Ross Fisher

Personally, I've often wondered what people see in these so-called "highly realistic" Tom Clancy military titles. From what I - and apparently a few others - have seen, it looks like "realistic" is another way to say "inconsistent in AI and gameplay." Would you enjoy playing The Legend of Zelda if the enemies randomly decided to stop patrolling in their usual manner whenever they felt like it? What if they suddenly got super hearing? Or sometimes their arrows had an accuracy rate of 97% instead of 60%?

I won't contest that it's more realistic for enemies to have some degree of randomness in their response. I only wonder if games built on such flexible rules are fun.

Last time I discussed the possibility that there was in fact a correlation between fun and difficulty. Perhaps games could have flexible rules if the games themselves were easy enough that the average gamer didn't have to constantly adjust to big swings in difficulty caused by enemies who suddenly changed behaviors.

Still, lately I've been wondering if perhaps the reason some gamers get such a fix out of games like Pandora Tomorrow and Tom Clancy's other military sims is because of the adrenaline rush that comes with never knowing if a terrorist will see you or not. A gamer playing just ten minutes of Metal Gear Solid will quickly learn that there are times they'll never be seen by a terrorist. These absolutes mean that the level of suspense MGS generates for its sneaking portions pales in comparison to Splinter Cell's.

So are people playing Splinter Cell because of the rush created by high tension, or because it's just fun? Is it the fun of playing through the level these gamers come back for, or the triumph factor of finally passing a difficult section? What if you can't win, or worse yet, what if high tension does not spark adrenaline production in your glands? Something to think about next time I guess.

Personally, I was impressed with how much of the world is open to exploration right from the get-go. Some narrative elements had to be sacrificed to allow the gamer so much room to move, but I'm not sure I played Diablo II for the story. The only problem with the huge world is that you can't get from point A to point B without having to stop and kill 10,000 creatures. Killing is fun in these action-RPGs, but a little room to breathe for exploration reasons would have been great.

It's too early to say whether Sacred can be recommended to gamers in general, but I think I'm safe in saying that Diablo II fans will find Sacred to be well worth their time and money.

I looked, ever so briefly, at La-Z-Boy chairs on my way home yesterday. Given that I'm currently living in a dilapidated house with not-up-to-code stairwells, I'd never be able to get one of those beautiful chairs up the stairs. Not that I saw the one I wanted. Either way, after E3 as I'm passing through by my parent's house, I'm going to be picking up one of their old La-Z-Boy chairs - for free. You can't go wrong with free. Here's to the places we park our asses!

Eric Manch

As I spent the week reliving the classics of the Super Nintendo, I've come to realize the sheer evil of Mode 7. When the SNES came out, it was Most Amazing Thing Ever and every game had some kind of flashy, gratuitous sequence that showed off this pseudo-3D graphics technique. Today, such cheeseball visual hocus-pocus is quaint at best. At worst, it actually makes entire segments of otherwise-excellent SNES games extremely annoying and difficult to tolerate.

Nowhere is the perverse effect of Mode 7 more apparent than in Contra III: the Alien Wars. The side-scrolling levels are fun as hell, and even feature some quality Mode 7 effects such as that enemy bomber that zooms in from the background and napalms the ground you're walking on. But the two overhead stages are pure agony. Instead of rotating your character, you use the shoulder buttons to rotate the screen. I can see how this would be an amusing play mechanic if you were doing Robotussin shots, but for us normal people it's just irritating.

Actraiser's Mode 7 effects are more benign, but no less unnecessary. The world map segments of the game, in which you are a deity overseeing the welfare of your earthly worshippers, are bookmarked with much swooshing and twirling of the SNES's scaling effects. The game, fortunately, is not adversely affected by it. The meat of the game is enjoyable, if derivative, platforming. Fun, but somewhat less amazing than our Mode 7-clouded minds seem to remember.

Super Turrican 2 has some Mode 7 bits that are actually still impressive today, such as the giant spider and giant sandworm bosses. The rest of the game is quite competent, a skillful blend of Contra and Bionic Commando. But Factor 5 weren't content with developing a solid action platformer, oh no. They had to go and throw in a bunch of gratuitous Mode 7 hovercycle segments that only detract from the overall enjoyment of the game. Sigh. Still, it's probably my favorite of the Turrican games.

Every once in a while I like to unwind with Umihara Kawase, a Super Famicom original and heir to Bionic Commando's gameplay style. The visuals are lovely, the music soothing, and the gameplay challenging yet leisurely. The game even gives you ten lives to start with, so you never really have the Game Over specter behind you as you play. I just wish that giant tadpole boss weren't so annoying.

Derek Durham

I had two hours to play video games this week, and with those two hours I mostly played the Painkiller demo and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, which happens to be the best thing Tom Clancy's name ever got attached to. It's pretty damn hard compared to the last one, but it's also a lot more fun. There's a lot more interaction with your environment, a few more skills at your disposal, and a fun multiplayer mode - or so I'm told. I haven't really gotten time to play it yet, so I'm just going to go ahead and believe everything I hear.

Painkiller is a dark FPS along the lines of Quake and Doom with a horrible name. You play a guy who kills demons with this gun that shoots stakes. You don't have to reload, and it uses an incredible physics engine. I think it's the same one Half Life 2 is using, or something. I'll probably buy it this week, or steal it.

I'm also still playing Far Cry, and you should too. It seriously is the best PC game in years. As a matter of fact, it might be too good for the likes of you, so on second thought, you probably shouldn't play it.

Chris Scantleberry

Because of a wicked cold I had for the past two weeks, I didn't have the luxury of spending nearly as much time playing games as I had hoped for in a previous "Gaming Report." I decided to jump back into Crimson Skies, eager to find some worthy challengers. It seems that everyone is up to speed on the prowess of the Bulldog. It's fast, powerful, and extremely effective on the Chicago level. It's the only plane I use when I am looking to take my opponents out with ease during Dogfight matches. On a good night, getting 25-0 is such a cinch that I can do it in my sleep. Unfortunately, this leads to players occasionally thinking that I have some sort of cheat enabled or I am exploiting a glitch.

The hate is strong.

In fact, players have coined a new term for the Bulldog, calling it a "health runner" (i.e., for players who focus on collecting health whenever their shield strength is low). And to make matters worse, there are some who are extremely against using the upgrade, considering it an unfair advantage. As a result, I've been booted out of the rooms at the snap of a finger (word travels fast I guess). What's wrong with these people?! So much for Microsoft's campaign, "It's good to play together." I can't seem to avoid the patch of sore losers.

This has been going on for about almost two months now, but it hasn't encouraged me to stop playing altogether, though I wish some of the TNL regulars were still into the game. Most of them have shifted their attention to Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Rainbow Six 3, and/or Project Gotham Racing 2. Yeah, I don't like them as much. I like aerial combat, and right now, there's nothing else I'd rather be playing. At least, not yet anyway.

Next week, I am going to give Harvest Moon: It's a Wonderful Life another go. I told my co-worker that I purchased the game for my girlfriend. Oddly, she's not interested in the game at all. Over the past few weeks, she spent a lot of time with the original Ratchet & Clank, completing about 85% of the game. Then she got frustrated and now she's into Jak II. She's a better gamer than me now. I can't seem to even spend an hour with some of my newest games. How shameful. Perhaps I need a new hobby . . . or I just need to put down Crimson Skies again.

Ted Boyke

This week, Xenogears, in which we discuss the meaning of "overbearing plot."

Let's say that before giving you my impressions of the game, first I rambled for about twenty pages on the history of my own personal PlayStation console and how I came to own it, recounted step-by-step the procedure of hooking it up to my TV, then discussed at great length every video game I've ever played on it in chronological order and the minutiae of each gaming experience, continued leisurely on to how I came to acquire my copy of Xenogears, paused to go into a sidebar about what I ate for breakfast on the day I decided to begin playing it, and at long last got around to my actual impressions of the game itself. That ought to give you a sufficiently boring idea of what it's like to start playing this game. Wouldn't it be better if I just cut right to the chase instead?

Oh, how I wish that's what Squaresoft had done with Xenogears. Because I really believe that there's a good game buried behind all that front-end exposition. I want to believe. This RPG has a lot of fans, it garnered solid reviews when it came out, and its plot is said to be one of the best in any video game ever. (It certainly has the most plot I've ever witnessed in a game.) Now I love a good story, so that hooked me in. Posters at online message boards said it just takes "a few hours" to get going. They lied. It takes a few dozen. I can hardly believe that this game was made by the same Squaresoft crew that did my all-time favorite RPG, Chrono Trigger.

At about thirty hours in, I still haven't gotten an opportunity to do any overworld map exploration, beyond briefly walking from one location to another - combat is infrequent. Literally two-thirds of those hours were spent hitting X to advance dialogue. The bulk of the gameplay is wandering through towns, talking to people, fighting through an occasional battle or a short, uninspired dungeon, and then back to at least an hour or two of cut scenes and talking to more people. This is made all the worse by one of Square's worst translation and localization efforts. I hate seeing typos and constantly reading awkwardly constructed sentences that I just know aren't getting the original meaning across.

So . . . the good parts? The gear battles are pretty simplistic, but they can be engaging. It looks like they have room to get deep and strategic later on. The hand-to-hand combat and its weak-medium-heavy strike dynamic is cool, as is the system of learning "deathblow" combos. I also get the feeling that there's eventually going to be something very satisfying and climactic to the pseudo-religious Paradise Lost-meets-Robotech plotline, but it's getting ridiculous. Hurry up and throw me a bone along the way.

Up to now, I haven't too been impressed with the characters or the game world; there'd better be some big plot twists and epic battles coming up. And while the anime interludes are a nice bonus, they're few and far between. The back of the box promised "over 20 minutes," and during all my play time, there have been maybe three (not counting the opening movie). More animation would make the first disc's overbearing plot a bit more tolerable. As it is, there could have just been a prerequisite book included to read along with the game and cut it down to one disc instead of two. Cliff's Notes, please.

So is Xenogears worth wading through for the extremely patient RPG enthusiast? Well, let's see: did you by any chance happen to enjoy reading War and Peace or the unabridged version of Les Miserables? I'll let you know if I ever finish it. By the time I do, huge robots will probably no longer be a thing of the future.

Nick Vlamakis

This was my first week of work since the Great Depression of 2003 (forced unemployment is not my thing), and I spent it in a whirlwind of projects and a near absence of quality sleep. On the whole, I felt too close to a total wipeout to enjoy much gaming, but I did dabble here and there.

Though James had a ball with the Transformers preview disc, my reaction was a bit more subdued. Granted, I only played through a little patch of one level, but that's all you really need sometimes. The Sly Cooper demo I got a couple of E3's ago was about the same length and it impressed me greatly - and I did, in fact, end up enjoying the full game. With Transformers, I was even more receptive and open-minded going in (I did not expect to like Sly Cooper), but I didn't see anything in there that would make me run out and drop forty or fifty bucks on it. Then again, I have no desire to play Jak II and I've never seen more than a minute of any Transformers cartoon, so remember to take that into consideration.

In the game, you can choose between Optimus Prime, Hot Shot, and Red Alert, pack your robot with four augmentations mapped to the PS2's triggers, and wander through the world looking for more upgrades. There are over forty in all, in the form of little Minicon bots, and the idea is to get them before the Decepticlones do. Platforming and gunfights were the order of the day, and I even got to run over some mechanical dirtbags while in car form, so I can see some of you really getting into this. Jumping and running as a huge Transformer may just be your cup of tea, but I'll stick with foxes and super-agile plumbers for now.

The other game I played involved no jumping whatsoever. Firefigter FD 18 is kind of like the paint-cleaning parts of Super Mario Sunshine combined with a firefighting game I played on the Super Famicom whose name eludes me. In a way, it's also reminiscent of Sega arcade games like 18 Wheeler and Virtua Cop: you do the same thing stage after stage and get ranked on your proficiency.

The goal of the game is to save trapped victims, so you don't feel driven to put out every tongue of flame you see. Yes, there are boss battles, believe it or not. The bosses I saw were fires, but they demonstrated some rudimentary AI and died with strangely satisfying screams.

It seems there are about four levels, so I made it maybe a third of the way through so far. If you play the game, close your eyes during the first encounter between the protagonist and the reporter - it's one of the first cut scenes. They speak perfect English but they sound so Japanese, don't they? Why do I bring that up? Maybe because sometimes the core gameplay isn't compelling enough, so it's easier to notice things like that. Still, it's a good rental.