This is a really great one.  It’s called Closure and the gameplay is truly unique.  Try it.

Have you ever wanted to destroy Van Halen iconography by shooting white pixels out of David Lee Roth’s ass?

Well, you’re in luck!

Rag Doll physics needs to get its shit together.  It hasn’t progressed much in the last 5 years.  In real life when I fail in my attempts to do a backwards rail slide I normally put my hands out to keep from landing on my head and grinding my face across the pavement.  These skateboarders defy all natural human instincts and instead go completely limp when they crash; allowing gravity and the laws of momentum to decide which body parts get shredded and disfigured.  I think we’ve got the whole “floppy body” physics thing down.  Now, can we maybe add a bit of “I care about my body and wish to preserve it” physics?

In a particularly ugly episode in the history of online and print journalism, Electronic Gaming Monthly has become the latest victim, not just of the failing economy, but the trend away from print.  I remember fondly the days when PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World, and their many brethren produced monthly issues each as thick as a small catalogue, packed with advertising, enthusiastic and sometimes tasteless editorial content, and above all a sense of fun and excitement around the hobby.  Things changed.  Websites stole the scoops and the breaking news, the advertising slowly trickled away, the smaller game developers went belly up (and some of the larger ones as well); the content of the remaining magazines got more serious, “mature,” and lost a lot of their adolescent enthusiasm–as, I suppose, did their ageing readership.

My sadness comes not from an old man’s pathetic nostalgia or distrust of the new (well, not just those anyway), but for our culture’s shift away from the measured writing and reading styles of print to the disconnected, hyperlinked, verbal collage that is online journalism.  High school textbooks are laid out like webpages now, packed with frames and sidebars and more illustration than text.  Yahtzee Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation reviews–funny as they can sometimes be–are a good distillation of what we value now: speed, irony and snarkiness, disjunct thought, and three minutes of content.

Things change.  Sometimes with glacial slowness, sometimes in the blink of an eye.  Sometimes in our enthusiasm for the new we lose sight of what we’re giving up. I feel badly for the way the the people at EGM and (especially) 1up.com were treated, whether or not the outcome was inevitable.  And I’m sorry we’ve lost another little bit of what makes our hobby a great one.

I don’t know about you, but one of the reasons I play games (and watch movies, and read books, and listen to music): those moments of surprise, when I encounter an image, character, choice, environment, situation or technical achievement that takes me to a whole new and unexpected place.  And mostly, they are just moments.  It is a rare work of popular entertainment or art that surprises from beginning to end.  In no particular order, here are just a few of my favorites from the past year’s games.

RESISTANCE 2 (PS3) The single-player campaign has been rightly criticized for being the antithesis of “open world” play: it leads the player through the most linear route imaginable.  That having been noted, there are some truly original moments and set-pieces in the game.  One of the most striking is when you are standing atop a radar defense installation that towers many thousands of feet above the patchwork of mid-west farms.  You look down and see the landscape–obviously taken from satellite imagery–and really get an astounding sense of scale.  In fact, RESISTANCE 2 consistently does a couple of things quite well: the sense of vast structures (the Chimera motherships) and the alternative 1950s setting.  The objective-focused, team-based multiplayer is also excellent.

LITTLE BIG PLANET (PS3) The more one plays this game, the more one appreciates the art direction, visuals, and overall vision: to give players a toolset and environment in which to play and create, via the medium of an entertaining (and often, fiendishly difficult) platformer.  It is a game with an amazing sense of humor and a sense of style. It almost balances the disappointment over SPORE, which, instead of being the Grand Unified Theory of Games, turned out to be an unfinished concept wrapped inside a rather juvenile package.

(Read on …)

No sir, I didn’t like it!

Behold my new term for the inverse of in-game advertising. Tonight I played Doritos: Dash of Destruction, a new free Xbox Live Arcade game hatched by the Unlock Xbox competition. It’s a nice enough idea: Gamers submit their ideas for a new game and the Unlock Xbox project makes it happen with the help of an outside developer. The muscle for Dash of Destruction’s development came from NinjaBee, the same folks who brought us A Kingdom for Keflings and the acclaimed Band of Bugs. Needless to say, this game is a bit fluffy compared to the developer’s previous offerings, but I’ll bet it gets a hefty number of downloads. Why? Find out after the jump.

(Read on …)