Opinion

Despite the fact that we live in the 21st century, fantasy as a genre is still with us, and shows no signs of going away any time soon. As an environment, it is so poorly defined that it can take the aesthetic of nearly anything, provided that certain tropes are in place: swords, archery, royalty, magic, assorted humanoid monsters with orcs being the mainstay, and the like. Temporally, there is a nebulous period of time during which all fantasy takes place, but you recognize it when you see it.

However, it's this vagueness that lends itself to abuse. Stylistically, there is little to cause any one fantasy-themed game to stand out from any other. And how many times can you get excited about playing the same character class over and over again? I'm in favor of any attempt to leave the stale fantasy genre behind and striking out into new territory, but how can we replace it, and with what?

Point Lookout, the latest downloadable content expansion for Fallout 3, takes a short break from the retro sci-fi theme that defines the rest of the game. Instead, this new area centers on more of a B-movie horror theme. Players get to go to some secluded swamplands and unload using a double-barreled shotgun on its mutated, cannibalistic, locals while confronting a local cult. In the meantime, you end up in the middle of a long running feud, uncover a book of the occult, and brew up some moonshine.

Check out the Fallout 3 downloads

There is a moment during the almost three hour-long Giant Bombcast: Game of the Year Edition when Jeff Gerstmann is expostulating on his choice of Grand Theft Auto 4 as his pick for GotY, where he describes a character that so closely resembled someone he knows -- and the associated memories of that person, and presumably the eventual fate of that person -- that he broke down a little and cried. "And games don't do that," he adds quietly.

It is the continuing viewpoint among those who don't play video games that games are not art. Among the reasons they cite for this stance, valid or not, is that a game could never make the player cry, because it lacks any sort of emotional depth. Obviously, this is an extremely facile argument, and can be attacked on a number of fronts, but let's examine it from the opposite angle. Can we envision a game that could make us, any of us, cry? What would it need to do to accomplish that?

Prototype starts with a loud, chaotic rampage through Manhattan, where the play uses a variety of shape-shifting powers to tear apart soldiers, tanks and citizen infected with a mutagenic virus. That short introduction perfectly encapsulates how the rest of the game plays out. Players run around the city, gruesomely tearing through anything that gets in the way, all the while collecting new abilities to cause more mayhem on a larger scale.

Human beings have been telling each other stories since the beginnings of language. Sometimes our stories are about ourselves, to celebrate victories, comfort each other in defeat, and help draw our community closer together by shared experience. Other times, our stories are told to help explain the world to each other, an attempt to understand why and how things happen.

Early humans (before the scientific method was invented) found it useful to personalize natural phenomena like fire, earthquakes, and thunder and rain by embodying them in human-like entities of great power, calling them gods. By telling each other stories about the gods and their ways, humans were able to assert some form of control over the otherwise random nature of their existence -- even if this control was only in their minds.

Video game enemies come in all shapes, sizes, colors, ethnicities, species, universal origins, and metaphysical states. Sometimes they're evil incarnate, other times they're just in the way. They might be superintelligent, dumb as a box of rocks, or even non-sentient. They may have a master plan, or they may just be moving in a predetermined pattern around the room. Regardless of the variety you're fighting, it's clear that every game has to have some kind of antagonist.

Is any one type any better than another? Is it necessary to hate the enemy to play well? Is it enough to defeat the enemy, or do they need to be utterly destroyed for a proper resolution? Let's take a look at what it means to have enemies in a video game.

Apparently, there's some big event of some sort happening in Los Angeles this week. Supposed to be a huge deal in the video game industry, something like that? Lots of news? Anyone know what all the fuss is about?

BI just keeps seeing poorly-lit phone-cam pictures of hotel rooms from Callaham's Twitter feed and snarky IM's from our head honcho about how long the line at Starbucks is.

Why, yes, BI wasn't able to make it to the E3 party (apologies to the fine folks at $Unspecified_Vendor, at whose party we were not able to cause chaos the likes of which would be spoken of in hushed tones for decades to come; maybe next year). Truthfully, we're not actually bitter about it. Given the flood of news that's been coming from this year's edition of the expo, hardware, especially for anyone not using a console and/or prone to waving things around, seems to be pretty much an afterthought.

Well, there was a particularly festive flight sim joystick. Thank you, Logitech.

Experience in games is a strange concept. Meant to mimic the more natural growth of an individual's knowledge and wisdom, experience (frequently shortened to EXP) is a way for the player to gauge their advancement in a game. As the player character defeats more enemies, his experience meter fills up, and when it gets completely full, a new level is gained and the meter drops back down to zero. New levels mean a rise in attributes and the granting of new powers, elements that become necessary for survival in the game world.

However, it is an arbitrary advancement. It's rarely a true growth; players who haven't developed any true skill in their play can still reap the benefits of a rise in level. There are games where your skill as a player is what matters, where you only get better by putting in the time to master the controls and knowing how to use the system to your advantage. Let's take a fresh look at the concept of experience in games and judge its viability as a useful mechanic.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a concept that science fiction has examined for decades. In general, the idea is to create by hand a machine that's intelligent enough to think on its own, at a level equal to or better than humans. Frequently used as the villain of the piece, our culture has spun numerous cautionary tales around the idea of the AI that overthrows the world and enslaves humanity.

My thinking is that if we want to avoid such a fate, the first place we need to start keeping a close eye on is in our games.

At the core of the Thrustmaster T.16000M is a technology called H.E.A.R.T. (Hall Effect AccuRate Technology), which uses magnetic sensors to boost the flightstick's accuracy to 16,000 x 16,000 DPI resolution. What that means to gamers is that they gain a frictionless controller with unmatched precision and response. Additional features include built-in rudder controls that can be accessed by twisting the stick, programmable side buttons, a four direction hat switch and a throttle slider on the base. To top it all off, the package comes with tools to change over the padding for left-handed users.

The T.16000M can be purchased by itself or bundled with Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X, and in many ways, it seems like this flightstick was practically custom made for this game. This USB controller installs without a hassle. Windows XP and Vista detect it automatically once it's plugged in, and it's already configured to support all H.A.W.X controls. The base has a decent weight to it and the non-slip pads ensured that it didn't slide around, even during some of the most intense moments. Having one hand on the stick and the other on the base to access button controls like flares and the ERS system takes some getting used to, but it's a small issue to overcome.

WIMP Environment [noun]: Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu) - A graphical-user-interface environment such as X or the Macintosh interface, esp. as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces.

- The Jargon File

These wonderful, powerful, magic boxes of ours can turn long strings of ones and zeroes into dazzling graphics with breathtaking speed, perform tremendous, complicated mathematical computations in the blink of an eye, and, in a pinch, do a fair impersonation of a space heater. They are ours to command, ready to do our (possibly nefarious) bidding. Whether we know what we want or not, if it's within the operational parameters and capabilities, a PC will do exactly what we tell it to do.

Of course, there's a catch or two. First, we need to know how to tell it to what we want. Heuristics be damned, other than on-the-fly spell-checking, no matter how sophisticated the modern PC is, it's not clairvoyant. Ask anyone who's done time in a call center how much disconnect can exist between what a user wants, and what they say they want. Unlike our not-so-hypothetical phone staffer, the computer can't ask questions or make inferences. They're fabulously literal.

The second catch is having some way to communicate our wants and needs to our willing digital minions. And that's where our input devices come into play.

Street Fighter: great game, terrible movie. The Matrix: great movie, terrible game. The list goes on and on: Super Mario Brothers, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Star Wars (both ways), and many more. There are so few true cross-over successes, it's a wonder the studios keep trying. Why is it so difficult to turn movies into games into movies?

The short answer to this question is: The strengths of one medium are not the strengths of another. There is a vast gulf in expectation between preparing to watch a movie, and preparing to play a game. We expect different things from each. With a movie, we want to relinquish control and be swept away by a story, its characters, the settings, and the emotions they engender. With a game, we want the satisfaction of victory through direct control, overcoming a series of increasingly difficult challenges to our intelligence, reflexes, and skills. Given that these two goals are polar opposites from each other, we shouldn't be surprised by our inability to have the best of both worlds. Yet, there have been times when we've come pretty close.

What originally started as a total conversion mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 has become a fully realized game of itself. Simply put, Killing Floor is a six player cooperative survival horror game where teams of players square off against hordes of genetically spliced monsters that escaped from a laboratory. The gameplay is as straightforward as the premise, but still requires quite a bit of teamwork to battle through the waves of monster hordes. If Left 4 Dead is any indication, there's no getting tired of cooperative zombie games. Killing Floor is similar to L4D's Survival Mode, except it's not as frantically paced and there's plenty of room to move around. Killing Floor also offers variety of creatures provide an excellent challenge and players need to work together in order to succeed.

Video gaming has come a long way in the relatively short time it's been a part of our culture. From crude, black-and-white gigantic blocky pixels to near-photorealistic 3D; from tinny 8-bit bleeps and bloops to full-blown orchestral scores; from no storyline at all to deeply engaging, multi-path branching narratives told cinematically, our favorite pastime has grown in sophistication over the decades to rival all other forms of entertainment for our attention.

Yet many still consider the playing of games to be a juvenile exercise; a pointless waste of time at best, and a demonic training ground for psychopaths at worst. In fact, you're more likely to witness mainstream acceptance of comic books these days than you would the practice of playing games, even though comics themselves went through a period of vilification by watchdog groups and well-meaning but uneducated save-the-world types. Just what is it that prevents non-gamers from accepting that not only are video games harmless, but worthwhile pursuits of our time? And how can we defend our choice of hobby against those who attack it? Let's examine the typical arguments against games and provide counterpoints.

We were halfway to Betelgeuse when the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters kicked in. We had two bags of--

... but first, we interrupt this column to bring you a Public Service Announcement:


At some point, whether it's because you're doing something warranty-voiding, or just because it's the worst possible time, the specter of data loss is going to rear its inconvenient head, maw dripping with negated bits. Whether this results in an epic cascade of profanity and spontaneous weeping, or just some muttering and the retrieval of some storage media is directly proportional to how recent your last backup was.

Yes, this falls solidly into the realm of Stuff You Think About Moments After It Will Do You Any Good Whatsoever, right up there with taking a headlong plunge into a room of whelp eggs, tasting day-old fugu, or doing that thing with the mayonnaise and the goat.