Fallout 3

I was ready to hate Fallout 3.

I'm not a fan of sandbox games. As an adult gamer with a toddler and a day job, I have a limited amount of time on my hands. I played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for a few days before I threw it down in disgust, aggravated by the lack of plot direction, frustrated by all the constraints placed on me by polite society (don't even think about stealing a wooden plate!), and bored by the long walks it took for my character to get anywhere. Yes, Elder Scrolls is a hugely immersive game, but I don't have time to be that immersive.

Fallout 3 starts with you being born. It's at that point you determine your gender and, as a toddler, you learn about your SPECIAL (an acronym for your character's attributes) abilities. How many games let you walk around a playpen as a toddler while teaching you the fundamentals of the game at the same time?

You continue as a pre-teen, dealing with all the difficulties of life in the Vault, a fallout shelter to protect you from the nuclear war raging outside. As the outside world intrudes, it becomes clear that all is not as it seems. Your scientist father disappears and it's up to you to leave the safety of the Vault and find dear old dad.

Nuclear war struck in the 1950s, locking the outside world in retro-future state. Ray guns, Robby-the-Robot style automatons, and cars with fins dominate the landscape. But it is a broken, shattered landscape littered with the detritus of humanity's failed hopes and dreams. And it is here where you will find everything from post-apocalyptic preachers, cannibalistic ghouls, super-mutants, and a whole pile of Mad Max-style survivalists.

There are still the annoying holdovers from Elder Scrolls – you can't just take things without consequences. And you do get tired from all that walking, of which there's a lot of walking to do. But for some reason, this is all less aggravating than Elder Scrolls.

Part of it has to do with the sheer depth of the game. Fallout's blend of post-apocalyptic with retro-future creates a unique setting that makes you want to explore the game. From your grainy PIPBoy 2000 to the Mohawks of the wasteland raiders, to the cheery 1950s-style manuals and billboards, Fallout 3 is an immersive experience.

Like BioShock, there are multiple means of overcoming a challenge. You can be stealthy. You can reprogram robots to do your work for you. You can be a charmer, smooth-talking your way out of difficult quests. Or you can just bash stuff over the head with a baseball bat.

Unlike all the promises made in Mass Effect, Fallout 3 actually delivers. The pausing system for combat actually makes sense (it's called VATS), and yet you can still shoot an enemy's head off from a distance without using VATS. The world is large enough to make getting lost at night a terrifying prospect, but not so imposing that you can't make it to a safe place to rest. And there are plenty of quests to keep you busy.

I'm still not a fan of sandbox games. But Fallout 3's so good, I'll make an exception.

Legendary

Legendary is one of those games that seems like it was created for me. It combines fantasy monsters and lots of guns to create a modern-day first-person shooter that takes on the creatures of Greek myth.

Wait, did I say Greek myth? Where did you get that idea? Oh, probably from the notion that Charles Deckard opens Pandora's Box (which is, you know, Greek) and unleashes: griffons, minotaurs, werewolves, firedrakes, Nari (evil little pixies), Tscuhigomo's Children (spiders that explode), a golem, a kraken, and poltergeists. Minotaurs and griffons make perfect sense. You could make an argument that the myth of Lycaeon places werewolves in Greek mythology. The firedrakes are modeled after the mythical salamander, a myth that harkens all the way back to the Talmud. But the rest? The rest is an excuse to throw monsters at you to blow up.

My delicate historical sensibility aside, Legendary is still a peculiar beast. Deckard's supposedly a jewel thief, but his lock-picking skill consists of standing at electrical panels and waiting for a counter to finish so the door opens. It seems like there was supposed to be a lock-picking mini-game that didn't make it into the finished product.

Deckard also has the ability to absorb energy from every monster he kills. This allows him to heal, shoot a burst of energy at his opponents, and power certain gadgets to defeat bigger monsters like the golem and the kraken. Reminiscent of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, this "kill more to survive" game mechanic is only slightly less forgiving.

Every game has a developer's favorite monster, the one that the designers clearly put a lot of thought into, sometimes to the exclusion of the actual focus of the game. In F.E.A.R. it was the amazingly life-like, intelligent, and vulgar clone soldiers. In Legendary, it's the werewolves. They climb, they throw stuff from afar, they regenerate unless you chop their heads off, and they're hideous-looking. You will learn to hate werewolves with a passion in Legendary.

What's curious about Legendary is that it wants to be a horror game. There are several scenes wherein everyday citizens are torn apart by the supernatural horrors unleashed by Pandora's box, right before your very eyes. Which seems a bit out of place for a game about mythical creatures taking over the world. Given the range of monstrosities foisted on thus in most modern horror games, a man being eaten by an eagle/lion isn't all that scary.

Legendary is pretty linear too. You can only shoot the bad guys you're allowed to shoot (no putting those civilians out of their misery!). You can only go in the designated areas not blocked off by debris, which is everywhere of course. And you can't jump. Period.

The ending has to be the most hilarious, over-the-top, death scene of a villain ever. Assuming you even make it to the end (spoiler alert!), you will have the distinct pleasure of watching the main villain killed in a Rube Goldberg-ian game of monster volleyball, with each monster mangling and then tossing the bad guy off to the next until he it tossed over a ledge…and then bounces on the way down!

This isn't a bad first-person shooter, merely a mediocre one trying to compete with superior action horror titles.

Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever

In Got Game, the authors put forth the theory that gamers aren't just suited for business, but that business is suited for them—in essence, that business IS a game, and thus those who play games are better suited to survive and thrive in the business world. Beck and Wade draw this conclusion from their survey of a diverse population of more than 2,500 Americans.

From there the authors follow the white rabbit down the hole: if gamers are good at teamwork in games, then they should be good at teamwork in business; if they see themselves as natural leaders in games, then the same should apply to business; if they are accustomed to playing games with a global network of players then global corporations should be second nature to them.

As a Gen X gamer who lives a double-life in the business world, it's very satisfying to find some reification of the adult gamer lifestyle. I have seen how playing role-playing games have helped me succeed: how speaking as a game master to a group around a table is similar to speaking at a business meeting, how organizational skills in writing an adventure are the same skills I use for drafting business articles, how speaking as a panelist at gaming conventions taught me to navigate business conventions. In short, although gaming can be a frivolous activity, it shouldn't be taken frivolously.

That said, there are a few challenges with Got Game that are endemic to writing a book about an evolving culture. For one, it's already outdated; throwaway references to consoles, games, and gaming populations are no longer relevant. For another, it's very specifically written for Boomers. I find this a bit odd, as the book's subtitle, "How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever" doesn't seem geared towards that specific audience – it's as if only Boomers can be mystified by gamers, as opposed to other non-gamers (of which there are many!). Third, some of the conclusions are reached without solid evidence to back them up.

Most specifically, Got Game doesn't differentiate between the types of gamers and how their skill-sets apply to the workplace. On page 98, action games are most prevalent (27.1% of sales) followed by sports (17.6%), racing (15.7%), role-playing (8.7%), fighting (6.4%) and shooters (4.6%). But there is a significant difference between being good at a first-person shooter and being good at a role-playing game, and the skill-sets vary tremendously. I've discovered that playing Halo has made me a better skeet shooter, but not a better manager. Role-playing games, on the other hand, require a different set of skills that may be more applicable to business. Gaming is a bit too large a category to group together everyone who has ever played games frequently.

And yet Beck and Wade get a lot of things right, name-dropping Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, The Sims, and MMORPGs. Kudos especially for this statement: "A movie called Mazes and Monsters, starring a young Tom Hanks, even imagined the death of someone obsessed with playing too much of a D&D-type game, yet to our knowledge the number of deaths directly attributable to D&D remains at zero."

Got Game is an excellent response for any parent or manager who fears that the next generation is a bunch of brain-dead brats. A book like this should normally be distributed in web format, but considering the audience (Boomers) perhaps dead-tree format is entirely the point.

Gears of War 2

I've beaten the campaign mode of Gears of War 2 (GOW2) on hardcore and I play multiplayer regularly on Wednesday nights (friend Talien if you're interested). I switched from our Halo 3 weekly games, so I will use that as a point of comparison.

The campaign is great. GOW2 fixed a lot of things you wanted to do before, like taking on a chainsaw with another chainsaw, holding someone hostage, fighting Reavers and even Brumaks, drive tanks, and more. More importantly, Dom's quest to find his wife adds pathos to a brutally violent game - pathos, I might add, that was so heavily hyped in Halo's campaign but never really pulled off. That's the difference between having a faceless protagonist and a character that's fleshed out through flashbacks. Through his heartbreaking quest to find his wife, Dom comes to life. It reminds us of the human cost of war, and helps take the edge off the endless macho posturing of four hugely juiced combat gorillas in armor.

There's also some weird plot involving Lambent Locusts, a revolution, an awfully humanoid-looking hottie of a Locust queen, Marcus Fenix's father, a computer gone mad, and the sinking of Jacinto. Mind you, I thought we were supposed to save Jacinto, not sink it; once it becomes clear that it would hurt the Locusts more by destroying it, the COGs seem to do the job on behalf of the bad guys. But those are minor quibbles and more than made up for the fact that the action is relentless, a pace difficult to keep up even in first-person shooters.

There are flaws in the campaign. If I never play another rail game again in a multiplayer, I would be happy. GOW2 also forces some button-mashing battles that are very different from the normal run-and-gun tactics that are part-and-parcel of the rest of the game. From a cinematic perspective this is great; from someone who just likes to shoot stuff, it can get frustrating.

The multiplayer is where GOW2 really excels. It's like a bloodstained Santa showed up and gave us everything we ever wanted that was missing in GOW. Want to be able to play with up to ten people? Check. Want to be able to just fight wave after wave of Horde cooperatively? Check. Want to play against computer-controlled opponents in multiplayer until you can fill the slots? Check, baby!

Unlike Halo 3, GOW2 feels like a vastly improved version of the original. It takes everything you loved about GOW and amps it up to 11. If you love first-person shooters, if you like team multiplayer games, or if you're just addicted to the gruesome implications of combining a chainsaw with a machinegun ... this game's for you.

Mass Effect

When I first played Knights of the Old Republic (KOTR) I was enthralled. Here was a Star Wars game that was better than the latest Star Wars movies, full of engrossing characters, interesting plots, and aliens true to their roots from the Star Wars universe. At the time, one flaw popped up that really bothered my wife: talking to the aliens ad nauseum meant that certain sound bites were repeated by certain alien races over and over. So you had a lot of "ooka shishka jedi" stuff going on that, while it didn't bother me too much, certainly annoyed the heck out of anyone having to listen to it over and over as I talked to everything that was willing to carry on a conversation. Then I bought Jade Empire and to my horror, discovered that it was the exact same game engine. It's the same engine used for Mass Effect. And all that dialogue is starting to get old.

Allow me to deconstruct the myth that Mass Effect is a supreme role-playing game experience.

• SCIENCE-FICTION ROLE-PLAYING: PERFECTED. The setting is a combination of Star Wars' exotic worlds, Star Trek's ship interiors, and Babylon 5's battle to establish human dominance in an alien world. Mass Effect uses conversational pathing. Generally speaking, the top choice is positive, the middle choice is neutral, and the bottom choice is negative. So if you want to be a jerk, you can always pick the rude bottom choice, and if you want to be a nice guy, you can always pick the positive top choice. Or if you're in a hurry, you click the button and move to the next chat menu. This is not role-playing, it's a game of multiple choice, and the majority of the time the choices are obvious. This game has more in common with KOTR than the game engine. The customizability of equipment and characters, the level up system, it's all the same. So instead of the Force we have "biotics." You can also customize your character's appearance, which is neat. However, Xbox's new interactive menus allow the same thing - avatar customization. It hardly makes this a "perfect" role-playing game. The equipment improvements come down to: Fire Ammo IV and Laser Rifle VII. There is a whole pile of scrolling text you can read about the history of the weapon, but the short of it is VII is better than VI which is better than V. You could get those kinds of power ups in a game of Diablo.
• THE VASTNESS OF SPACE BECKONS. Like KOTR, you have a ship that you can fly all over the universe. This is like the world's worst sandbox - it's hard enough to figure out what to do and where to go in a small city. Yes, there's lots of content, but it's not necessarily relevant or interesting. Almost all the quests involve "go here, get widget, return it to me." Then there's the MAKO, a dune buggy-type roving cannon. Exploring the surface of worlds primarily involves shooting at giant crab things that you can run over. In this respect Mass Effect is reminiscent of the Final Fantasy games.
• LOSE YOURSELF IN A LIVING GALAXY. The graphics are amazing, the voice acting top notch, the character expressions just as nuanced as promised. It has Seth Green as a voice actor, which rocks. But for reasons I will never understand, there are long elevator sequences. In the world of science fiction, where ships can travel through space and alien races intermingle, we have not yet invented a means around elevators. EVERY time you get in an elevator, your characters freeze, face forward, and you listen to the sci-fi equivalent of elevator Muzak. The only thing you can do is spin the camera around the characters while they stand there. You can't reload, check equipment, or anything else. It's useless downtime. For some reason, the highly advanced civilizations still like to keep their belongings in boxes. The boxes can be hacked; I'm a sucker for these mini-games, so I confess I enjoyed them. But really, boxes? There might be other interesting ways of finding equipment, but since this is the same game engine as KOTR, boxes are everywhere. There is also the romantic subplot. This subplot involves choosing between a sexy blue alien (reminiscent of Zhaan from Farscape) and a pushy human racist woman. It's pretty clear which woman the game would like you to hook up with (or man, if you play a female character, but the alien female retains her faux gender). This is hardly a deep romantic plot, and the ruckus raised over the intimate scene between the two characters is unwarranted; it's far tamer than anything on the Internet. To save on memory, the majority of aliens are the same bodies duplicated multiple times, in the same way Star Trek tended to have every alien be humanoid since that meant less makeup was required. There are a lot of the blue female aliens throughout the game, and they all look similar. There's not a fat person among them. Even the ship's doctor, a much older woman, is a silver fox with the body of a twenty year old (where was the romantic subplot with HER?).
• LEAD YOUR SQUAD IN INTENSE, REAL-TIME COMBAT. Although your best bet in beating this game is as a soldier, Mass Effect is no Halo. The third person perspective is difficult to follow, especially when you fight many enemies at once. What this means is you're constantly pausing the game to give your squad commands, which completely ruins the "real-time" combat element. There isn't the nail-biting thrill of trying to reload a weapon perfectly like Gears of War, and the ability to use terrain as cover isn't nearly as smooth.
  

Mass Effect isn't a bad game by any means. The graphics are excellent and if you have the time, you can wander the world interrogating every single alien, reading and listening to every path of dialogue, and looting everything on every planet.

Mass Effect is ultimately a giant sandbox that's somewhat different from KOTR, only with none of the cachet of Star Wars. The main plot line, the one in which you save the universe, is a lot of fun and makes for an interesting game. But you'll have to sit through a lot of elevators to get there.

Turok

Ever since I saw Jurassic Park, I had a newfound respect for Tyrannosaurus Rex. Forget dragons: a T-Rex is a terrifying killing machine, and Jurassic Park made it clear that you didn't just see one of these monsters coming, you actually felt its presence. Of course, my love for dinosaurs started well before that, back when I was in elementary school. What's sad is that I wanted dinosaur curtains, dinosaur bedspreads, dinosaur anything -- and back then there WERE no dinosaur-themed stuff for kids. Now my one-year-old wears a new dinosaur-themed outfit practically every day.

It's probably no surprise that I'm fond of Jurassic Fight Club, which matches two (or more) dinosaurs in tail-to-head combat. The speculation and history lessons are fun, but the actual computer graphic battles in all their bloody glory left me itching for something more. And that more is Turok.

Turok is a first-person shooter, but the thrill is in the use of the bow and the knife to silently take out your enemies. Dinosaur combat is less about shooting them and more about pressing the right combination of buttons to fend it off; the combination changes with each dinosaur attack, which keeps Turok fresh with sudden mini-games that are thrust suddenly upon you.

The other neat element is that dinosaurs are animals at heart. They run from explosions, sniff out prey, and can be lured into traps. My personal favorite: shooting a flare over a grenade, a dinosaur wanders over to sniff it and...BOOM! Instant meat shower! The dinosaurs are more forces of nature than enemies; there are plenty of opportunities to have shoot-outs with better-armed and armored opponents.

This is the first game to really do the T-Rex justice. Showdowns with this monster (which, I'm pleased to report, happen frequently) always end in horrible carnage. The great voice acting and slick script only add to the paranoid atmosphere. There's even a shout-out to Aliens, complete with flamethrowers and giant bugs.

Remember that scene in Predator, where the Native American, Billy, stays behind to take on the alien with jut a knife? His off-screen death was really lame. Turok's much better answer: Hell yeah, an Indian can take on a dinosaur...give him a knife, and he can stab a T-Rex to death with it!

The Darkness

I've never read The Darkness comic. I couldn't get past the fact that the character looks like a bad Spawn rip-off and the quote from Brunching Shuttlecocks about the truth behind Dungeons & Dragons: "I attack the darkness!"

The Darkness is essentially every Mafia movie cliché mixed with the brooding atmosphere of The Crow. In fact, the protagonist, Jackie Estacado (Kirk Acevedo), looks and sounds at lot like Michael Wincott, who played Top Dollar in that film. If you've seen The Crow, you know that Wincott's got a very distinctive appearance, with his long black hair, leather overcoat, and hawkish features. In The Darkness, Jackie is affectionately nicknamed Ratface by his girlfriend Jenny Romano (Lauren Ambrose). As you can imagine, having personal connections in a dark game like this is inevitably a liability, but I digress.

The Darkness owes a lot to films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, with random narrative from our hero, outrageous characters, and an uneven mix of action and drama. The first cut scene (created with all in-game graphics) gives a perfect sense of what's to come: lots of cursing, lots of gore, absolutely no respect for authority, and plenty of violence, all taking place in New York. It's the New York of the seventies, when crime and graffiti were rampant and sane people didn't wander out alone by themselves. And you're one of the reasons.

The Darkness is a two-headed demonic symbiont that lives within Jackie and, we discover later, the entire Estacado bloodline. In that respect the game is a lot like Spawn or Venom; the Darkness is a personality as much as it is a thing that augments Jackie's considerable gun-fu skills with the ability to create black holes that suck everything into them, whiplash barbed tentacles, magical guns, and snake-like mouths. In the dark, Jackie can summon other demons to do his bidding, which range from kamikaze critters loaded with explosives to gatling-gun wielding warriors.

Jackie's opponents have no such superpowers, and it's a credit to the game's creators that any supernatural monsters you encounter all fit the plot. There's no inevitable escalation of the villain gaining superpowers to do battle; indeed, the villain behind most of Jackie's woes, Uncle Paulie Franchetti (Dwight Schultz) is as much a moral foil as he is an arch-foe. Killing him isn't the point.

The game revolves around the issue of Jackie's soul. Mob life is a violent one, and The Darkness contrasts the mythical honor of the "old ways" with the mad-dog frenzy of Franchetti. When Franchetti starts blowing up orphanages, the older mobsters use Jackie as their form of vengeance.

The Darkness uses the New York subway system as its primary means of shuttling Jackie from place to place. This makes a lot of sense and provides a sense of realism to an otherwise route form of travel that bedevils so many first-person shooters. The streets are filled with entertaining characters who all have missions of their own to complete. Two of the most memorable characters include Butcher Joyce (Mike Starr) and Aunt Sarah (Norma Michaels), but there are many more and the voice actors are all superb. Between screens, and there are a lot of load screens, Jackie narrates his life and death to Jenny, which provides a humorous series of quotable anecdotes. These are the first load screens that actually distracted me from the load time.

Despite the age-old Mafia tropes, The Darkness takes the themes explored in The Crow and Spawn and amps them up to eleven, without ever losing focus on sacrifice, violence, and even love. I wasn't entirely convinced that saving Jackie's soul was feasible (I earned the anti-hero rating from the game), but the very notion of redemption being possible is a breath of fresh air to the first-person shooter genre.

Blacksite: Area 51

This game is bad. Bad, bad, baddity, bad. I hate it with the passion of a thousand suns. Here's why:

• It crashes. Constantly. It would crash at random moments, whenever the game tried to load the extremely detailed environments.
• There are a million load sequences that interrupt the flow of the game. And the load screens are repetitive. And the "hints" the game shares with you are useless. Reload frequently? Thanks, Blacksite, I never thought of that!
• It's linear. At one point, the resident tough guy character quotes Star Wars, cause, ya know, the area looks like one of the chasms on the Death Star. When a character points out how linear the game is, you know there's a problem.
• The enemies are boring. There's one actually freaky alien, and it's telling that the thing is showcased in all the art advertising the game. All the other creatures look like they were ripped out of Starship Troopers. There's also the stupid "exploding monsters" which are a tired staple of FPS. Did I mention that one of them is a giant tower that slowly rotates and farts out alien bugs?
• Squad-based tactics? Sure, that amounts to telling people where to go (they never listen) and telling them whom to shoot at (because it's not obvious?).
• Non-destructible environments. Sure, the fuel trucks can be shot. There are crates you can break, but there's nothing in them. The environment is largely static.
• There's also a rail game component. With monsters that shoot projectiles at you. I've never seen this before. All that's missing is the "shoot me in the head" game.
• You can't affect anything the game doesn't want you to shoot at. You can empty an entire clip into your allies heads, shoot their vehicles, and basically act like a moron without affecting the game. And when I get bored, I can really be a big moron.
• You can jump about two inches in the air. There is no purpose to jumping. You can't scale any environment, except to slowly fall down a zip-line like you're on an elevator. In the one area where you can fall to your death, the final boss battle, your dead body stutter-steps down to the ground. This is a fabulous piece of code, let me tell you.
• It's short. I mean, really short. Even for me. I tried to play the game on a much harder difficulty, but the crashing actually drove me so insane that I wanted to at least get my money worth. So I played it on easy to get it over with.

There are some redeeming traits, but none good enough to make the game worth buying. It's got some interesting environments, including a battle in a suburban neighborhood. At one point you receive air support from a chopper flying overhead while you're duking it out on the ground. And the rail gun battles, while rote, are at least scripted to be exciting. There's also the amusing, ripped from the headlines dialogue. None of that saves this stinking fetid pile of excrement.

In the era of Bioshock, Halo 3, and Gears of War, Blacksite is proof that graphics alone are not enough to make a great game. The developers should be ashamed of themselves, but I can't tell you who they are because while I was forced to watch the end credits...the game crashed.

Crackdown

When Halo 3 was announced, I actively resisted buying Crackdown for the sole purpose of getting onto the Halo 3 beta. Mind you, I love Halo 3. I play team slayer every Wednesday night (add Talien to your friends list if you want to join). But I wasn't going to pay more money just to get into the game early. So for a long time, I just avoided Crackdown out of principle. Which is a shame, because Crackdown is awesome.

Basically, you're a genetically-engineered superhero who can leap tall buildings in a single bound, lift trucks over your head, and shoot criminals real good. Did I mention the criminals? They're the reason you exist: in a society overrun by scum, you "AM de LAW!" There are three gangs you must defeat, each helpfully segregating themselves by taking over a different island. There's the Hispanic Los Muertos (death), who swear at you in Spanish and drive muscle cars. There's the Russian Volk (wolves) who drive Soviet-Era transport trucks carrying Stinger missiles. And then there's the Shai-Gen, sort of the uber-corporate villain reminiscent of Gibson-style Japanese megacorporations. You take down each of these bad guys by taking out the lieutenants, which in turn weakens the gang leader by reducing the effectiveness of his bodyguards.

There are a wide range of weapons and vehicles you can use to wage your one-man war on crime. You can impound weapons and vehicles so you can use them later. Your uber-cop advances through the skills he uses; use lots of explosives and your explosives skill goes up, run over bad guys with your car and your driving skill goes up. There are also power-ups floating around the city, blue question marks that give you bonuses to all skills and green exclamation points that increase your speed and jumping ability.

Crackdown's methodology heavily relies on the carrot approach, rewarding you for going to difficult places in the game by providing incentives. Even death isn't permanent; thanks to cloning, you reappear at one of the supply points throughout the game with a loss in some skills.

Crackdown's cell-shaded universe is both comic book-y and beautiful. It's amazing to watch the sun set and rise, or be dangling from a twenty story building when the lights flick on. I was especially fond of killing major villains and hurling their bodies off of skyscrapers, watching them fall doll-like hundreds of feet to the ground. Wait, should I not have shared that? I've said too much.

Ahem. Anyway, what makes Crackdown so different is that it truly delivers on the sandbox-style of play. You can fight gang members or kill citizens, drive vehicles anywhere, pick up anything, destroy everything. You can jump, you can swim, you can climb. Every character is as interactive as your character, and the AI reacts in a reasonable fashion: citizens run screaming, driving their cars erratically to get away from firefights. Gang members shoot you, run you down, and throw grenades at your head. When a firefight breaks out, police come screeching onto the scene, and usually get in the way. When you jump down from a distance, you shatter the pavement. When citizens see you leaping through the air or carrying heavy artillery, they flee for their lives.

There are moments in Crackdown where I was reminded of the target audience. The non-English speaking gangs and citizens shout phrases, adding to the atmosphere of the game. The English speaking drones in Shai-Gen are a lot less amusing and become downright annoying. The swearing is a little silly (with so many citizens randomly saying things, when combat goes down they end up cursing quite a bit) and over the top. But this is a game about killing gang members by throwing trucks at them, so I give Crackdown a pass.

Speaking of the audio, the narrator is the only character of substance, and he guides you through the game. His encouragement and chastisement is pitch-perfect, an older, grizzled white guy's voice telling you how it is and how to do better next time. I wasn't thrilled with the ending - like so many games, it feels rushed and a bit of a cop out - but playing the game was still a rewarding experience.

If you're a fan of Robocop, Judge Dredd, or the Tick, get Crackdown. You'll be shouting "SPOOOONNN!", hurling chimneys, and leaping across rooftops in no time. Unless you're not a fan of the Tick, in which case you'll appreciate laying down the law the old fashioned way: with a rocket launcher.

Bioshock

"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?"

--Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I didn't really want BioShock. The name didn't exactly thrill me, and the concept was a little hazy. Some guy underwater in the 50s being attacked by weird monsters in diving suits? What the heck was that all about? But my brother talked the game up so much that I put it on my wish list. I got it for my birthday and was instantly hooked.

BioShock has a vision, just like its creator/villain, Andrew Ryan (Armin Shimerman). And that vision is Rapture, an underwater city built with 1940s style architecture and Ayn Rand's (note the similarities to Andrew Ryan's name) principles. You are plane crash survivor named Jack and you are trapped in a hell that was once supposed to be Eden.

BioShock's central philosophical question is the plight of children. There are Little Sisters wandering throughout the complex, little girls who have been merged with some kind of mutant parasite that allows them to process ADAM from dead bodies. ADAM is a mutagen that bestows superpowers on whomever uses them, which puts the girls in a precarious position. Fortunately for them, they are protected by Big Daddies, diving suit-wearing behemoths with drills and rivet guns.

Running around Rapture are the shattered remains of civilization, the Splicers. These poor people are deranged; listening to them at length is a sanity-straining experience. Warped by their own mutations, Splicers argue with each other, weep over their fate, and of course try to kill you. Throw in a series of automated weaponry and robots dedicated to snuffing out all who cross Ryan's path and you've got one exciting first-person shooter.

BioShock is retro-sci-fi, all viewed through a 50s lens. There are hilarious instructional videos that explain how the various mutations work, vending machines that cheerfully solicit you, and public service announcements worthy of a Leave it to Beaver episode.

BioShock is well written. The plots take twists and turns and the villains aren't who you'd think. It's well acted too. You meet very few sane people, but interactions are largely through old-style cassette tapes that play in creepy, grainy fashion as you stalk the halls of Rapture. I'll still be haunted by one actor screaming, "I CAN'T TAKE OFF THE F****ING EARS!" over and over.

The graphics are phenomenal. Fire and water are rendered realistically, with bits of water beading on the screen. The Splicers are all creepy, from mask-wearing debutantes to crazy doctors in surgical masks, to Spider Splicers who crawl along the ceiling. And the Big Daddies are disturbing and a little pathetic, groaning and moaning as they pound their way through Rapture.

The game play is fun. A variety of styles can be used to win the game. Bad at combat (like me)? No problem; hack the robots and automated weapon systems using a series of tube puzzles. I'm a sucker for puzzle games, so the hacking really hooked me and kept the game from ever getting boring. I got really good at hacking. More than once I turned the entire security system against the bad guys. Using the right mutations, you can be stealthy, you can just blast your way through, or you can even turn your enemies against each other.

BioShock also gets all the basics of gameplay right. If you get lost, it tells you where to go. It helpfully lists your goals. A map is always available. These should be ingrained in every game created post 2000, and yet it's far too rare.

But back to the Little Sisters. The main question BioShock asks is: would you harm a little girl to get ahead? Maybe it's just the fact that I have a newborn son, but I found the idea revolting. You're given a choice with every Little Sister you rescue, harvesting her or saving her. Harvesting kills the girl and garners more ADAM, while saving her gives you less ADAM but the gratitude of their creator (who gives you a gift for every three girls you save). It struck a chord with me, and soon I was determined to save every one of the little girls.

I thought this was just yet another means of BioShock hooking you into the game. But in actuality your decisions in how you treat the Little Sisters affects BioShock's conclusion. The Little Sisters are integral to the plot and how the game ends. They are the future, the future Ryan claimed he wanted but could never see.

Everyone else I've spoken to gleefully cracked the little girls open and took their stuff. As one gamer put it, "I'm a powergamer and that helped me get ahead faster, so of course I killed them." I still find that notion chilling. In fact, the very first opportunity to harm or save a Little Sister is very traumatic, with the little girl begging for her life. I couldn't bear the thought of killing one, even in a sci-fi video game. Maybe I'm getting soft.

In the end, BioShock isn't just a retro sci-fi shooter. It's a moral test. Of us.

"No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly.

--Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Halo 3

I came into Halomania with Halo 2 on the original Xbox. During the time we waited for Halo 3, I played Gears of War online with an expanding circle of friends, including the Geezer Gamers (look 'em up). We chafed at the eight-man team maximum and were itching to play in the larger sandbox that was Halo 3.

My wife bought the Halo 3 Limited Edition the day it came out. Did I mention I love my wife?

There's been so many reviews about Halo 3 that there's little new I can contribute here. The campaign is serviceable, but takes itself a little too seriously. Viewing the web site for Halo 3 is unintentionally hilarious, treating the game like a World War II memorial, as if it has that much emotional gravitas. It doesn't; the hinted-at relationship between Master Chief (Steven Downes) and Cortana (Jen Taylor) gets a little silly at times, the stalwart allies die heroically, bad guys become allies and then betray you later, and aliens natter on about setting off the Halo rings and destroying the universe. The talking plant known as the Gravemind (Dee Bradley Baker) doesn't make an appearance, but his voice is ever present. In fact, the game uses the awful method of flashbacks, both from Cortana and Gravemind, to interrupt game play and force the plot down your throat. It gets old fast. The game reaches a rollicking conclusion with a crazy Warthog chase across collapsing platforms that recaptures some of the fun of Halo 2. The ending is predictable but well earned.

But forget the campaign. The real beauty of Halo is the multiplayer game. I play the game every Wednesday night (look for Talien) and we play Team Slayer with sixteen people at once. It's great fun, and the boards provide an endless array of challenges that make Halo 3 the excellent multiplayer experience we've come to expect.

There are some changes. The graphics are better, but not much better. I miss the value of a perfect reload from Gears of War. Speaking of Gears of War, Halo's environments aren't as destructible. And my favorite tactic, two-fisted Needler-ing, has been rendered obsolete. In fact, Needlers don't track nearly as well as they used to.

There are new guns and vehicles, but the biggest change is the ability to remove heavy machineguns from their mounts and walk around the board, mowing people down. I've had more kills using this new tactic than using all the other weapons combined. As for vehicles, there's a new bike and an enormous beast known as the Elephant that I'm fond of driving (I flipped an Elephant once, ask me about it some time). Speaking of war stories, there's also a neat function that allows you to view replays and share it with friends.

The packaging of LE of Halo 3 isn't very practical. Made of metal, the package I received was warped. Since the piece that holds the disc in the box is also made of metal, the disc was banging around inside the case. Even the booklet, which is in the center of the container, was warped. No wonder the discs in some copies were scratched!

Despite the changes from Halo 2, Halo 3's multiplayer can't be beat. It's a testament to the game's staying power that we come back to it every Wednesday.

Overlord

I didn't start out planning to be an evil overlord.

When I found out that Overlord was a cross between Dungeon Keeper (where you get to play the bad guy in a fantasy world) and Pikmin (where you get to control different colored carrot people in quests), I was sold.

My first impressions of Overlord was that I was playing Sauron, back when he was still a horse-headed giant-type, before all that all-seeing angry red eye on top of a tower business. As Overlord you are in charge of goblins, who come in four flavors: brown, red, blue, and green. Fans of Pikmin (or any video game on the planet) know how this works: blues are immune to water, greens are immune to poison, etc. These diabolical minions accompany your Overlord everywhere as you rampage around the countryside reclaiming your evil inheritance. You know, cleaning up the tower, reclaiming all your minions, and finding a naughty girl to settle down with.

Being an Overlord is rather domestic, apparently.

-----+= EVIL OVERLORD RULE #24: I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line "No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!" (After that, death is usually instantaneous.) =+-----

I started out feeling very charitable to the peasants of Spree, returning their food from the evil halflings. I discovered that Overlord is basically a cynical view of Lord of the Rings, with all the heroes being horrible hypocrites, and thus truly the villains. Compared to Melvin Underbelly the gluttonous halfling, the Oberon the slothful elf, Sir William the lecherous lord, Goldo the greedy dwarf, Jewel the envious and Kahn the wrathful. The seven deadly sins, wrapped up in fantasy stereotypes, all waiting to be defeated.

There are two paths you can pursue in Overlord. Be nice to people and do good deeds (or at least, not particularly evil deeds) and you can pursue the path of Lawful Evil, for those of you who know D&D. Be mean and it's a downward spiral into Chaotic Evil. These choices reflect how the various characters interact with you, from the lowliest peasant to your mistress of choice. I started out trying to be relatively nice, if only because all the walkthroughs I consulted whenever I got stuck took me down that path.

Then I was on a quest to save some stupid sacred Tree of Life in a stupid sacred elf forest and in an attempt to stop two bloody unicorns (no, really, they're unicorns covered with blood) from killing me, I used a fire spell...and set the Tree of Life on fire. This in turn set the whole forest ablaze, bloody unicorns, elves, and all, who went up in a screaming conflagration.

Well that pretty much dashed any hopes of my redemption right there and I started considering an evil path. I felt bad about the whole thing and was actually considering making it up to the elves, maybe by planting some trees or something...

Until I met Velvet.

-----+= EVIL OVERLORD RULE #49: If I learn the whereabouts of the one artifact which can destroy me, I will not send all my troops out to seize it. Instead I will send them out to seize something else and quietly put a Want-Ad in the local paper. =+-----

About halfway through the game you have the opportunity to take a mistress. Rose, Velvet's older and more straitlaced sister, calls your little goblins "pixies" and generally sets an imperious tone about your tower--MY tower, which I didn't invite her to. So when I had the opportunity to switch to the sleek little minx named Velvet, reclining in laced up stockings on her bed and promising Teen-rated services...I suddenly had a change of perspective.

Velvet's evil and she's not subtle about it. She constantly threatens, cajoles, and pouts throughout the game to get you to do more evil things. It worked. Oh how it worked! And when you give Velvet what she wants, she...reciprocates.

I'm not proud of this, but Xbox Live is. Because it has Mistress Master as a title. This has to be a new low. Or a new high, depending on your perspective.

Thus I became not just an evil overlord, but a really sadistic jerk. I went back to Spree and slaughtered every inhabitant, burned every building to the ground, and took all their stuff. Then I went back and enslaved their best-looking women as servants. I mean...somebody knows what 12-year-old boys want. I am not a 12-year-old boy, but I hope to be when I grow up.

Overlord is a glorious form of stress relief. You travel from area to area via your tower, slowly accumulating more minions and gold. You can upgrade your weapons, learn new spells, and of course evil-fy your tower. Because Velvet wants you to. And you should really do what Velvet tells you to do if you know what's good for you.

-----+= EVIL OVERLORD RULE #53: If the beautiful princess that I capture says, "I'll never marry you! Never, do you hear me, NEVER!!!" I will say "Oh well" and kill her. =+-----

Overlord can be repetitive at times, especially when you run out of minions and have to resort to "farming" lesser creatures to get the magical energy up to create new ones. Death has no penalties other than a loss of minions and starting over on a level, so there comes a tipping point where you are either clearly outmatched and thus have to spend more time mindlessly killing wimpy critters, or you are so powerful that you roll over everything in the game.

By the end of the game, I had a huge pile of gold in my coffers--you can visit your coffers and watch as the gold accumulates. I bought Velvet everything her wicked little heart desired and then some, from flaming demon-shaped fixtures to skull banners. And I had a shiny new set of armor and weapons. At one point I had ten female servants, Velvet lounging around, and Jewel in a cage in front of my throne. This is not a game that caters to females...unless your name happens to be Velvet.

It's good to be the Overlord.

(Rules courtesy of Peter Anspach's The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html)

Earth Defense 2017

It's rare that a game gets panned and, upon reading about it, I realize it's the perfect game for me. Earth Defense Force (EDF) 2017 is a bit of a clunker, with unrealistic physics, repetitive enemies, and a terrible vehicle mechanic. Folks accustomed to the first-person smoothness of Halo or the gritty action of Gears of War would most certainly turn up their nose at EDF.

But I loved every single level of it.

You've probably guessed what the plot is: flying saucers invade and deposit hordes of giant ants, spiders, robots, and Godzillas--sorry, "Dino-mechs"--onto the Earth's surface in an attempt to take over the word, Independence Day-style. You are Storm 1, EDF's premiere ground soldier. You and a bunch of your hapless fellow soldiers are tasked with repelling alien invaders several times your size with nothing but handheld weapons. Remember Starship Troopers? It's like that.

With apologies to Winston Churchill: You fight on the seas and oceans, you fight in the air, you defend your planet, whatever the cost may be. You fight on the beaches, you fight on the landing grounds, you fight in the fields and in the streets, you fight in the hills...and you never, ever surrender. From Aliens-style bug hunts in cramped tunnels to bitter Children of Men-style warfare in ruined cities, EDF drops you into every environment imaginable, puts a gun in your hands, points you at a giant monster and asks you to take it on mano-a-giant monstero.

The enemies are glorious to behold. The giant robots are 1950s style automatons reminiscent of the Iron Giant, clunking their way through city streets with gigantic beam weapons, one eye, and weird rope-like limbs. The giant dinosaurs breathe atomic fire and smash through buildings and troops.

And then there are the bugs. Lots and lots and lots of bugs. The giant ants squirt acid or bite, swarming in an erratic pattern just like their tiny brethren. The giant spiders, a combination of tarantula and wolf spider, jump AND spit webs. As if this weren't bad enough, sometimes EDF throws all of these types of enemies at you at once.

The other major part of the game are the weapons. There are intelligent miniguns that track monsters just like in the extended cut of Aliens, bullets that ricochet off of the walls, flame throwers, grenade launchers, sniper rifles, acid sprayers, time release mines, rocket launchers, guided missiles, and of course shotguns. Each has a reload time, although you rarely run out of ammo, and a range and damage, so there's plenty of variety. The more enemies you kill, the more weapons and armor you pick up. There are also vehicles, including tanks, helicopters, hoverbikes, and mechs, but the controls are clunky.

EDF revels in its size. Everything is destructible, from bikes and cars on the street to skyscrapers. And they can all be taken out with one well-placed (or poorly placed) missile. Bugs run up the buildings and attack from above--but if you shoot one of the buildings down, the bugs just float to the ground without a scratch. In fact, there's really no penalty for falling (including blowing up the building you're standing on). I destroyed quite a few buildings and struggled to run out of the falling shadow, only to watch the rubble fall right through Storm 1.

On the other hand, the UFOs that fly overhead are also a destructible part of the scenery. As a result, there's a massive sense of scale as you fire rockets at the giant spaceships floating above you; it's exhilarating to watch one of the UFOs crash to the ground after several well-placed shots. And since the things are so darned big, they often fall on TOP of you.

The AI is dumb as rocks, of course. While there are occasional bosses, this game is mostly about blowing up the entire scenery. Sure, Storm 1 leads the EDF troops once their captain dies. And the dialogue really is hilarious: it's been structured so that they talk in vague terms about the enemy to increase the applicability of spoken phrases. Here's a typical snippet of dialogue:

"Where's the enemy?"
"The enemy is out of range!"
"Are you scared?"
"Shut up!"

This silliness adds up to the perfect B-movie dialogue. Even better, the troops are almost of no help whatsoever and actually a threat--though buildings fall through them, your troops can be hit by friendly fire. I killed off the entire platoon several times when an idiot EDF soldier ran in front of my rocket launcher.

About the only unforgivable flaw is that the game's difficulty levels are widely variable. I beat some levels with ease on hard while others were impossible. Unfortunately, EDF does not count beating a level on hard difficulty as beating it on normal difficulty. Since EDF awards points on Xbox live only upon completing every level on one difficulty, switching back and forth between normal and hard levels meant I ended up with no credit for beating the game at all.

You have to be a certain kind of person to appreciate EDF. If you've ever enjoyed THEM!, Tarantula, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Godzilla, Starship Troopers, Aliens, Independence Day, War of the Worlds, or if you just happen to like blowing things up but suck at games like Gears of War and Halo...then grab your rocket launcher, soldier, because the EDF needs you!

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

I put Lost Planet: Extreme Condition on my wish list because it looked like Gears of War crossed with Robotech, featuring giant mecha and tiny soldiers battling huge monsters in a frozen environment. That's more or less what I got.

Our hero, Wayne Holden (modeled after Byung-hun Lee and voiced in English by Josh Keaton), loses his father to a giant Akrid known as Green Eye. When the archvillain of the game is chiefly known by the color his eyes, it's an indicator that perhaps the translation isn't perfect. Or to put it another way, we don't call Godzilla "Flaming Mouth."

Anyway, Wayne wakes up on the same frozen planet, rescued by the tasty purple-haired Luka (Christina Puccelli) and her aggravating little brother Rick (Justin Shenkarow). Rick's one of those characters who always wears goggles, as if they're surgically affixed to his face. He's a staple of anime, the energetic techie that tags along with the hot chick to make her more effective, since said hot chick doesn't seem to do a whole lot besides make poor fashion choices.

Yuri (Andrew Kishino), who looks like a villain, complete with narrow gaze and white hair, leads Luka and Rick. With Wayne joining their merry band, they're ready to go out into the frozen world and steal stuff.

They're Ice Pirates...sorry, I mean Snow Pirates. Well, not really - they're actually the Rebels to NEVEC's Empire, battling on Hoth...

Wait, this isn't the Empire Strikes Back?

Which review is this? Lost Planet? Oh yeah, right.

Sorry, sorry, my attention wandered from the convoluted plot. It involves Wayne losing his memory, a bit of time travel, a weird glowy thing attached to his arm that powers the mecha (sorry, VIRTUAL SUITS...can't the anime community agree on a standardized term for these bloody things?), some rivalry between Luka and some other mannish-sound woman, and another bad guy (we know he's bad because he wears glasses) who wants to take...over...THE WORLD! MUAAHAHAHAHA!

This is a mech game masquerading as a third-person shooter. Wayne plods along, even when there's no snow. He stumbles when he jumps. Fortunately, he has a grappling hook that fires from his wrist and never manages to dislocate his arm. I ended up shooting the grappling hook at a lot of stationary objects and dragging Wayne along like a slower, dumber version of Spider-Man.

The other challenge is that Wayne requires heat to live. Fortunately, the Akrid provide it, which really motivates Wayne to kill them however he can. There are also huge vats of energy lying around that are just waiting to be shot up. What doesn't make nearly as much sense is why Wayne has to power up his heat energy when he's indoors. Or in a volcano. Seriously.

The Akrid are beautiful to behold. They are all weird, squiggly bug-types, each unique and varied and most of all HUGE. Lost Planet revels in the size of the landscape, throwing giant worms and massive moths at you as you struggle with poor mini-Wayne to get to a mech. Once you're in a mech, the game becomes much more fun, because you can move faster than a snail's pace and blow things up much more effectively.

The human opponents, also in mechs and on foot, are annoying and suffer from the I MUST SHOUT SOMETHING BEFORE I DIE syndrome. Every time. When you kill a lot of these guys, the slogans and rallying cries get old. The Akrid bosses, who don't speak, make up for it.

In fact, the game is all about the bosses. Each is innovative, challenging, and terrible to behold. However, Lost Planet is a game of attrition; on the longer levels it carries over the energy you collected in the beginning. Since heat energy and damage are tied together, failing to get enough energy or taking too much damage in an earlier part of the game can make a boss battle impossible. I had to restart two levels from scratch until I got it right.

But Lost Planet is addicting. I played it on hard and all of the boss battles were very close. Two of the boss fights ended with Wayne going through two mecha, a handful of grenades and a missile launcher. Now THAT'S a fun game!

Marvel Ultimate Alliance

I played X-men: Legends for the Playstation 2 and, although I liked the idea of playing with four players at once, the actual game play left a lot to be desired. There were a couple of problems, not the least of which was that four characters on the screen were difficult to keep track of or even see. When the camera was hovering a thousand feet up, attractive graphics became irrelevant--everybody looked like ants. Also, you couldn't play the cool characters right away but had to earn them, which made the game frustrating.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance (MUA) fixes all those problems. You start out playing the characters you WANT to play: Spider-Man, Wolverine, Doctor Strange, Deadpool, the works. The cooler characters you have to earn, but they're worth earning: Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider, Blade, Daredevil, Black Panther and even Nick Fury. My team of choice was Doctor Strange, Blade, Ghost Rider, and Deadpool. Pick your team of four heroes and you're off!

Your team is assembled to beat bad guys at the behest of SHIELD Agent Nick Fury, he of the eye patch and white gloves. Then you proceed to battle an array of villains led by Doctor Doom, from Mephisto to Loki, Galactus to esoteric bad guys like Dragonman. Just about everyone in the Marvel universe is in this game.

The game play is standard: shoot things, slash things, and blow things up. In turn, various minions will do their best to knock you out, leaving the hero unconscious for a period of time until he recovers. There were a few times I ran through the game with just one hero left, like when Ghost Rider took on an entire legion of Skrull warriors and Galactus droids, tossing them off cliffs with his chains. Man, that was fun...but I digress.

Although most of the time you can't zoom in on the characters, you get a much better perspective of them when you handle the upgrades. The upgrade system is intricate, detailing everything from the powers the heroes use to the gadgets they pick up to the outfits they wear. This is especially good, because folks accustomed to the movie version of Blade will be horrified to see what his original costumes looked like in the comic (hint: think green). That said, the costumes actually matter, and you slowly unlock costumes throughout the game that will appeal to fans that know the characters from the comics (Doctor Strange's alternate costumes are friggin' weird).

MUA gets a lot of things right. The powers are evocative of the comic, from Ghost Rider's vengeance stare to Doctor Strange's magical bolts, to Blade's shotgun, katana, and pistol. The hero voices perfectly match their characters. Blade SOUNDS like Wesley Snipes. Doctor Strange sounds like the way I've always imagined him. Ghost Rider is suitably gravelly. And Deadpool...well I've never imagined Deadpool speaking but it fits.

The boards are interesting and interactive. Most fun is Arcade, sort of a Joker for the Marvel universe, complete with funhouse and old-style games like Pong and Pitfall that you have to play (I imagine kids are scratching their heads...). The boss fights show off the detail of the characters, as they involve button-mashing sequences as opposed to straightforward combat. This makes for a cinematic climax to every end battle.

There are some things that are still a little silly. While it's great that you can bash and smash nearly everything, from walls to sculptures to machinery, sometimes that simply doesn't make sense. Our heroes begin on a SHIELD helicarrier that's about to crash, and they gain coinage by...smashing everything on the ship. Isn't that exactly the opposite of what they're supposed to be doing?

But that's a minor quibble. The game has oodles of replayability, as you search for collectible action figures (I found all of the Daredevil ones, but not the Black Panther), find special mission discs that let you play out scenes from each heroes past, and even develop your team's powers. GO TEAM VENTURE!

I haven't played multiplayer, but you can play against an opponent or with up to four of your buddies. That just sounds like a lot of fun. Even the computer-controlled characters are not complete morons, which is a refreshing change for this sort of game.

Everything that makes the Marvel comics universe great is here in obsessive levels of detail. I enjoyed the game so much that I played it to completion and then some. I can only hope that the next game will allow you to carry over your saved characters. It's enough to make a Marvel fanboy weep with joy.

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II is a curious name. It's like calling a movie Part Two: The Sequel. Dark Alliance was a chapter in Baldur's Gate's history and this game continues what was started in the first, including many of the same characters and voice talent.

To wit, all the efforts in the first game to prevent the teleporting Onyx Towers from falling into the wrong hands was for naught. Mordoc Selanmere (a vampire) has located the towers on the Shadow Plane and manipulates both the Harpers and the Zhentarim into bringing it to the Prime Material Plane so he can teleport right into Baldur's Gate itself and turn all the citizens into shambling undead.

Our three heroes from the first game (the elven sorceress, the human archer, and the dwarf) have been captured and apparently are in for a long torture session. Meanwhile, five new heroes are recruited to the cause:

* Borador Goldhand: a dwarven treasure-hunter
* Alessia Faithammer: an aasimar cleric
* Vhaidra Uoswiir: a drow monk
* Ysuran Auondril: an elven necromancer,
* Dorn Redbear: a human barbarian.

My wife chose Vhaidra and I played Ysuran, because they were the most interesting characters. I mean, come on, Dorn Redbear sounds like a Klingon.

Vhaidra is known mostly for her sarcastic comments and the inability to walk without crouching like Elmer Fudd. Ysuran is identified mostly by his bare nipples, which he seems to have a pathological need to display at all times. It must be a necromancer thing.

The heroes must journey from place to place to retrieve certain items at the behest of various employers, whom ultimately all happen to be connected. The same merchant sells and buys all things with the same annoying and repetitive banter. The twist is that finding masterwork equipment and then augmenting them with gems can improve items. In this way, you can end up with an Exceptional Helmet of Viper's Quickness.

Also new to the Baldur's Gate games is the notion of prestige classes. After reaching 20th level and doing enough research about their past (which always costs gold, of course), the characters can join prestige classes. Ysuran's can join Shadow Adept and Vhaidra can join Assassin. These classes give you new nifty abilities. The only problem is that by the time you're 20th level, these abilities are marginally more effective at best.

The Baldur's Gate series uses a simplified version of the Dungeons & Dragons game system to good effect. All spells, feats, and class powers have been turned into feats. At each level, characters start with a certain number of points in certain feats. For example, Vhaidra starts with 1 dot in Armor Proficiency, Sprint, and Unarmed Combat. One dot in Armor Proficiency means she can only wear light armor, like leather armor. Role-players, look in horror upon that which is possibly Dungeons and Dragons 4.0!

We played the game on Medium difficulty, which was probably a mistake. Ysuran is capable of surviving just fine by himself, because of Skelly.

What, you don't know who Skelly is? Why, he's the skeleton that arises from Ysuran's Animate Dead spell. Unfortunately, Ysuran doesn't really animate any dead-Skelly just rises out of the ground and does not require any actual corpses to create him. Another missed opportunity for gaming coolness.

The world hates Skelly, but he doesn't seem to care. Every monster in the game has an inexplicable desire to kill Skelly (again), but Skelly just whacks away at them with his bare fists. Fortunately, Ysuran's protection spells extend both to his undead as well. Which really makes them unstoppable. There were a few situations wherein the boss monster killed Vhaidra and Ysuran prevailed with just Skelly and the Life Drain spell.

If Skelly makes the game less challenging, the Life Drain spell makes it a cakewalk. In essence, Life Drain inflicts damage and heals Ysuran. However, Life Drain doesn't require any targeting-Ysuran merely needs to point in the direction of his victim and red darts of energy flow out of his foes towards him. Yes, I ate several cookies while Ysuran sucked up the souls of his enemies like a Shop-Vac.

Because you can craft magic items, things quickly get out of hand. With enough money, Ysuran had a +4 helmet that protected him from 15 percent of fire, cold, and acid damage. And then because he was such a wuss, I gave him a ring that gave him a +4 bonus to Strength so he could carry all the crap Skelly found.

There were some challenges, like the Elemental Plane of Air, where Skelly and Ysuran often fell to their doom. Although really, how long did it take for them to hit "doom"? It's all Air, right?

Dark Alliance II seems to be dumbed down a bit. There are no longer ammunition limits, so ranged weapons effectively fire forever. Stocking up on arrows kept the archer in the first game in check. Here, it's all bolts, all the time.

The graphics are more or less the same, although my wife appreciated the fact that most of the main characters didn't seem modeled after certain movie stars (remember the bartender of the Elfsong Tavern, Lady Alyth?). And no, you can't strip down the drow chick to her underwear like you could with Adrianna in the first game.

For reasons I cannot comprehend, the map function was moved to the touch pad instead of pushing down on the stick. Since spells are up and down on the touch pad and the map requires pressing to the left (right switches from ranged weapon to two-handed weapon to one-handed weapons), more often than not I brought the map up in the middle of a combat. Please guys, if ain't broke, don't fix it!

Baldur's Gate II is an inferior sequel that offers more of the same, only easier. It's probably more entertaining in a single-player game, but it was definitely not balanced for two players. Restricting the necromancer to a single-player might have been a good start.

Although I feel obligated to tell you that Skelly thinks that's a stupid idea.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic

Is it possible to have a game and a movie set in the same universe, and love the game more?

In this case, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic harkens back to an era even earlier than the Star Wars movies. Thousands of years earlier to be exact.

The Mandalorians (the originators of the armor that Boba and Jango Fett wear) were still in power then. Just as the Jedi were fending the Mandlorians off, a major upset in the balance of power took place when Darth Malak and Darth Revan turned on their allies and returned from the Mandalorian War with a Sith fleet. Only one Jedi's "battle meditation" saved the fleet and now the Jedi are in shambles, the Sith run rampant, and Mandalorian bandits abound. Your mission is to find the disparate "Star Maps" that will ultimately lead to a world crushing machine of Armageddon proportions: the Star Forge. You must beat Darth Malak before he uses the Star Forge to destroy the Republic.

In this mix of high adventure are a host of characters (nine in total) range from Mandalorians to Wookies to druids, assassin and otherwise. Each character is carefully crafted and voiced by professional actors who do an excellent job with the material. And by professional, I mean movie talent: Ethan Phillips (Neelix of Star Trek: Voyager) and Ed Asner (uh...ask your parents). Given the number of possible responses in the dialogue, it's a truly massive task.

The game system should seem familiar to many - it uses the d20 pen-and-paper role-playing game system of the Star Wars RPG, with tweaks to make it easier to use for a computer game. The abilities blend seamlessly with the game play itself. I never felt at any time that I was playing a pen-and-paper game on a computer. Additionally, the game system uses Bioware's ever-evolving game engine used in Neverwinter Nights, which makes everything easy to use.

With multiple worlds that you can fly to at any moment, multiple characters (up to three active at one time), and a dizzying number of side quests, you simply can't get to them all. It doesn't matter though, because the metaplot rumbles along in the background every time you find another Star Map on another world.

The graphics and sound are exceptional. Sun glare flares on the game's camera and darkens your character's shadow. The controller trembles when large beasts are afoot (or worse, in combat!). The sounds are all taken from the movies, so lightsabers sound like lightsabers, aliens speak in their native tongues, and starships roar just like their cinematic counterparts. This is about as close to playing a movie as it gets.

The character development is worthy of mention. Your own character can be customized by body type, gender, and appearance. Your gender modifies the plot (males can fall in love with Bastila, the pretty Jedi mentor). All this uniqueness and yet the game never falters in dealing with it - your character's head never looks out of place in any of the cut scenes. Speaking of the cut scenes, they are all done with the same in-game animations, marinating the feel of the overall game play without stepping out of the action. And of course, your own character's background has a twist.

The NPCs have their own range of personalities. Unlike the current crop of Star Wars movies, there is a careful balance between the elegantly serious Jedi and their adventuring counterparts. Bastila provides a dose of class in the group as the somewhat taciturn Jedi master, but Carth is her balance, a gravelly-voiced war veteran who believes in the power...of a good blaster, that is. My personal favorites include Canderous Ordo, a grizzled Mandalorian of too many wars who loves a good fight. And of course, everyone loves HK-47. Like AK-47, only with an "H." That's right, HK-47 is an assassin druid with a mind of his own. HK-47 is fond of calling people "meatbag," except for his master...when he remembers his place.

There are plenty of old favorites too: Sand People, Banthas, Krayt Dragons, protocol druids, it's all here. If the characters don't remind you of Star Wars, the soundtrack will. It's true to the original score and in some cases, IS the original score. It's impossible for even the mildest Star Wars fan to resist.

All that, and there's a good old-fashioned subplot involving romance and betrayal, Light Side and Dark Side. This is the story Lucas dreamed but never truly brought to life.

The game is amazing in its flexibility. There are Light- and Dark Side choices in every conversation. You can solve puzzles or blast your way through plots, help NPCs or set them against each other. There are even logic puzzles that require the player to think, something I haven't been accustomed to doing in a long time.

There are flaws, but they're minor. In one case, I ended up killing a major NPC twice. There are puzzles that result in instant death failure, a no-no in game development. And combat is turn based: the player doesn't really determine very swing of the lightsaber, but rather the battle freezes and resumes as the player provides real-time strategy. Also, the game uses the same engine as Neverwinter Nights, which means it involves a lot of walking around talking to people. A LOT.

Still, this is one of the best computer role-playing games I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. I was thrilled when my character's romance with Bastila flourished, devastated when I saw a father-son argument between Carth and his son Dustil, and I laughed at loud at some of the spontaneous character interactions.

Can a game be as good as a movie with the same setting? Nope.

It's BETTER. I got far more bang for my buck playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic than I got after two hours of special effects in the movies. In this game, the special effects at least had a heart.

Batman Vengeance

Batman: Vengeance looks just like the cartoon, including the voice actors and designs. This game takes place after the cancellation of the Batman cartoon series. That's the latest incarnation -- not the original series, but the slimmer, darker version of Batman that incorporated designs from the movie. For those of you who didn't follow along, Batman lost Robin and only had Batgirl as a sidekick.

Batman: Vengeance, starts out right. You are immediately thrust into play as Batman slides down a slippery slope with an explosion behind him. The player doesn't have a whole lot to do -- for the most part, Batman's going to make it regarless if Batsy slides to the left or right -- but it got me excited about the game.

Batman's got a compelling plot, including Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze, led by the Joker (voiced by "I used to be Luke Skywalker" Mark Hamil). The Joker maneuvers Batman into release the right combination of chemicals in an effort to stop other villains. By manipulating Batman into these situations, he inadvertently mixes a dangerous concoction that threatens Gotham.

Things look a bit different because the characters are rendered in three dimensions, which is different from Superman: Shadow of Apocalips. So the characters look similar, but they're not quite right.

Batman has a multitude of tools at his disposal, including the Batmobile and the Batjet. Batman vaults around the city with his batgrapple, throws batarangs, and uses his cloak as a defense as well as a means of gliding from place to place. Which is important, because Batman fights on a lot of rooftops and ledges -- death from falling happened a lot.

The game takes itself seriously. Joker, Harley, and their cronies play for keeps. They shoot machineguns, try to push you off ledges, and otherwise kill you. True to the cartoon, the bad guys fight dirty and it's up to Batman to use his formidable abilities to overcome his disadvantage -- ya know, not having a gun.

Batman is well-rendered, but there were some graphic flaws. There is a "snap to" function that allows you to recenter the camera, facing the way Batman's facing. This is less of a good use of the camera as it is a lazy fix to a problem that is problematic for too many games. Unfortunately, it snaps so quickly that sometimes I became disoriented by the new angle. Additionally, the camera is an object and will bounce off walls, forcing itself literally inside Bat's head. Which looks weird and doesn't help the perspective if Batman is against a wall.

Batman also has some clipping bugs. In at least two different cases, Batman froze in space after getting trapped on the corner of a three-dimensional object. Then he couldn't leave it and I had to start over. Batman: Vengeance only saves when you IT wants you to. You have to finish the board to get to that point, which makes for an either frustrating or easy experience, depending on your level of skill.

By far the best part of the game is fighting my favorite villain, Mr. Freeze. Sure enough, Freeze cannot be fought in hand-to-hand combat (if you've ever seen Batman try, you'll understand) and it requires some crafty maneuvering. There are a multitude of mini-games that test your skill and your brains. Although none are particularly hard, they help break up the gameplay. There are puzzle games, the aforementioned Batmobile and Batjet games, and some other puzzles.

This is good, because barring the unique villains (including Mr. Freeze's Eskimo chickies, Poison Ivy's root-men, and the Joker's mimes), there isn't too many bad guy types. The villains do, in typical movie fashion, stop shooting once Batman engages one of their comrades in melee, politely waiting until he goes down to resume firing. They also react to their surroundings, listening to noises, reacting to their allies socking one to Bats (they cheer), and falling off ledges. Yes, you can actually knock someone off a building and watch them plunge to their death. Now THAT'S Batman!

Overall, Batman: Vengeance is an excellent balance of puzzles, action, and style. It was a great opportunity to return to the cartoon I enjoyed so much.

Rygar: The Legendary Adventure

I had low expectations for Rygar. After all, my only contact with the game was when it was an extremely difficult side-scroller in the arcades. Sure, Rygar's concept was cool - a barbarian who throws a Yo-yo of Death (okay, it's called Diskarmor, but you get the idea). What's not to like?

Rygar: The Legendary Adventure changed my perceptions of what Rygar was about. Rygar was reimagined as a Greek tale, much the same way that Link was reimagined as a Celtic hero. Being an avid role-player, I appreciated the change.

But there's a lot more to Rygar than just throwing a shield at weird caterpillars. The realm is firmly (if rather inaccurately) rooted in Greek mythology. Echidna, Typhon, Minotaur, Centaur, Sphinx, Cretus, Greek gods...the whole gang is here. And the settings are beautiful - backgrounds look and feel like Greek landscapes and vistas. Even better, Rygar is encouraged to destroy everything in sight and his efforts are rewarded by the massive collapse of pillars, statues, and caverns. It's like Classical graffiti. Unlike Superman: Shadow of Apokolips, you actually feel as if you're hitting hard things when you hit them with your Diskarmor. The Diskarmor sparks and bounces as it hits solid rock.

The princess you have to rescue is a spitting image of Britney Spears. Depending on your opinion of Britney, that's a good or bad thing.

The game revels in its beautiful levels, giving Rygar ample opportunity to explore it all. The Temple of Poseidonia is especially breathtaking, with sparkling waterfalls and glowing seashells. Equally impressive are the Skies of Arcadia, where Rygar must do battle miles above the earth and clouds. Fortunately, if you fall off you don't die but rather start over at the nearest large floating island. This single piece of thoughtful design is what stopped me from completing Akuji the Heartless. It's a compliment to say that Rygar got everything right that Akuji tried to do - take an unusual setting and make it both visually interesting and fun to play.

Like Final Fantasy, there are familiars that can be summoned to unleash even more damage on Rygar's enemies. There are three: Siren, Cerberus, and the not-quote-phonetically-correct Taros (that'd be Talos, but the Engrish translation screwed it up). The Diskarmors can also be improved by gaining experience (er, sorry, "sfaira" which means "sphere" in Greek). By improving the three different types of Diskarmor, Rygar can add mystic stones. Mystic stones enhance the powers of the shield, including the ability to heal, inflict more damage, or defend better. Some people call this a "role-playing element." I don't, but it's still neat.

There are a few things wrong with Rygar. For one, the voice acting is awful. I know voice actors - they have brains, and anyone who speaks English should not be reciting the badly translated crap from Japanese that was foisted upon Rygar. Don't any of these voice actors turn to the guy handing them the script and say, "Nobody would say it like that!"? In one instance, the bad guy is trying to get Rygar's soul. So he states, "I will crush your soul, and steal your body." That'd be "Crush your body so I can steal your soul." The voice acting is bad enough that it detract from the game.

Rygar's plot is nearly impenetrable due to the bad translation. It loosely involves Aristotle (yes, THAT Aristotle), Cleopatra, and Julius Casear (along with his son, Caesarion). Because of the poorly constructed plot, the whole thing comes off as if someone threw a bunch of Greek names in a blender and made a story out of it.

The monsters are strangely out of place in an adventure set in mythic Greece. The rollers are a cross between pissed off centipedes and caterpillars. They move just like caterpillars too. But why is Rygar fighting so many of them? Or the strangely acrobatic Hycanithus (wouldja believe they're killer flowers)? Or the Harpuai, which are floating arms. The only Ancient Greek monster that shows up on a regular basis are the cylcopes, but they're rare. C'mon folks, this is Greek myth, there's plenty of other critters to thrown into the game.

But I quibble. Although Rygar isn't as good as it could be, it's still one of the most beautiful games to ever grace the Playstation 2. I played it obsessively until I beat it. And that's the best recommendation I can give any game.

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance

I picked up Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (BG:DA) for Playstation 2 after finishing Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes on the Xbox. I'm familiar with Bioware, who consistently makes games I really enjoy (including Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic). Additionally, Baldur's Gate came first before D&D Heroes, so I knew there would be some improvements. Still, Maleficent and I enjoy blowing stuff up together, so we needed a new fix and Baldur's Gate fit the bill.

Unlike D&D Heroes, BG:DA pretends it has role-playing elements and in doing so, just highlights how non-role-playing the game is. Similar to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights, there are conversation trees. When you speak to a character, you select a series of responses from a menu. There are maybe five characters you can talk to in total and your conversation doesn't really matter - we quickly discovered that clicking the top choice always meant we'd get to hear the whole story. But you can just skip the whole story too and get right to the matter at hand, which means the role-playing elements are just trappings to make it seem more like D&D.

Forget character customization too, at least at character creation. There are three character types, including an elven sorceress, dwarven (cleric? I didn't play him so not sure), and human arcane archer. Some warning flags should go off for folks who play the third edition of D&D - one cannot start out as an arcane archer, that's a prestige class. But that doesn't matter - the human, named Vahn, is whom you get to play. While he can hack things up in melee, Vahn's clearly optimized for ranged combat. The game gives subtle hints like dropping great heaps of arrows as the only equipment you find in treasure hoards.

BG:DA is obviously geared towards a particular breed of player - the young, [...], male kind. The first character you interact with is a blonde elf that is quite buxom and has a habit of leaning forward, gesturing towards her chest or thrusting her hips. Similarly, the elven sorceress is only elf-like in that she has pointed ears - the rest of her is quite human.

The artwork, especially for a PS2 game, is fantastic. The backgrounds and sound effects are impressively crafted and filled with a loving attention to detail. The characters themselves move smoothly and act like real people in their hand gestures and emotions - even the lizard man acts slightly inhuman in how he speaks and moves. The voice acting is well done, but that's something I've come to expect from Bioware.

There are some lazy shortcuts that were very irritating in their exclusion. One lizard man sends the heroes through an elemental plane of water, spends five minutes explaining how dangerous the journey will be and then we see a cut scene focusing on some random tower. POOF! That whole water/drowning thing? We never see it - we don't' even see animation explaining the journey. We have to trust on faith that it was a tough swim through the elemental plane of water. When everything else is narrated and explained in such painstaking detail, I expect to see animation explaining it.

There is, of course, all the good stuff that some people think equates with a role-playing game: you can buy equipment, switch out arms and armor, and train particular feats and spells as you advance. Little of these powers resemble third edition D&D - fire shield is considerably weaker than its tabletop counterpart. Strangely, my character was unharmed by Maleficent's burning hands (even when she was blasting right through him) but her fireballs hurt him. Go figure.

Some of the monsters are radically different from their tabletop equivalents in weird ways. In Neverwinter Nights, umber hulks are wusses with an irritating confusion gaze. In BG:DA they are terrifying juggernauts, sans gaze. Drow are still as sneaky as ever (it's clear Bioware has a soft spot for the dark-skinned elves), dragons are still a pain in the ass, and giants are suitably fearsome. Bulette burrow and are extremely difficult to kill, which is appropriate, although they waddle like fast moving turtles...not how I envisioned them (or how they move in D&D Heroes).

Perhaps the most unforgivable flaw in the game is that it crashed. That's right folks, just like a PC, the screen went white and the game crashed hard. Considering we were at a critical point in the game and a lot of objects were on the screen at the same time (magic missiles, multiple enemies, arrows, etc.) I imagine it overtaxed the PS2. But what the heck - if I wanted a game that would crash I would have played it on a PC!

As a game developer myself for RetroMUD, I was surprised to see that every corpse and item stays where it is. That means there's no object cleanup. This means that the system has to determine the location of every item, corpse, and monster at all times. Corpses stay right where they are, which is alternately cool and disturbing, especially in rooms of mass slaughter. This problem was resolved in D&D Heroes (the corpses disintegrate) but it's a big mistake for a game of this size and probably led to the aforementioned crash.

I also got stuck once in an area due to clipping errors. These are amateurish mistakes that I haven't since seen repeated (certainly, not in D&D Heroes) so I'm willing to forgive the developers. But it's their first foray onto console games and it shows. It's a good game, but there are better games now with less boring, click-so-they-shut-up "role-playing" elements.

Magic the Gathering Interactive Encyclopedia

The Magic: The Gathering Interactive Encyclopedia (M:TGIE) promises a lot. It claims to be a playing tool, an encyclopedia, and a deckbuilding assistant all in one. That's a pretty tall order. Is Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) up to the challenge? Let's find out!

The M:TGIE's interface takes up the entire screen. It's a black background that doesn't lend itself to skipping between programs, even though much of the system relies on a Web browser. My preferred weapon of choice is Netscape, so it's possible the interface works better with Internet Explorer. After a couple of extraneous and irritating animations (that you must skip through every time you load the program), you have a choice of five sections:

This section allows you to find an opponent and begin an online game of Magic: The Gathering. It's not quite the same experience as playing a non-virtual game. Essentially, this is just a virtual gaming table.

Like so many other attempts to duplicate in-person, face-to-face gaming, the gaming table is a poor substitute. While it does standardize some aspects of a face-to-face game, like not having to worry about getting soda on your cards or the size of your gaming table, it's not going to replace the card game any time soon. Of course, WOTC knows this, or they wouldn't have created M:TGIE. But at least you don't have to worry about running out of counters anymore.

All the typical elements of virtual gaming are evident, including the ability for coin tosses and dice rolls, so you don't have to guess if your opponent really got a Heads on that last flip. There's also a list of parameters you can set for prospective players, which help ensure you play the game the way you want to play. You won't find an AI computer opponent with this program though.

Beyond the awkwardness of a virtual interface, which takes some getting used to, the biggest problem with this section lies in its communication tools. M:TGIE doesn't provide for audio interaction (although it does have a chat window). This isn't usually an issue with most games, because there are plenty of other shareware programs that you can use to work around it. The problem, however, is that M:TGIE is not Windows friendly. Switching between windows is laggy and can cause the program to crash. The window doesn't minimize either.

Still, considering the chaotic nature of most Magic: The Gathering games, the controlled virtual environment may be a welcome reprieve for gamers with high blood pressure.

The Deckbuilder is a fabulous feature for collectors, because it allows you to see what cards you still need. This is also where you can create your own virtual decks. The ability to print data about each card is very useful, but you can't print the pictures. No surprises here - if WOTC did this, you could probably create your own cards at home. But you can print a list of your entire collection, as well as the details of each individual card (including the quotes!).

Let's face it, the best part of collecting is gloating over the value of your Black Lotus. Although WOTC doesn't officially endorse any particular pricing list, they've given you the ability to download pricing lists on the Web. What they didn't give you was the ability to sort or display the prices in any useful way. So if you want to figure out the value of your deck, you'll have to look at each and every card individually. If you're a collector like me, this can take a very, very long time. Still, it's faster than looking up the value of each card, which is something I simply wouldn't bother to do (I'm the lazy collector-type).

There are also a few problems with the Deckbuilder section. Some views do not display correctly on screen. The search view appeared to be broken, as I was only able to display the upper left part of the search window. Patches and updates to the program didn't fix the problem.

This is the real meat of the encyclopedia. This section tackles the daunting task of giving you access to every Magic card ever printed. Almost all of them, anyway - there were no Guru cards that I could find. Useful features include the ability to make your own notes about each card, additional information from WOTC about background information on each card, why it was created, its intended use, or strategy tips. One particularly useful feature is the ability to zoom in on the artwork. I didn't think this mattered much until I began to notice the subtle differences between the seemingly endless editions of Magic: The Gathering cards. The only way to determine which cards you have is to carefully scrutinizing those graphics. It's also amusing to see how the game has changed for the better, and how some obviously abusable rules were clarified in later editions.

The strategy library is a storehouse of articles and writings to help with your game play. It includes rules and formats, articles, the history of the game, and organized play. Don't get too excited though, as this isn't proprietary information - it's all available (and linked to) WOTC's Web site. This guarantees the information is kept up to date, but it makes for an awkward interface that doesn't mesh well with your Web browser.

This is where the true value of the M:TGIE becomes clear. With the speed that WOTC produces cards, this encyclopedia would be rapidly outdated in a matter of months. But just a few simple downloads, and -- voila! - my encyclopedia was up to date. This also included updates to the card pricing, ensuring the latest and most up to date values.

The M:TGIE tries to be all things to all gamers, and only achieves some of them successfully. As an interactive gaming tool, it's a novelty. As a collector's assistant, it's invaluable. As a reference, it's less successful due to the broken search function and awkward Windows interface. Most importantly, the Magic: The Gathering Interactive Encyclopedia utilizes the full power of the Internet, ensuring that its shelf life will be measured in years rather than months.