With Mass Effect 2 on the way, it’s probably a little too late to make a wish list, but on the other hand making the wish list back in 2008 would have been just as useless. So let’s get on with it.

1. I know Bioware games have some sort of rigid rule about characters being able to jump over knee high barriers, even if they happen to be incredible warriors with amazing powers. I know. You couldn’t do it in any of the Knights of the Old Republic games. I can only hope you’ll be able to do it in the MMORPG. You couldn’t do it in Jade Empire. You couldn’t do it in Mass Effect 1. I’m sure it’s how the game is built, but you know just maybe it’s time to update your game all the way to 1994. You guys can do it.

2. Don’t give me a warship with a whole bunch of marines, and then force me to pick two aliens I just picked up along the way as my team to storm a fortress and an entire army. I don’t mind doing it. It’s fun, but for an otherwise well written game, it’s stupid and completely unbelievable. Give me some version of the Ebon Hawk with a few castaways. And that’s it

3. Planets. You advertise a great space adventure. So why not give me more than one planet I can visit. And I don’t mean race over sand dunes or icebergs in a matchbox military car, blasting tiny enemies along the way. I mean a port I can return to and characters I can continue interacting with.

4. The ending. Like a lot of RPG’s lately, it’s all too easy to finish the main storyline in Mass Effect 1, before you even explored a small piece of the game. And unlike Oblivion, it’s not an ongoing universe. The ending is the ending. It’s stupid to create a vast universe and then to rush me through it by visiting only a few worlds.

5. Melee weapons. You guys did Knights of the Old Republic. Throw in your own version of a lightsaber in Mass Effect 2 and call it whatever you want.

Most games make really bad movies, but Mass Effect would probably be the lone exception. That’s because Mass Effect is a great Science Fiction movie already, and a mediocre game. An independent IP descendant of Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic games, Mass Effect is chock full of cut scenes, but its gameplay is sadly lacking. Like most RPG’s you’ll buy the basic concept involves fulfilling a core quest that will save all of life from the rise of evil, along with a bunch of colorless dungeon hacking side quests. In Mass Effect that’s implemented with a main quest that has you fighting to stop the return of the Reapers, machine starships who have been waiting in dark space to return and consume all intelligent life. Think of them as Cylons on steroids.

But stopping them means running around and shooting a small assortment of enemies, mostly varieties of robots from a sub-mechanical race called the Geth. Unlike the KOTOR games there are no melee weapons, and you get a choice between using a handgun, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, an assault rifle and a hand grenade. Mass Effect’s version of KOTOR’s Force skills are Biotic implants, but the average player on default mode won’t get a chance to use them, except second hand. There’s also a vehicle, the MAKO, a six-wheeled Matchbox military pod you get to drive around a bunch of different rocky planets, before descending into tunnels where the dungeon hacking begins.

Mass Effect’s environment is hopelessly impoverished compared to the KOTOR games. Where the Knights of the Old Republic games boasted unique planets and different cultures, Mass Effect only has the Citadel, a great space skyscraper that is pretty impressive, but nothing beyond that except for a troubled human colony and a corporate ice world, neither of which are particularly interesting. The first time player might find it exciting to look at Mass Effect’s galaxy map, until he realizes that it only takes you to the same bunch of rocky environments. And like just about every RPG lately, including Oblivion and Fallout 3, Mass Effect seems eager to race you through the main quest, letting you wrap up the game in a short amount of time.

Bioware clearly put a lot of work into the story, and the voice acting is strong as usual, but not much effort has been put into creating a game, rather than a movie. Mass Effect’s cutscenes are fascinating fun to watch, at least the first time around, but the game itself is not nearly as fun to play.

Gothic 3 is justly infamous, released with a ton of bugs, some of which rendered the game basically unplayable, others unimaginably irritation, it’s hard to find reviewers who were willing to look past that to review the game itself. Which is a shame because Gothic 3 takes the Gothic universe to the next level, tossing the player into a vast world with three continents and climates, and even more moral dilemmas working to negotiate the complexities of the Orc occupation of three human lands.

In each version of the series, Gothic has grown, from a unique story told in a human prison colony, to the collapse of the human front against the Orcs, to the Orc occupation itself. And to its credit Gothic 3 is smart enough to create the complexity that takes an RPG above its smash, grow and loot basics. The Orcs in Gothic 3 are not the simple monsters they were in the last two games. And the humans are still just as ugly and conflicted. It’s startling the first time you do a mission for the Orcs, or the first time an Orc has your back. That’s because in Gothic 3 the old alliances are no longer so simple.

There’s a resistance that’s often corrupt or incompetent, raiding and robbing farmers, or hiding in the woods and doing nothing. There are the human mercenaries who have chosen to work for the Orcs. The Hashashin who have come from the desert to hunt slaves. And the clans of the north who are facing their own struggle for survival. And while like most RPG’s, Gothic 3 still boils down into many of the same dungeon hacking quests, they take place in an environment where individual actions feel like they matter. A sharp contrast with the tedious mess of missions in Oblivion.

I could of course go over the many bugs in Gothic 3, and other problems that cost Pirhana Bytes their spot doing Gothic games. But considering that Gothic 4 will go in a Fableish direction with chapters, instead of a great open environment, a fully patched version of Gothic 3 is going to be a classic game that is well worth playing.

It’s not exactly an original question. When Microsoft got on board the console express, one of the first things they did was try to begin drawing away PC game makers into developing for the the XBox, that was actually one of the supposed selling points for developers. Microsoft has an obvious financial incentive to drive gamers from the PC to the XBox 360, because it doesn’t profit from PC games, it does profit from XBox 360 games. Microsoft needs PC gaming only when it releases a new OS to try and sell gamers on the idea that this OS will be good for them. And Microsoft has a history of trying to pull gamers into a new OS by making it exclusive. Microsoft deployed that in a big way with Windows 95 working with developers to create Windows 95 only games. Microsoft has done the same thing with its own games, buying up developers and insuring that they develop only for the XBox 360 and not for the PC. That’s why you won’t find Gears of War 2 or Fable II on the PC. Microsoft however has to walk a fine line between shoving gamers out the door, or destroying the whole idea that the PC is a credible gaming platform.

The blood smear and Manson songs on the Dragon Age trailer and the Bitch, Mass Effect trailer are getting their share of ridicule, and well earned too. Some of the blame can probably be handed to EA, but this kind of marketing becomes the default when Sony rolls out dead goats and EA itself managed to plumb the depths in promoting Dante’s Inferno by creating a contest for sexually harassing booth babes and staging fake protests. Considering the EA corporate culture this really isn’t a shock. EA is run by people who hate games and see only dollar signs. And the marketing department follows that pattern. Think of the boss in the CTRL series. That’s pretty much the stereotype there. But Bioware games are also not the easiest to market. Mass Effect is a sequel to a highly rated but underwhelming game. And Dragon Age tries to go where every game in the last few years has gone before. Both are Bioware’s attempts to recreate their successes with the Dungeons and Dragons and Star Wars IP’s into IP’s that they actually own. And that’s the sort of thing that the people who run EA get excited about, but is a lot harder to get audiences pumped up about. So here’s some Manson and blood spatter, bitch.

One of the smartest things about Mass Effect is how Bioware took its experience working on the Star Wars IP and producing probably the best Star Wars games in a long time, Knights of the Old Republic, and then turned it its own private and equally popular IP with Mass Effect. Mass Effect is of course very obviously Knights of the Old Republic crossed with Halo, a crossbreed that’s especially potent. The entire package was put together in a realistic SciFi universe with the Force dressed up as Biotics (blame George Lucas for opening the door to this sort of thing with midochlorians, now with extra clorox midochlorian bleach), a multispecies alliance and a main character who has been chosen to serve in the elite order of the protectors of the multispecies alliance, a Jed… uh Spectre.

The thing about Mass Effect is that it’s just as good or even better than Knights of the Old Republic, proving that Lucas needs Bioware, more than Bioware needs Lucas. The KOTOR MMORPG being developed by Bioware may change the MMORPG environment, or just drop off unheard. But Mass Effect will keep on going. And while there might not be any more Knights of the Old Republic games unless the MMORPG bombs badly (so for anyone who hates the MMORPG idea and wants another KOTOR RPG, start trolling the Bioware forums now), Mass Effect 2 is moving full steam ahead, hopefully with the enhanced functionality that was left at the door in order to make Mass Effect 1’s ship date.

But probably what’s most exciting about Mass Effect is that it’s a strong outer space game that might be a disguised RPG shooter, but feels like a grand space opera. And that sort of thing is rare. For all the pretense, Halo is nothing more than a shooter. Its story and plot are hopelessly dumb. Mass Effect, like a lot of Bioware work, feels much closer to a good Science Fiction novel. At a time when we’re supposed to be excited over Avatar, a movie that looks like a video game, Mass Effect 2 promises to be another game that looks like a great Science Fiction movie.

Yes Fallout 3 has gotten a mixed response from fans of the Fallout games, somewhat justified and somewhat not. Once the sales figures for Fallout 3 rolled in and Bethesda began selling 5 billion DLC packs for a game that they released unfinished without a real ending or the ability to join the Brotherhood of Steel, Bethesda clearly stopped caring what anyone thinks of them. What follows is Bethesda suing Interplay, which is pretty much Herve these days, for selling copies of the original Fallout games… because you know there’s a risk that someone might actually play them and realize how much better Fallout 1 and 2 were than Fallout 3. After exploiting the Fallout license to basically make Oblivion with guns and mutants, the good people over at Bethesda or ZeniMax or their lawyers want to make sure that nothing interferes with selling 50,000 more DLC packs for Fallout 3, including packs where you turn into a mutant polar bear, learn to ski in the radioactive mountains of Alaska and get a tick infestation. And the thing interfering with them is the original Fallout games, the actual Fallout games. Now what else might have motivated Bethesda’s assault on Interplay, the Fallout trilogy pack has been selling really well. Which raises the possibility of Interplay getting enough capital to develop a Fallout MMO, which would trash Bethseda’s primary lawsuit against Interplay.

With the release of yet another Wolfenstein game that is basically being greeted with a round of “Well it’s all right for a generic First Person Shooter I guess”, maybe it’s time to lay Doom and Wolfenstein, the games with which ID pioneered the first person shooter, to rest. The new Wolfenstein game, like the previous Wolfenstein game, is visually gorgeous but is once again being damned with the nothing innovative label. Just the way Doom 3 did before it. What Doom 3 and the Wolfenstein sequels have in common is that they work on a purely visual level and they give audiences lots of Nazi, Demons from another dimension, killing abilities but not a whole lot else. They’re games with 2009 engines and yet play like they’ve been designed in the time before Half Life or Gears of War. The latest Wolfenstein game makes some effort to borrow elements from Grand Theft Auto, Just Cause and Metal Gear Solid, but they’re only there as window dressing. The thing is that Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were innovative for their time, not just for being 3D first person shooters, but in gameplay. In some ways firing up Wolfenstein 3D and the original Doom and playing them makes for a better gameplay experience than their modern sequels. Maybe it’s time to put the sequels to rest and create something equally solid and innovative for today.

Luckily for us we at Space Ramblings managed to score an interview with legendary and award winning game designer Peter Molyneux about his upcoming game Shoe. Peter Molyneux remains one of the most fascinating game designers out there so we were happy to sit down and chat with him about his shoes or Shoe as it may be.

SR: So Shoe, a deceptively simple name for a great game?

PM: Absolutely. But the simple is also great. Like the shoe.

SR: So Peter, what is Shoe like as a game?

PM: Shoe will change games, it will change gaming, it will change how you even think of games. After playing Shoe you will look at ordinary games and wonder what they are. You will look at game consoles and be unable to connect them with game playing.

SR: So basically Shoe will make you retarded?

PM: Parts of you. Only parts of you. The parts of you that are cynical and unable to connect with a spiritually more aware world.

SR: And that covers 90 percent of me. Okay so in Peter Molyneux’s Shoe, do you play a Shoe, are you on a quest for Shoes? Is your main character called Shoe?

PM: No, no. you are not getting the big picture. Shoe is meant to make you think of shoes in a whole new light. How do you see shoes now?

SR: As well something I wear on my feet.

PM: And that is all wrong. Have you ever thought that shoes could be your friends?

SR: Generally not.

PM: Have you ever connected emotionally with your shoes?

SR: I’m not French, so no.

PM: Peter Molyneux’s Shoe will change all that. It will create an intimate emotional connection between you and your shoes.

SR: So this game will turn people into shoe fetishists?

PM: That is the narrow minded American in you talking. Shoe will elevate your understanding, it will enable you to view your world from the world of a shoe.

SR: Alright, now we’re getting somewhere. Do you play a shoe in the game?

PM: If you choose to, you can play a shoe.

SR: What else can you play?

PM: Anything you want!

SR: Oh come on. Just tell me what the game is about already.

PM: It’s about your soul!

SR: Oh crap.

PM: Have you ever woken in the middle of the night from a strange dream believing that you had no friends left in the world only to discover that your only true friend is your shoe?

SR: Is this how you get all your ideas?

PM: Shoe is about a quest but the quest is already complete before you begin it. You can do anything you want in Shoe.

SR: Can you fly in Shoe?

PM: If you decide to, yes.

SR: Can you scuba dive in Shoe?

PM: If you imagine it, you can imagine doing it.

SR: I see. Can you return Shoe for a refund?

PM: Regrettably not in the real world, but you can imagine returning it for a refund which is even more satisfying.

SR: Well this has been fun, in an awkward and painful sort of way. Peter Molyneux’s Shoe, coming to a GameStop’s discount bin near you. It involves shoes in some way.

PM: And the human soul.

SR: Shut up.

If sequelmania rules the box office and studios are scrambling to remake just about every classic movie ever made while digging up property after property to recycle, right down to classic cartoons (witness the Speed Racer, Scooby Doo, GI Joe, He Man, Thundercats and Transformers movies in just a few years alone), the news is little better from the gaming world as Electronic Arts solidifies its grip on gaming and churns out games based on classic movies like From Russia with Love with Sean Connery or Reservoir Dogs or Godfather, you can’t help but shudder to think of EA picking up Take Two and having them churn out a video game of Waiting for Mr. Goodbar where you stalk women in bars.

Are we really out of ideas or are we just out of executives and producers willing to risk an original idea? The real problem is that at some point executives turned to outright content mining losing any interest in developing new properties and turned the bulk of their attention to churning out sequels, remakes and developments of anything with brand recognition. And the worst part is that the box office has repaid them with billions of dollars. Any movie with brand name recognition tends to do better than it would without it. Even Underdog had a decent opening before it imploded. The two Scooby Doo movies alone would have justified this insanity in purely cash terms.

In gaming, sequels still don’t have the power that they do in marketing movies. While there are plenty of franchises out there, it’s a minor issue compared to what’s going on in the movie industry. And with the added cost of licensing, most game studios are not as eager to dive into the costs of churning out a movie game adaptation willy nilly. And generally speaking those adaptations don’t build franchises or sell well enough to justify the risk.

The whole hue and cry raised over Konami’s Six Days in Fallujah makes me wonder why it’s okay to create war games based in the Vietnam War or WW2, but not a simulation of an actual war going on now. Sure there’s the cry of “Too Soon”, but the idea that making a game about a subject automatically trivializes it, doesn’t hold true anymore. Sure some older people hear game and immediately think of Pong or Atari, but computer and console games today can handle serious subjects in a way similar to that of a movie. Yes there are no shortage of shoot and giggle arcade games out there, but there are also games like Far Cry 2, that are up there with serious dramas in handling issues going on in parts of the world today.

The Vietnam War was if anything uglier than the War in Iraq, but EA could release something like Battlefield Vietnam, which is a long way from being respectful of veterans and is nothing more than a shoots and giggles game developed by Swedes who got all their ideas about the Vietnam War from watching Apocalypse Now and Platoon. There’s every sign that Six Days in Fallujah would have been something quite different from Battlefield Vietnam or the numerous Call of Duty or Medal of Honor WW2 shooters that are nothing more than counterstrike maps using a catastrophic world war as a background. Unfortunately however the game industry remains ridiculously oversensitive to criticism, and Konami folded.

Of course I’m sure a year from now some Swedish or Russian or Croatian developer will put together an Iraq War game that is nothing more than a shooter, and will not be the product of consultation with veterans, and will not actually tell a story about the people who were there. But it will fly by under the radar and no one will care very much. And that is the problem.

Thank you ladies, gentlemen, inbred nobility and assorted other creatures,

The Empire’s situation is very grave indeed. The entire continent is overrun by freakishly huge rats and oddly aggressive crabs. Not only is the Emperor dead, but the population of Cyrodil appears to have dwindled to about several hundred people, of which about ten percent are actually Bandits, Daedra worshipers and members of the Dark Brotherhood or talking upright walking cats.

This is a serious situation as we cannot possibly hope to maintain any kind of functioning Imperial capital with so few people. Our average city barely has two dozen people, half of whom are guards. It’s hard to tell what makes our cities into cities rather than towns or villages, except our willingness to be deluded into thinking that a high wall and a big cathedral surrounding a dozen houses and four shops is somehow a city rather than a tiny village. Meanwhile what little villages we have left have turned into underground people who worship primordial evil beings, which is just bad for everyone.

Recently it has also been brought to my attention that every single fort on Cyrodil is deserted and filled with the undead. With only one city standing between Morrowind and the Imperial City, Morrowind could easily overrun us in a matter of days, if they only had more than a thousand or so people themselves to spare for an invasion.

This population shortage also puts Cyrodil’s traditional native industries, such as selling looted weapons, paying ridiculous prices for pieces of flowers that can be easily picked and hunting through ghost and skeleton filled temples, at great risk. Additionally Cyrodil no longer has any mines, only derelict mines.

At this point I’m not even sure why Oblivion is bothering to invade us, they could probably just wait a generation for us to die off on our own, since we don’t actually have any children and aside from Vampires and Orcs, we consist of species that cannot and should not reproduce together.

Nevertheless I would like to commend those who keep the Arena matches going, diminishing what little population we have, particularly the part of it that can actually hold a sword. Also to the inventor of Ardorks’ Unremovable Underwear which is responsible for our population problem and lack of children, your attempt to preserve morality may have doomed us all, but it was still a noble gesture.

Thank you all, and I’m moving to High Rock.

What if you remade Grand Theft Auto starring the Hulk? That’s the not so secret premise of The Incredible Hulk game. A Sandbox game with Wanted levels, selective missions and lots of easter eggs to find scattered around the Marvel Universe version of Manhattan, The Incredible Hulk game is a hybrid between a platformer and Grand Theft Auto, incorporating many of the latter’s gameplay features. The problem is that the game borrows both the good and the bad, giving you a large city to play with and saddles you with boring missions, some of which require you to escort or protect whiny and annoying characters and their lab equipment all within a narrow time limit. And for any game designers taking notes, that’s the difference between imitating Grand Theft Auto and learning the lessons of Grand Theft Auto.

Despite many of the annoying missions, The Incredible Hulk still boasts a ridiculously fun concept, giving you a somewhat smaller version of Manhattan to play with. Climb the Empire State, King Kong style or tear off a lampost and swing it around as a club while battling a giant 10 story robot sent by the evil Paragon corporation. Fight City Hall by smashing it to pieces, every building is destructible, or race through Central Park leaping over the trees.

But like most sandbox games, there’s only so much freedom you can take before you get bored, and while The Incredible Hulk offers an incredible setting, it doesn’t do very much with it. The missions run the gamut from the redundant to the frustrating and miss the point of what the Hulk is all about, which isn’t taking cell phone calls and escorting scientists around a map. The in game voice narration from Ed Norton doesn’t help by reminding you that is a game tie in with a movie that was equally clueless about the Hulk and its audience.

Like most movie tie in games, you shouldn’t go in expecting too much from The Incredible Hulk. The graphics are shockingly bland and crude. The city, despite featuring both real New York City and imaginary Marvel universe landmarks from the Apollo Theater to the Daily Bugle, is generic. But that doesn’t mean the game still isn’t fun as long as you don’t expect it to offer much beyond the sandbox play. And once you’ve exhausted the fun of jumping off the Chrysler Building or navigating Manhattan by rooftops while dodging armored troopers hunting for you, you’ve also exhausted everything worthwhile about the game.

Call it the console effect. The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind was a deep, rich and complex game. The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion had only one real calling card, graphics. Its shiny system destroying upgrade requiring graphics were all that Oblivion had on top. Oh sure Bethesda talked a good game about Radiant AI but the average character in Oblivion looked like a mannequin, was dumb as a post and extremely annoying too. Yes he or she might get around more, but having 200+ characters walking around the towns of Cyrodil was small compensation for how awfully stupid they were.

Oblivion was arguably the console version of Morrowind, dumbed down and backed by shiny graphics with an emphasis on combat and determined to hold the hand of even the biggest idiot so there could never be any confusion. But the irony is that despite its age Morrowind is still a better looking game than Oblivion. Morrowind may not have Oblivion’s Bloom or HDR but it did have a restrained color palette that brought a real beauty to the landscape, the soft pale bluegreen lighting inside homes, the tan stone and most strikingly it had the architecture and the concepts, giant bugs that carried you between cities, a city composed of sections floating on the water and slum fishing villages.

Where Morrowind felt like a trip to an exotic land, Oblivion feels like the poor man’s imitation Rome that is with an out of control color palette and scale substituting for grandeur. Morrowind had a complex clash of cultures. Oblivion has a jumble of scattered peoples in generic towns with no real story to it all, except fighting the usual hell dimension types. Morrowind played with politics, but Oblivion just throws demons at you. The one thing Oblivion succeeds at is at designing and modeling vegetation but that is a poor triumph compared to the richness and diversity of Morrowind’s offerings.

As I began installing GTA IV for PC it was hard to tell if I was installing a new game or a new operating system. Naively I thought I had bought and was installing a game, instead of a software suite, but this is how Redmond and Rockstar are playing it. Buy the game, which is already huge, and get a ton of bloatware as a bonus. Between installing Rockstar Social Club, installing the whole Games for Windows infrastructure, both of which expect you to create accounts with them, and their various updates, installing GTA IV for PC was a lot more like installing Microsoft Office than installing a game.

The Microsoft vision, which Rockstar seems to share, is that the way to keep PC gaming competitive, is to make it more like XBox with a whole lot of social networking. The thing is many people actually buy a game in order to play the game, and don’t want to be constantly badgered to sign into another service, even during the game itself. By the time the agonizing neverending installation was done, there were more installations to do. And by the time they were done, there were still more prompts. And when the game crashed 5 minutes later after I had driven by Coney Island and was on my way somewhere in the game world equivalent of Park Slope, and the game bluescreened on me, the first thing I saw on restart was a prompt to sign in to Rockstar Social Club. It’s almost like instead of installing a game, I joined a cult.

(By the way I haven’t seen a blue screen crash in like forever on Windows XP. So thanks Rockstar.)

And the presents just keep on coming, since some people are experiencing a bug in Rockstar Social Club which uses up processing capacity. I quickly unchecked Run When Windows Starts on the Rockstar tray icon, but plenty of players won’t know to do that. And why in the world would you add a program that runs all the time to a game you only play some of the time? I thought that kind of insanity went out even in the EA ranks in the late 90’s. Besides GTA VI, Rockstar doesn’t exactly have that many games people are busy playing. I don’t think that many PC players have Bully installed, which leaves an entire infrastructure dedicated to nothing but GTA IV that runs non-stop unless you disable it.

In the meantime, as is becoming common these days on the PC, the user community is stepping in to help. Again, thanks Rockstar. I can really see the extra time to make that PC port paid off.

Liveblogging things is very popular (obnoxious) now and more and more reporters are jumping on board by liveblogging everything from movies to funerals to movie funerals. This interesting (annoying) trend has caused the attention of editors (clueless nitwits) and publishers (desperate clueless nitwits) eager to provide a new form of content (desperate to keep the kids from going somewhere else) for the reading public (old people).

That’s why we’ve decided to do you a service (disservice) by liveblogging Oblivion.

Just began playing… oh man Patrick Stewart got really fat 12:29 PM March 11, 2008 from web

Okay so the Emperor is running for his life, naturally he wants to stay and chat with a condemned prisoner 12:33 PM March 11, 2008 from web

Giant rats, why is it always giant rats? Why can’t it be giant hamsters or giant hedgehogs. Giant hedgehogs would be so much scarier. 12:43 PM March 11, 2008 from web

Another stupid quest. Great. Does anyone in Cyrodil even have jobs or just quests? 12:42 PM March 11, 2008 from web

A side effect of the Daedra invasion is that everyone got fat making their faces look like dough. I thought it was just Patrick Stewart. Let’s call it a plague, or just download the Natural Faces mod. 12:53 PM March 11, 2008 from web

Okay so now the Emperor’s bastard monk son will lead the Empire even though his only experience is being a monk. I’m not seeing a good outcome here. 12:55 PM March 11, 2008 from web

Stop telling me how good I am with a blade. I never even promised to call you. 1:05 AM March 11, 2008 from web

Would it really be wrong if I just hijacked one of these ships to Morrowind in search of a better game? 1:12 AM March 11, 2008 from web

Yes I know I’m good with a blade. Here’s a demonstration. Yes I will resist arrest. 1:18 AM March 11, 2008 from web

Okay so I’m a wanted fugitive and a vampire but on the up side I get to kill everyone who says something stupid to me, which in this game is everyone. Radiant AI, take this! 1:23 AM March 11, 2008 from web

That’s right, the Emperor is dead. And you’re next! 1:35 AM March 11, 2008 from web

So when is GTA IV coming out for PC anyway? 1:41 AM March 11, 2008 from web

So you’re playing your way along through Fallout 3, exploring the Wasteland and doing lots of side quests, until you suddenly notice that shooting a Raider or unlocking a safe no longer produces that cha-ching sound. That’s right, you’ve hit that fantastic Level 20 cap, making much of the rest of the game pointless. Sure you can use Advlevel to artificially advanced, download a Mod with enough warnings about crashing the game to make even a dedicated overclocker think twice or keep constantly reverting levels. All of these solutions though are awkward and ruin the natural feel of advancing through Fallout 3.

Fallout 1 had a level cap at 21, Fallout 2 had no level cap at all. Fallout 3, which is a good deal larger than Fallout 1, has a level cap of 20. Or to put it another way, Bethesda created a sandbox game and then didn’t want anyone to keep on playing it, because it’s not as if Level 21 is the cutoff point at which you become superhuman or the point by which most players would have done most of the game. Unless you’re a very conservative player who doesn’t get into combat much and avoids XP giving situations, but you do plenty of the side quests and explore around, you will get the Level cap long before you’re even halfway through the game. I got it with only 16 quests completed. Not exactly sandbox friendly gaming there.

So why have the level cap at all? Bethesda’s planned release of 3 add on packs, answers that questions. Since Fallout 3 clearly does support levels beyond 20, the cap exists to keep the player down until he or she ponies up the money for the new packs. The first two packs are gimmick packs, recreate the Battle of Anchorage, which apparently would take you back to the war itself and to Pittsburgh for a battle with the raiders, meh. But the third one is equivalent to Oblivion’s Knights of the Nine, and will let you continue your quest in the Wasteland, deal with the Enclave once and for all, and oh yes, join the Brotherhood of Steel. All things that you of course can’t do in Fallout 3.

Like Oblivion, Fallout 3 suffers from a fairly short main quest that’s easy enough to finish, which is why smart players detour a lot and explore the gameworld. Fallout 3’s main quest is even shorter than Oblivion’s and while Oblivion had many problems, a deliberately crippled game wasn’t one of them. It is a major problem for Fallout 3, which through the level 20 cap cripples the game for extended play, and has a lot of locations, but cuts the overall game short in order to accommodate a future expansion. I have nothing against Bethesda making more money with add on packs, but those packs should not come at the expense of the main game itself.

It is a real shame because the Knights of the Old Republic series were about the only Star Wars games worth playing, particularly when it comes to anything in the RPG category, smartly written and conceived by Bioware and Obsidian, they were landmark games that made Star Wars worthwhile a universe away from where George Lucas was relentlessly processing what was left of the Star Wars people knew into flavored yogurt for the mildly retarded tween market.

But money talks. Had Galaxies not been a whomping disaster, there might be a Kotor 3. Instead with Galaxies turning out at best mediocre, the search for a Star Wars MMORPG required a game concept that would be Star Wars but without competing with Galaxies. That made Knights of the Old Republic the inevitable answer and now it’s official, there will be a KOTOR MMORPG but no KOTOR 3.

Money talks and no shortage of franchises have taken a look at the mountain of money from World of Warcraft and thought some of it should belong to them. Interplay wanted a Fallout MMORPG instead of Fallout 3. Luckily we will finally get a Fallout 3, not another MMORPG. KOTOR wasn’t so lucky and I won’t be playing it. I prefer stories and first person adventures to spending time storming castles with Leeroy Jenkins and a horde of 12 year olds, but I’m sure it will be a good game within the limitations of the MMORPG, which is a lot like saying that Lord of the Rings would be great adapted to within the limitations of a daily newspaper comic strip.

You know that it’s a bad idea for the New York Times to be doing video game reviews when its reviews dedicate several paragraphs to Edward Said, and none to reviewing the actual game. Case in point, Seth Schiesel of the New York Times who decided the New York Times hired him to discuss his views of Orientalism instead of reviewing video games so people could decide whether to buy them or not. I guess that’s his strategy to get noticed or fired by his bosses, so he can do more serious journalism.

And yet I have never been fully comfortable approaching the Prince of Persia games simply as a diversion, and it has been difficult over the years

I think like Seth Schiesel we’ve all found it difficult to just approach a series of platformers about some sort of magical stuff going on in an imaginary kingdom as just a diversion. We’ve all plumbed the deep hidden meanings inside it. Oh wait we didn’t. Because we’re sane people.

What are we to make of a “Prince of Persia” who talks and behaves like a 17-year-old American mall rat?

Clearly he’s not in his cultural context, whatever that may be when dealing with an imaginary character from a magical kingdom threatened by a wizard. Of course thanks to American pop culture, teenagers the world over actually talk and behave like 17 year old American mall rats. Of course Ubisoft is a French company, making this cultural analysis even more fun. Also no one cares.

A “Prince of Persia” with blue eyes, fully Anglicized facial features and what looks like a tan he picked up on spring break?

Blue eyes do exist in the Middle East, and Seth Schiesel seems to be replaying his own prejudices about what people from Persia look like. Here’s a hint. not all of them look like Ahmadinejad. Iran consists of a bunch of different peoples and looks will vary by region. Also Prince of Persia is set in a magical kingdom with wizards and princesses, not in the Persia we know.

In fairness, the new Prince of Persia does not claim any historical or cultural authenticity; the game is set in a fantastic magical realm rather than in a rendition of any real place. But does that absolve the game of any responsibility?

Responsibility for what? To depict accurately the inhabitants of a place Seth Schiesel just admitted it doesn’t depict? Has Seth Schiesel been drinking too much over the holidays?

I think not. I played the original Prince of Persia in 1990, and at the time I did not really know how to express my unease.

I think we just uncovered the reason why Seth Schiesel got beat up every day at school. He was the kid who played a videogame and then felt unease over its historical inaccuracy.

One year later I read the seminal work of the scholar Edward Said, “Orientalism.” A controversial and influential academic figure, Mr. Said contended that the West had spent centuries romanticizing and fetishizing the cultures and peoples of Islam as a tool of the West’s own political and military hegemony.

Here’s a fun fact, Edward Said was kind of a fraud. Also Prince of Persia has nothing to do with Islam. Persia was a pre-Islamic empire. Also it’s a damn video game that has magic in it. Prince of Persia has a vaguely magical middle eastern setting, other video games from Ubisoft are set in space and the far distant future. As silly as Edward Said’s views were, he didn’t go around analyzing video games. He left that to muppets like Seth Schiesel who are busy trying to impress their bosses by not doing their jobs reviewing video games, and trying to do Michiko Katakuni’s job instead.

Many Americans have little understanding of the difference between Persia and the Arab world.

Neither does Seth Schiesel since he assumes they can’t have blue eyes. Not that this is a difference between Persia and the Arab world. It’s just a stereotype held by Seth.

Also what do the differences between Persia and the Arab world have to do with this topic.

Prince of Persia does not try to grapple with these issues. But by mere fact of its name and Middle Eastern trappings, the game invokes and raises them.

No it doesn’t.

Yes, there is danger and potential futility in taking works of mass fare too seriously.

Such as the danger of getting fired for not doing your job, and submitting your freshman Middle Eastern Studies composition instead of a video game review.

Yet there is also danger in employing cultural symbols of such power so blithely, with such a willful disregard for reality.

You mean the reality of a game set in an imaginary kingdom with magic and people who can shoot fireballs from their hands? Clearly such willful disregard for reality can have horrible consequences.

Prince of Persia is a great game, but simply being a video game is no longer sufficient to earn a pass from being held to account for shaping the perceptions and attitudes of its players. Not anymore.

Shaping the perceptions and attitudes of its players? Paging Jack Thompson.

Seth Schiesel is a terrible game reviewer, and simply cloaking that behind a politically correct diatribe about a people he’s clearly ignorant of, in order to condemn a video game set in an imaginary place, is no longer sufficient to earn a pass from being held to account for confusing a video game review with a chance to remind people that he read three pages of Orientalism and now wants to tell you about it.

GTA IV is being widely praised as the best game of the year if not the century or the millennium or the last trillion years, but it doesn’t really change the fact that GTA IV is basically GTA III with better graphics, a more complex cinematic story and a lot of gimmicks and minigames. Which of course raises the question, where can GTA V go from here?

It’s not a complete urgent question. After the DLC content is rolled out, Rockstar will probably move on to GTA IV Vice City or/and GTA IV San Andreas. But sooner or later the problem will come up again. And it’s a double edged problem. On the one hand the GTA series is innovative enough that it breeds imitators. On the other hand the gameplay basically remains the same across the GTA 3 games and GTA 4, and the gameplay just isn’t all that good, once you subtract all the added elements and the sandbox itself.

Both edges of the problem contributed to developing GTA 4. GTA 3’s success helped spawn any number of mob games, from Mafia to the Godfather game launch. So by San Andreas, Rockstar moved on from the mob centered story in GTA 3 and Vice City, to a more urban gangsta story in San Andreas. But then you had Saints Row and 25 to Life. When Rockstar rolled out GTA IV starring Nico Bellic, an Eastern European immigrant with an odd accent, they thought that finally they had a premise that nobody was going to imitate too quickly.

But the second edge of the problem is that GTA 4 isn’t really a better game than GTA 3, it’s just shinier, more cinematic, has better graphics and a lot of minigames, social elements, tv shows, internet, more developed radio stations and integration with the whole Rockstar Social Club setup. And the insecurity behind that for Rockstar is clear, if they can’t genuinely improve GTA 3’s gameplay, they can distract you from it. Hey look, there’s an arcade game, and a cell phone, and entire scripted TV shows you can watch. But like a skyscraper when you look at it the right way, what you see is a developer trying to get you not to notice how little the game has really changed.

But if not enough players have noticed that yet, by GTA 5 the problem will be much more acute. And how many more minigames, distractions and gimmicks will Rockstar have to shove in, to distract players from the fact that they’re basically playing the same game they were playing 3 years ago, and that GTA V is basically GTA IV as GTA IV was GTA III.