bee your way through the leaking hallways and ruined pleasure parks you start to piece together what must have happened. It's a story of idealism broken by corruption. Imperfect men and women try to build a world unfettered by the stogy ethics of the surface world. A closet full of the blood stained dresses of murdered Little Sisters speaks to their success.

The game play is fun. It's not non-stop action in the vein of Gears of War, but there's more than enough to go around.  The RPG elements are light, consisting of a few choices of which "plasmids" and "tonics" to upgrade your character with. The mournful call of the Big Daddies stomping through the halls stays with me still. The ending even made me mist up a little.

I completely loved this game.

I can't stand Tycho's writing. He's the literary half of Penny Arcade's Gabe and Tycho team. When it's just him and a block of text I can count on being irritated at least twice, annoyed once, and left with a general feeling that he could have said it all in half the space.

However, when his writing is filtered through the three panels of a comic, I love it. Gabe is a great and expressive artist, and when Tycho is forced to cut his thousand words down to twenty, they can frequently be just right. The same turns out to be thankfully true of Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode One.

The writing is mostly quick and funny, very much in the style of the comic. The game itself plays out in a short five or six hours. The combat system is interesting and eventually fun, but it  takes some getting used to. The characters are uniformly funny and interesting to interact with. You want to beat up mimes and clowns? Who doesn't? This game delivers on both counts. Do you have a modest proposal for dealing with the rampant hobo problem? This game has the solution. When facing off against the brutally horny Fruit... Lovers you can throw out a lusciously juicy orange to stall their attacks. It actually distracts two of them, the one doing the loving, and another who watches. Pervert.

There are upgrades and potions, but not much variety. These are amusing as well, such as the potion to degrade your enemies attacks, "Extra Mild Super Weak Sauce". I think I had that at Taco Bell once.

It's the return of the funny adventure game, and I think they got it pretty much right. I look forward to the next installment.

The rumors are true. Assassins Creed does indeed get a bit repetitive in its core gameplay mechanics. Before each of the nine major assassinations that Altair is required to perform you must:

1) Climb to several high points in the city, and hit a button that forces you to look around at the beautiful
     environment.
2) Sneak about the alleyways, or climb to the rooftops and run with amazingly fluid animation.
3) Eavesdrop on others who often give you helpful and important information about your current target.
4) Kill a bunch of fools with cinematic finishing moves that makes everyone else in the game run for cover.

Or you can skip almost all of that and get right to the main event. And oh, what events they are. Corrupt officials, psychotic military leaders, evil doctors, conspirators all, but for who? And what? What could tie these men together?

I was sucked in by the story, loved the main assassinations, and happily played through the repetitive investigations side missions just because I loved the immersive world Altair lived in so much. There was nothing better than sneaking down a wall like Spider-Assassin, carefully stepping up behind the target, delivering the killing blow with the hidden blade, getting even more juicy story elements from the target himself, and then running like hell, the whole city alert and on your tail.

The game itself could certainly have had more variety, but the story and game engine technology more than made up for it in my book. Climb to top of the cathedral in Acre, perch on the cross at the top like the bird of prey you are, and simply enjoy the view. It's really stunning.

The new Prince of Persia game is apparently built off the same game engine as this. I cannot wait.

You know, the King of All Cosmos is kind of a dick. He berates you, The Prince, for a few minutes before dropping you off without warning in the most cluttered Japanese restaurant you've ever seen in your life, forces you to roll up all of the knick-knacks scattered about on your "katamari", a roundish, spiky toy that can stick to most everything so long as it's not too big, and then doesn't give you nearly enough time to build up said katamari to his arbitrarily required size.

No wonder all of your other cousins ran away.

The game is bright with simple but effective graphics. Relentlessly cheery J-Pop music blasts as you frantically try to collect as much stuff lying around as you can. The more you roll up, the bigger your katamari gets, and the bigger your katamari gets, the bigger the objects you can successfully get to stick to it. Before long you're rolling up cats, then bowling pins, then mailmen, eventually Mt. Fuji and North America. At the end of each level The King of All Cosmos judges your collection, and turns it into a moon, planet, or star to replace the ones he carelessly destroyed during a royal game of badminten.

It's clearly surreal. It's often fun, particularly when your katamari size hits that magic level where you can suddenly plow through a big collection of objects that you used to bounce right off. As The King says in the game, it's surprisingly soothing. Who knew? The objects are often funny, and automatically categorized as you collect them. Living things like, say, mailmen, wiggle humorously on your katamari after you've picked them up. I guess they don't want to become part of the new Jupiter.

I recently went back to play more (it is surprisingly soothing) but was disappointed to be totally unable to get an online game going against anyone. Anywhere. In the world. As happens with most games that aren't Call of Duty 4, the vibrant online community seems to have faded away. Partially because the versus online mode isn't much fun, but even more so because I suspect a giant katamari rolled them up.

It's worth playing all the way through at least once, but I don't know that I'll go back to it again. Take that Dad.

Fallout 3 is big. Really big. You might think it's a long way to the corner store, but that's peanuts to Fallout.

There is much to love in Fallout. The world is big. The density of content is astounding. While it is a wasteland you travel through, you can't go very far without coming across some sort of landmark, mini-quest, or full fledged dungeon. There is just so much to do. So many people to talk to. Even more to shoot. You could spend over a hundred hours questing and not even touch the main story.

At the same time, the combat does get a bit repetitive. Once you're out of the early levels, and depending on which upgrades you pick, it can also become dead easy. Between levels 10 and 20 I died once, and even that one could have been avoided had I been paying attention.

This incarnation of the Fallout world does have a fascinating storyline that makes exploring and running into the occasional baddie more than worthwhile. You do get large elements of the story from the main quest, but the more time you put into exploring the more of the story you will uncover. As science fiction, it's very well done, and as you identify more and more with your character, you become part of the story yourself.

I lived in Washington D.C. for two years, which added to the enjoyment. I've been in those Metro stations. At one point I realized I wasn't using the map to get around downtown because I knew the way from living there. The retro-future spin they put on everything is an added bonus.

Fallout 3 is a big, sprawling, and wonderful RPG. The combat is a little weak at times, but the wonder of the story and beautiful, broken world more than make up for it. I'm eagerly looking forward to the DLC coming the first three months of 2009.

I bought Too Human for a few reasons. First, there was the game's fearless leader, Dennis Dyack, and his multiple  forum based shenanigans. I found the whole thing endlessly entertaining and want to do my part to support outlandish behavior in the people who make games. Second, I'm a big fan of Norse mythology, and cybernetically tarting the whole thing up appeals to me. Third, I like killing pretend dudes with giant pretend swords. I don't regret my purchase in the least.

The game is fun. I enjoy killing pretend dudes, and there were plenty of pretend dudes that needed killing. The highlights, for me, were jumping right into the middle of a huge cluster of baddies, and relentless wailing on them with the various Ultimate Swords of Total Annihilation and Doom.

I also quite enjoy leveling up. Something about getting slightly better equipment and slightly better skills over and over scratches that particular OCD itch that makes me susceptible to gaming in the first place. The main character Baldr drops some dudes, who in turn drop some weapons. You pick them up, and occasionally, if the game thinks the equipment is something special, a chorus of a thousand voices sings out about your skill and worth. You feel good about yourself, until you check the stats on the new gear and see it's about the same as what you have already.

I played through the whole campaign, and quite liked the story, clunky character models and all. I liked killing hoards of dudes. After a while, however, I felt like I was just watching Baldr kill hoards of dudes. He seemed to enjoy it, but I was getting less out of it than he. Because you're just picking the direction of Baldr's next attack, I started feeling a disconnect between what he was doing, and what I was. There's more to the fighting system than just holding up a stick, of course, but there isn't a whole lot of motivation to do so. Many times you can get through just fine by holding the stick in a certain direction and waiting.

I think Baldr's method of getting from enemy to enemy while in mid combat bugged me the most. He literally skates from one to the next. He's fast. He's a God. He looks like they ran out of time to animate a run cycle and just shipped it ice-capades style.

Just like Mr. Dyack, the game has issues, but despite them I had fun. Dudes need killing, and Baldr's just the God for the job.