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...

Tom was definitely right about our lack of updates and Halo 2's multiplayer goodness having someone to do with one another. Not that it's a good thing. I'm over the initial hump of addictiveness though, I've settled into an easy-going two hours a night. I can stop any time I want to...and I actually would like to finish the single-player game so that I can A) finish San Andreas, B) play through Ratchet and Clank: UYA, and C) purchase and play through Metal Gear Solid 3. In that order, ideally. I'd also like to get to a couple other of the seventy-five thousand games that came out this/last/next week, but as you can see, my gaming plate is full.

It's been hard to follow much news with the deluge of games recently (and their subsequent reviews and whiny bitch threads), but one piece that caught my eye yesterday involved Tekken 5 being multi-platform. It's since been debunked as not having been official (even though it came from Famitsu), but I can almost guarantee it will end up happening regardless. Soul Caliber did well on all three systems, and hey, free money for Namco. But I swear to fuck, if PS2 gets stuck with Heihachi again as an exclusive character while Gamecube gets Charles Bronson and Xbox gets Jesse Ventura, I'll be less than pleased. Who plays fighting games on those systems anyway? Mormons?

Another choice piece of news - EA is about to snap up Digital Illusions (DICE), the developer of Battlefield 1942. That, I do not care about. What I do care about is that their next casual purchase will apparently be Free Radical, creators of the fantawesome Timesplitters series. And Second Sight. In what's sure to be viewed as a pro-EA comment, I'm fine with it. EA can't really get much more popular/powerful than they are now, so I don't think it affects them much outside of sheer ducket intake. But, as with Criterion, it gives a great, underappreciated developer the money and marketing that they need to get noticed from here on out. Not that either company's games were sleepers, per se, but they certainly weren't on the top ten either. I suppose EA could just publish both developer's next several games and not have to buy them outright, but if they can afford it, it makes sense. Hell, EA should just jump into the console race at this point. They have more (and better) second party developers than Nintendo, and only they have the license to make a console shaped like John Madden's head.

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but Stubbs the Zombie in "Rebel Without a Pulse" is going to rule. The developer, Wideload Games, is founded and led by Alex Seropian, the founder of Bungie. And the game is being published by Aspyr Media, who published lots of awesome Mac games back in the day (well, back in MY day of playing Mac games). Wideload is all about making funny games, and it sounds like hilarious fun so far. Check it, straight from IGN: "Stubbs employs numerous means of attack including his zombie strength to bust down doors, the ability to eat brains, transforming enemies into his own personal horde, the ability to possess humans and to use your body as a weapon. On this last front, he's got explosive gut grenades, zombie sputum, a severed hand (that can crawl through tight spaces and possess the living), a head (that doubles as an unholy bowling ball), and powerful flatulence. That's zombie power!"
Sounds like a winner. Plus, it uses the fucking Halo 2 engine, so it looks tits too.





And, based on the soundtrack that they announced today, it will sound incredible as well. It consists of some of my favorite indie/regular rock bands such as Ben Kweller, Death Cab For Cutie and Cake doing covers of 50's songs, such as "Lollipop", "Earth Angel", and "Strangers in the Night", respectively. In a zombie game. Made by the founder of Bungie. Does anyone not think this game will be awesome? Can this great gaming year finish so another one can start already?

First, a link to the inspiration of this column. That will take you to a 3 year old column written by my favorite writer of all time, Bill Simmons. If you don't know who that is I have to say I'm very disappointed with you. Not angry, just disappointed. Why am I linking to a sports column in the midst of all this video game chatter? That column, labeled The Ewing Theory, is one of the greatest ideas ever proposed by man. Last night, for the first time in my life, I have finally been able to connect it, however loosely, to my favorite pastime.

Before I talk about my experiences from last night, I should explain exactly what The Ewing Theory is about. As far as athletes are concerned, there are two types of great players - those that make their teammates better and those that merely fill up the stat sheets while their teams never have any success. The media does not differentiate between these two, very different, types of athletes. They somehow dish out the same amount of hype to the truly elite players and those who just seem great to the untrained eye.

When one of these pretend greats gets hurt, the media immediately writes off the team as a whole. This is when the players rally, play to their own strengths instead of relying on one player, and start to win. The media is, of course, surprised by this sudden surge. Obviously, anyone who knows about The Ewing Theory is not.





I wouldn't have had to go through all that if you had just clicked on the convenient link I provided at the beginning of the column.

Anyway, now that the theory is finally explained, I can relate this to my experiences in video games. If you think this has anything to do with sports games, though, you are sorely mistaken. I was once again knee deep in Halo 2 last night, I've logged close to 50 hours on it already, when I realized that The Ewing Theory can work in other facets of life as well. I was playing some clan matches with Nick and various other people from my Cheapassgamer clan. For some reason, even though I'm good and Nick is the best Halo 2 player I've competed with, we were on the losing end in most battles.

In fact, as I did a little research for this column, I noticed that, in Clan matches that feature both Nick and I, we are a combined 5-9. That's a mere 35% winning percentage. A 35% success rate might work if you're a major league batter or a neuro surgeon, but in video games it just does not cut it. I may not be the most competitive guy around but I do enjoy tasting victory more often than defeat, and sadly, even having Nick on my team didn't allow me to accomplish that task.

After losing a few more rounds yesterday, Nick announced to the disheartened group that he was leaving us for a bit. He promised, when he finished his meal, he would rejoin the group. But until that time, we were on our own. As we didn't want to move on to another mode, we simply recruited another member from our clan and continued to fight the world at large.

Now, you may think that, since we were losing with Nick, clearly we would have no shot at all without him. I mean, everyone knows he's the best player among us. He's the one keeping us in line the whole time. The one shouting "Be aggressive! Everyone stay on offense!" He's the one constantly reminding us to "Stay in the Base! No one take a vehicle unless they get the flag!" Surely, without his constant ordering we wouldn't know what to do and would fall apart at the seams. Surely, we couldn't survive without him.





Well, Shirley was wrong because we did survive. In fact, in the two games Nick was gone, we went 2-0. That's a 100% winning percentage. We were on fire. It's hard to say exactly what changed things for us, but I think we were just having more fun as a whole. No more roles and duties, we just kind of did what we wanted to do. We ran around the map securing a sword and some Ghosts to help us on defense. We coordinated our attacks so we were always outnumbering our opponent. We risked death to grab the flag for seconds at a time to make sure it didn't respawn at their base.

The funny thing is, as soon as Nick was done eating he rejoined our group. Fresh off our two game win streak, we thought we might be able to string a few more wins together with our best player back. Sadly, that was not the case. We once again found ourselves on the losing end, wondering if we would ever reach the promised land of victory again.