G-pinions

I was all set to talk about how I finally got to manhandle a DS today, when I had the very unpleasant experience of watching some of Video Mods, a fairly new show on MTV. Remember when all those developers whored out their creations to "pose" in Playboy? This is much, much worse. The premise of the show has you watching music videos for mostly terrible songs starring various videogame characters, dancing, singing, or playing along to the music in a band. So, say, Bloodrayne will serenade you with an Evanesence (ask me if I care if I misspelled that, go on, ask me) song while the supporting cast of Outlaw Golf 2 rocks out in the background. Now, on paper this is one of the least entertaining things ever conceived, so to say it is sheer, wall-to-wall shit when actually put together and viewed is quite the understatement. Worst of all, the only video I watched in it's entirety (and it was ROUGH) starred the two main characters, some bad guys and several backgrounds from the previously highly-respectable Jade Empire booty dancing like a bunch of morons. Not that it makes me want to play the game any less, but BioWare must have been hopped up on luudes when they decided this would be of any interest to their fans or actually garner enough viewers to make some money. It's just the worst thing I've seen on TV in a while (even more disgusting than a certain group of Pistons fans were tonight), and it saddens me to see my entertainment medium of choice get culturally raped so viciously and thoroughly. I had to turn away.

To get that out of my mind, and balance the cosmic gaming scale for today, I popped in a freshly acquired demo of Mercenaries, easily one of the best-looking games of next year. I've gotta say, Pandemic are some fabulous people. The game is pure, destructive fun, just like I expected it to be. It uses quality physics in all the right ways (read: for the power of evil), and reminds me of some of my favorite action/militaryish games like Freedom Fighters and Socom, only with much more readily-accessible firepower and wanton obliteration. This is where I see "emergent" gameplay heading. Here's a badass setting, a fun mission, and a bunch of awesome tools to do the job with, however you deem appropriate. Pandemic seems to have sci-fi and military covered already with Destroy All Humans! and Mercenaries, but I get the idea we'll be seeing Old West "sandbox" games before long. Anyhow, Mercenaries looks to be awesome based on this demo, and definitely feels like a 2005 kinda game. Now, the waiting game begins...