Hot rumor this week is one Gamespot reviewer was fired because of his review of the less then stellar Kane and Lynch: Dead Men causing a ruckus with Eidos. The Gamespot site has advertising for K&L all over and well, the reviewer of the game didn't particularly care for it. If this is indeed true, I must say it's a pretty sad state of affairs. There are a few reasons I've never done advertising on Gaming Nexus and this is one of them. If I don't like the game, I'm going to say it and I'm not going too have an advertiser tell me to take action on a reviewer because their opinion of the game doesn't match yours. I know the folks at Gamespot do what they do as a living and they rely on advertising dollars to keep their site and staff paid but to release someone, if this is true, over a review because some company got their panties all up in a bunch is pretty sad and wrong.

Meebo.com (a web version of Trillian) recently rolled out a set of online games that you can play against other people using meebo.  John and I played a bit of Connect4 today and here's the brief chat log review of the game:

John: This sucks
Charles: graphics suck
John: the 3d is not realstic
Charles: for fans fo the genre only
John: not worth the money
Charles: free is still too much
John: gameplay is repetitive
Charles: lacks tactical elements...
John: no sixaxis controls
Charles: nothing that seperates it from the back
John: woulda been fun 30 years ago
Charles: Portal is more engaging,
Charles: bah
Meebo Message: John has left Connect 4
John: my vista box only ran 15 fps with the settings on high
Charles: the story and writing are terrible
John: i concede

Make no mistake about it. Crysis is absolutely gorgeous. The game's a great achievement for Crytek in pushing the PC as even the best systems today have trouble handling the game in all it's glory at high resolutions. While there are a small variety of enemies for a sci-fi themed game, the AI does do some pretty cool stuff. The water effects are, in my opinion, better than BioShock's and that's saying something. I just experienced my first crash after 5 hours of playing though so let's hope that's a rare occurrence. You have to love a game for being able to throw chickens at your enemies.

And there's no better one than Reggie Fils-Aime. Here's one of his latest quotes about the Wii's games..

One of my fondest memories was playing with the Amiga and all the great games that it had. I was a C64 junkie and the Amiga offered some incredible power compared to the old computer. The TV Sports series and most of the stuff from Cinemaware stole many of my childhood hours. Well I stumbled onto a site with many of those games recorded and available for you to watch whenever you want. I know what I'll be doing when I get home from work now.

Still an hour to go before kickoff for the mere formality of beating the golden pants of off that team up north to earn an outright Big-10 Championship and a trip to the Rose Bowl (argh, have to buy another sweatshirt...), so I'm working on the next title in my backlog of reviews: Alpha Prime.  Other than experiencing such severe framerate issues whenever the action heats up that I was prompted me to create YATLA (Yet Another Three Letter Acronym) for DBF (Death By Framerate), it's been fun.  This morning I was reminded of why my Dad always told me to stay in school so I wouldn't end up schlepping boxes in a warehouse:




I had to stack these guys up in order to get to the catwalk that leads to the next room.  Frankly, killing a room full of semi-sentient robots would have been easier.

Now I'm stuck in a situation where I need to jump into a moving crane to get across an open space of floor, but every time I jump into the thing, it breaks and jams in place.  Why, WHY can't these evil villains that create these mega-super-hideouts just buy quality equipment for once??

Patient, mindful exploration.  That's what I'm about.  While there are many others, my point-of-entry into a video game is in exploring the virtual construct.  No, I don't explore in order to accumulate and obsess over number-crunching armor and weapons stats, and I don't explore for the sake of breaking the game and seeing what the developers let slip through the cracks.  But there's an inherent need in me as a player to completely engage my ocular senses within a game world ... and to simply see all that I can see.  If the developers want to mercilessly wrap me around their little finger, they only need to throw in some hidden items to collect, and the completionist switch in my brain is also engaged. 

Assassin's Creed is indeed satiating my bent for exploration.  The Crusader-era re-creations of the Holy Land will drop your jaw.  The urban constructs are pieced together with artfully-restrained hands.  The surroundings achieve a hallowed magnificence, or a subdued pallor, all with meticulous attention to detail. 

And as I take Altair, the protagonist, on, around, and above those hobbled streets, the meandering populace is not always indifferent to my presence.  The crowd forms into a collective character in and of itself, putting the towns' heroes and villains on a pedestal, or burying them behind blurred, obscure masks.  The wealth of the robes or the wrinkles in the rags the people wear embellish the surroundings, telling the people's stories in thread counts rather than word counts.

And free-walking 10, 20, and 30 feet above everyone's head in Masyaf (where the Assassins are headquartered) is every bit as thrilling as swinging Peter Parker through Spider-Man 3's Manhattan Island.  Exploring the mechanics of Altair's fluidity matches the impressively-calculated movements of a Sam Fisher inching through a Splinter Cell.  And pulling off a high-speed evasion or blending seamlessly with the local denizens is worth its weight in Hitman gold.
And this is just tip of the iceberg stuff.  Doubtless there's plenty more in store.  But if it's patient, mindful exploration that gets you through the door of a game, then Assassin's Creed has got your ticket in.

... since the year my mother-in-law decided to supplement the carbon-neutral free-range solar-powered turkey that she buys at Wild Oats with some mushrooms she found growing in the back yard. 

Yes, I'm still working through FEAR Perseus Mandate, having discovered God mode to get me past that humongous mech-y guy from last night. 

Who knew, though, that there are actually atheist monsters that don't believe in God (mode)?  Well, there are.  My new motto: "Ghost mode, for those days when God mode just ain't getting it done."

So, I just went through something like six identical rooms just before I came to this one:



I'm finding myself very reluctant to open the door, my biggest fear being that some mutated Sixth Sense kid is going to be down there, and he's going to be able to see me. 

Personally Dave, I think you are just getting old and your skills are declining. But that's just me :)

So I'm playing the game and while it's still fun a scary thought came through my head. With the popularity of the game, how long before we see multiple spin-offs for the game? I mean the gameplay can only be changed so much and it looks like we're nearing the peak of how the game's going to play. Remember how popular DDR was? Well what happened to that series? We got DDR Remix, DDR Disney, DDR Electric Boogaloo Edition, DDR Barbie's House Party, DDR RRoD, and so on.  We already got Rock the 80's on the PS2. Why do I get the feeling a Guitar Hero game with Jem or Barbie or Mickey is just around the corner?