Tea Leaves

Y’know, I pretty much stay awake until 1 or 2 am every night of the year. Every single night. But something about the hype and circumstance surrounding New Years’ Eve makes me want to go to sleep at 7:30.

Bah, humbug.

As is traditional at this time of year, our brain capacity has been severely limited by a all the blood rushing to our stomachs. I can’t really remember what I was doing a week ago, much less a year ago. Still, here are a few thoughts that I can manage to locate in the fog.

Pittsburgh Food Events of the Year

The beginning of this year saw the sad loss of one of the iconic food locations in Pittsburgh. But, on the bright side, we’ve gained a lot too. First, there was the addition of the Penn Avenue Fish Company to the Strip. Then, the latter part of the year saw two new places open that we can only hope will endure: Mio Kitchen and Legume. These two places instantly join my list of local favorites. In addition, a small miracle has happened over at the Post Gazette in that they appear to have finally hired a restaurant critic, one China Millman, who is worth reading, and not only because she agrees with me all the time.

Game System Secret Shame of the Year

So here is the thing. Nintendo is kicking ass. They own the world. The DS and the Wii are selling at PS2-like rates. But, when push comes to shove what do I spend most of my time playing? PSP and PS2 games. While I respect and acknowledge the brilliance and care that goes into the Nintendo titles, they just don’t connect with me, especially on the DS. Instead, I find myself on the couch with Disgaea or MLB 07, happily poking away at my d-pad and face buttons, instead of whatever innovative yet crappy control scheme Nintendo has dreamed up. I always knew I was a bad person for not liking Zelda… but it turns out it’s all much worse than I had let on.

Sports Convergence of the Year

Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics. Who would have imagined it.

Smug Assholes of the Year

The 1972 Miami Dolphins. Hey! Did you know they were the last team to go undefeated in the NFL?

Technological Non-Convergence of the Year

Broadcast television continued its slow slide towards terminal crappiness. It’s difficult for me to imagine a more byzantine, overengineered, complex maze of interdependent customer service nightmares than setting up a modern television. And it just gets worse every year.

Maybe the Best Games I Played of the Year

In order of confidence: Portal, Final Fantasy 12, Bioshock, Ratchet and Clank Future, Mario Galaxy, Rock Band, Call of Duty 4, Disgaea PSP. Yes I know FF12 was from last year. I played it this year.

Most Infuriating Media Story of the Year

The “coverage” of the so-called “Presidential” “Campaign”. This has gotten so bad that I turn the radio off the instant I hear any of the normal NPR political reporters come on. I don’t understand who they think gives a shit about this now, but they are pretty sure about it. Personally, I think we should get rid of the entire primary system and go back to smoke-filled rooms. At least then I don’t have to hear about it until the conventions.

Kitchen Appliance of the Year

I got a toaster for Christmas. It has a dial, one button, and a lever on it. You push the lever, it makes toast. It replaces a ridiculous “toaster oven” which, I’m sure, was really good at something, but took ten minutes to make a under-toasted piece of crap that you then could not retrieve from its innards without burning the tops of your hands.

Yes, this is even more exciting than the coffee machine.

Best Things I Learned How To Cook this Year

A decent cappuccino, and that tomato sauce.

Interweb Miracle of the Year

Karen and I bought a drum kit for a certain small child this Christmas. We then found ourselves in our living room with three or four dozen drum kit parts strewn on the floor and no idea how they were supposed to fit together. And no manual. The kit came with no instructions.

So to the nets we went, and in a true Christmas miracle, we found a video on YouTube that explained everything. Thank you Aaron Swearingen at World Music Supply, whoever you are. Truly this is a wonderous age in which to be alive.

At my request, my co-writer and game pusher peterb used his Gamefly powers to obtain Assassin’s Creed for the Xbox 360 the other week. I’ve spent a couple of weeks playing it in between my long sessions of getting repeatedly shot in the head playing Call of Duty 4. To say that Assassin’s Creed is a mixed bag does not really do the game justice. After all, the game has far loftier goals than usual. So, I can’t say that my impressions of the game are merely mixed. No, Assassin’s Creed is more like an exquisitely crafted ceramic dish that someone has covered with dog shit. It is by far the most finely crafted crappy game I’ve played.

First the good stuff. Everything about the game is big. The areas are huge and seamless. You can spend a lot of time in the game climbing up on high towers and looking down at the city or forest below you, and then set off and walk there. These large areas are filled with hundreds of NPCs, both friendly and hostile. Your goal as the main character is the game is to walk through these cities, among these people and complete a set of assassinations to restore your status in the order of the Assassins. In this capacity you have dozens of bad-ass abilities that encompass combat, stealth, thievery, eavesdropping and running, jumping, and climbing over anything that doesn’t move.

By far the best part of the game is running around the cities and climbing on things. Your little puppet runs up walls, grabs on to the tiniest crevices like Spiderman in a white robe. When you get to the top you are treated to a sweeping spinning panoramic shot of everything around you. You can just sit and stare at it all and marvel at the work of hundreds of designers, artists, 3-d modelers, motion capture technicians and animation experts. They have all done their work impeccably. Everything from design and rendering of the cities to the animation of the main character are as completely realized as anything I’ve seen in a video game. And this fact is most clear when you are sitting at the top of one of these eagle-eye viewpoints. Then you can hit a few buttons on the controller and dive head first into a conveniently placed pile of straw.

At this point, the part of your consciousness responsible for suspension of disbelief has a little spasm, and that’s not the last time this will happen. Over and over again Assassin’s Creed makes you want to bury yourself in its premise, only to forcibly tear you out again by reminding you that you are playing an Ubisoft stealth game. Here the checklist:

1. Only 5 NPCs with only 4 lines of dialog each. Here they replaced “I must be seeing things in the shadows!” with “Die! Infidel!”.

2. Complicated context sensitive controls that often leave you jumping off of a wall instead of continuing to climb upwards. I think this is more my problem than the game’s problem though.

3. Although the animations for “counter-attack” kills and assassinations are fantastic, the sword-play still feels a bit disconnected and sloppy to me. I probably just suck.

4. Stupid A.I. Guards will go into a red alert if you walk past them at the wrong speed. But, you can walk down the street and leave a trail of beggar corpses and no one bats an eye. This is a great feature beause it means you get to watch the fantastic assassination animation over and over again.

5. Finally, there is the Metal Gear Solid cardboard box gambit. Given that your stealth cover can be broken just by walking past the wrong person at the wrong speed, you have to have a way to reset the perceptual state of the guards. In Assassin’s Creed you do this by climbing up on the roof of a building and jumping into a cardboard box cabana or a handy pile of straw, at which time everything resets.

Fans of Metal Gear will recognize this mechanic as a time honored way of surviving an alarm state when guiding Solid Snake through an enemy military installation.

I find this gambit more annoying in Creed than in the Metal Gear games because Ubisoft wants you to take the setting and premise of the game seriously, whereas I don’t think anyone on Earth really cares if you believe what is going on in the Metal Gear games.

For me, these problems make performing the core missions of the game almost the opposite of fun. Each of the missions involves some minimum amount of “investigation” time, by which they actually mean a lot of busywork that isn’t climbing cool buildings. Then you track down the victim, watch a long cut scene, put a knife in him, watch another long cut scene, and then if you weren’t lucky you get chased by a dozen guards screaming “You won’t get away from me!” or “You can’t run forever!” or “Die! Infidel!” for about 15 minutes until you finally manage to jump into a cardboard box.

I’d rather just walk around the cities and stealth-assassinate all those annoying beggars who are constantly asking me for “Just one more coin!?!?!?”. But you have to do the missions to open up more world to run around in. Worse, all the new areas are just like the old areas anyway, and they are filled with the same 5 NPCs with the same 4 lines of dialog. The overall effect is to convince present you with a dead world populatd by zombies in which there is nothing at all interesting to do.

Trying to fight my way through this, I managed to complete three or four missions and convince myself that I was having an OK time. I was trying to give Ubisoft credit for at least trying something new. Then I ran into a guy who wanted me to collect 20 widgets in three minutes in order to get to the next plot point. I took one shot at it, but ran into a guard the wrong way and had half the city chasing me screaming one of three lines of dialog. At this point, I turned the Xbox off and put the disk back in the Gamefly envelope.

I think the Penny Arcade defense of this game had it right. If you buy this game and play it once a week for a couple of hours and get one or two tasks done per session, I think the game would be enjoyable. In small doses over a long period of time, the gaping holes in the game’s world are not as obvious because you shield yourself from all of the crippling repetition. Unfortunately, this means I’ll never get to the end of this game. First, I feel like I should give the Gamefly disk back to peterb in a reasonable amount of time, so I can’t just set the game on the shelf and get back to it once in a while. Second, even if I were to pick up a cheap copy of the game later, some other shiny distraction will inevitably keep my from actually playing the game. It will join the pile on that high shelf of games I tell myself I will play, but which I should really sell on Ebay.

As much as I want to enjoy the result of what was obviously thousands of hours hard work by hundreds of people, there just isn’t enough there to keep me going. This makes me sad, so I guess I’ll go get shot in the head some more to make me feel better.

I’ve made no secret of my love for Bay 12 Games’ Dwarf Fortress. I’ve returned to it this holiday season only to find there’s been a significant change: the game is now 3D.

It’s still a roguelike, mind you. But the environments now encompass a huge number of z-levels, which you can step through with the < and > keys.

I’m of two minds about this development. On the positive side, it brings a lot of freshness and variety to the game, and opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, particularly with respect to moving water and magma about. On the other hand, the user interface of Dwarf Fortress was already fairly punishingly bad, and this isn’t helping.

Perhaps a more significant change is that sites are more varied now. In previous versions of the game, every mountain was (essentially) guaranteed to have an underground river, a chasm, and a magma river. Now, you have a lot more flexibility. You can build your settlement on a mountain, or the plains (digging underneath the surface, naturally), or a glacier, or on the shore. It’s entirely possible to choose a site with no magma (or, as I have discovered in my current game, no unfrozen running water. Talk about a challenge).

For added niftiness, someone has created a 3D visualizer for Dwarf Fortress maps.

I’m currently playing it on my Mac via codeweavers’ CrossOver, and it works great. The author of the game, Tarn Adams, is currently trying to get it working under MacOS X natively. I can’t wait.

Karl Hendricks, a Pittsburgh indie-rock local legend, released an EP in the early 90’s called I Hate This Party which perfectly encapsulated teen angst, the feeling of simply not understanding the things that other people like to do, and the shame that can sometime go along with it.

I hate this party.
I hate all your friends.
I hate feeling stupid.
I always do in the end.

This, not to put too fine a point on it, is how I feel when people talk about what a superlatively awesome time they are having playing Popcap’s pachinko-on-crack game Peggle.

Peggle — which, along with its disturbingly named stablemate Chuzzle was just released for MacOS X– is a game that combines simple game mechanics with beautiful, compelling production values. This is par for the PopCap course: everything they release has a certain polish, a certain sheen that shows a fanatical attention to detail. That’s a good thing.

The graphic and sound design sensibility in Peggle closely mirrors that of Bookworm Adventures, a game I loved to the point of obsession. The game itself is simple and easy to understand: it is Pachinko merged with Breakout. You shoot balls into a field full of pegs. The ball bounces amongst the pegs, which earns points. After each ball falls off the bottom of the playfield, the pegs that it hit disappear. Clear all of the pegs from the board and you advance to the next level; use up all your chances, and the game ends.

Here’s a video demonstrating some of the gameplay:

Popcap’s attention to detail and production values has been rewarded. Everyone loves Peggle. Everyone. You love Peggle. Lorien loves Peggle. For crying out loud, even Yahtzee loves Peggle. Everyone in the entire world loves Peggle and, probably, wants to go to the prom with it. Everyone except me.

Why don’t I love Peggle? My theory is: I am a bad, bad person.

Peggle

Well, perhaps there’s another reason. Peggle is a game of chance. Once you’ve mastered the basic rules of “where should I send the first shot,” whether you win a given board or not is largely a question of luck. This means that I don’t always win. As we’ve already established, I’m the sort of player who would rather reload a poorly designed strategy game rather than accept the permanent loss of a character who has much importance as a piece of moldy cheese. So Peggle makes me feel inadequate, meaning that because I can’t predict where a ball is going to carom after hitting 30 bumpers, I feel like a moron. In other words, to channel the spirit of the girl you had a crush on in 8th grade: “Oh, Peggle, it’s not you, it’s me.” The only modification to Peggle’s design that would make me truly happy would be if I could replace the yawning chasm at the bottom of the game board with a springy trampoline, which would cause the first ball fired to continue to carom around until, eventually, it cleared the board, giving me the palpable feeling that I am a trigonometric genius (memo to PopCap: my consulting rates are quite reasonable. Let’s chat — I want to pitch you my idea for a color-matching game where all the tiles are red.).

If making brilliant beautiful simple games that I don’t like wasn’t already unfair enough, PopCap is making things worse by selling their individual download games for half price until January 3rd. So if you’re curious to see just how removed from the zeitgeist I truly am, you can pick up Peggle for $9.97 at the moment, or, in other words, effectively for free. Even though I already have a license for the Windows edition, I might buy the Mac version solely to make a political statement. Then I can complain about how it makes me feel dumb without having to run Parallels or Boot Camp. And who knows, perhaps that will encourage them to port Bookworm Adventures, also.

Disclosure statement: Popcap graciously provided me with a review copy of Peggle.

Update: My contact at PopCap takes serious issue with my claim that Peggle is largely luck, and is staging an intervention by sending me remedial courses in Peggling. Perhaps there is hope for me yet.

…and now I’ve picked up Disgaea 2 via eBay.

STOP ME BEFORE I BUY AGAIN.

I visited The Exchange last night, and ended up walking out with two other Nippon Ichi games, La Pucelle Tactics and Rhapsody, A Musical Adventure.

I am so very doomed.

My co-writer and I have somewhat different approaches towards games of questionable value. He approaches gaming a bit like a “catch and release” fisherman, constantly buying the newest games on a whim, playing them for a couple of days, and then selling them on eBay in a week if they don’t work out. I, on the other hand, agonize over each and every purchase, determined to hold on to my hard-earned cash to the last second.

This has its downsides. One of them is that I hardly ever sell games. If the game is good that’s fine, but I even put the bad games on the shelf, lovingly enclosed in their pristine cases, so that I can enjoy not ever playing them again. It’s a bit of a sickness.

However, my buying pattern has its upsides, too. My co-blogger doesn’t just buy too many games, he actually buys them twice. So every so often I get a free game. It’s charity, like that given to a beggar scratching at the back door of Marie Antoinette’s pastry chef.

Last week, he bought Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness for the PSP, so I got his copy of the PS2 version of the game, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. It has taken over my life, and invaded my dreams. Perhaps by writing about it a bit I can get it out of my head.

I initially approached Disgaea based on my first impression: as a lighter, stupider version of Fire Emblem. “I’ll play the first ten missions and give it back to him,” I thought.

Laharl and Victim

Disgaea seemed quite trivial. The lead character, Laharl — a juvenile demon prince trying to claim the throne — was likeable enough, but the game mechanics themselves weren’t comfortable. I didn’t like the way the characters felt like they moved on invisible roller skates, the “geo effects” system seemed trivial and too easy to abuse, and there was something fundamentally odd about the input method in the game. You could cancel characters movements after they participated in an attack, which rubbed my Panzer General-trained self the wrong way. It all just seemed shoddy. By the time I reached the “boss” at the end of the first chapter, I was ready to throw in the towel. My characters were all too weak, and the thought of grinding them all through the earlier maps in that chapter just seemed monotonous in the extreme. However, just as I was about to give up I had three separate epiphanies in close succession.

First, I realized the limit for the number of characters one can create (and bring with you) is incredibly large. You can generate over a hundred characters, and bring any ten with you on to any map. I had been playing with just 5 characters total.

Second, I realized that the odd “cancel movement” behavior allows you to have characters who can run out, join in a joint attack (gaining some experience in the process), and then return to the loving bosom of the perfectly safe “base tile.”

Lastly, I realized that the “main campaign” of the game is a complete sideshow, and all of the fun is concentrated in the so-called “Item World” which is the Being John Malcovich dimension that exists inside every object in the universe. It seems that inside every object in the universe (such as swords, shoes, and little bits of fluff) are monsters, and teachers, and valuable items. Fighting your way through the Item World makes the object you’re inside of more powerful. In more prosaic terms, the “Item World” is a potentially unlimited set of random maps. It’s where you will probably spend most of your time while playing Disgaea.

Regarding this last point, this is completely backwards from the way most games of this sort are structured. Typically, lots of care and thoughtful level design goes into the main campaign, and the random battles are for the freaks who just can’t get enough. In Disgaea, it’s the reverse: the “formal” levels are pretty flat, but the random levels range from “sort of boring” to “completely and gleefully insane.” This mostly has do with the “geo effects” system and how the game awards bonus points.

It’s like this: sometimes, some of the squares on a map will be brightly colored. There are pyramids which grant special powers or penalties to anyone standing on a square of that color. Furthermore, if you destroy a pyramid when it is on a different color, it changes all squares of that color into the pyramid’s color, dealing damage in the process. So perhaps you have a red pyramid on a yellow square. You smash the red pyramid. All of the yellow squares turn red. Across the board, there was a blue pyramid on a yellow square. When that square turns red, it blows up the blue pyramid, which then causes all the now-red squares to turn blue.

Essentially, it’s a sort of platonic implementation of a Rube Goldberg machine. That may sound contradictory, but when you see it in action, you’ll agree.

If you can manage to chain together a number of these explosions, you accrue a ridiculous amount of bonus points. Some of the bonus points lead to experience point awards, which are given generously to any of your characters who are on the map when you kill the last enemy.

That last paragraph is key. Consider that the typical “grind loop” in an RPG looks like this: recruit a new, sucky character. Throw him into battle. Watch him die. Resurrect him. Throw him into battle again. Watch him die. Resurrect him. Repeat this until your spirit is crushed and you want to fly to Japan to stab someone in the neck. Eventually, your loser character gets lucky and reaches level 2, and now only dies 90% of the time, instead of 95% of the time. In Disgaea, the most effective levelling strategy for your weak characters is to make sure they don’t fight. Rather, you send out your most powerful character and have him kill everyone except one enemy. Then you bring out your weaklings, keeping them far away from the remaining enemy. Finally, you set off a chain reaction of fireworks, accruing bonus points and (often) killing the one remaining enemy. The end result is that your weak characters gain experience points for standing around picking their noses.

Some call this insanity. I call it brilliant. It transforms the nature of the level grind from an exercise in careful balancing to a full-on heedless plunge to find the toughest level that your best character can take on by himself (or, if you’re feeling frisky, with one or two assistants). It also means that you spend your time playing only levels that have that ineffable puzzle nature. Occasionally, I encounter a level without any geo effects. I typically stroll off of those levels without even bothering to kill a single enemy. After all, I’m playing a Demon Prince. Why bother? What’s in it for me?

The odd thing about the Item World, from my perspective, is that the game does its level best to downplay it. “Oh, yeah, and this other thing is over here. You can do it if you want. But, really, don’t worry about it.”

After a solid week of playing through the item world every night, all of my dreams featured colored squares which gave the various dream figures different magic powers.

However brilliant the core conceit, if you’re playing on the PS2 you should anticipate at least one problem: the game was designed by savants, but they were idiot savants, because it has an utterly retarded save system that doesn’t support save anywhere. On the PSP you at least have instant suspend to partially shield you from this idiocy. No such luck for us poor PS2 players.

Gripes about the retarded save system notwithstanding, Disgaea has completely knocked Fire Emblem off my “what I’m playing at the moment” list. I’ve even played more than 10 missions.

And the best part, of course, is that I didn’t even have to pay for the game. Now I just need to convince psu that he likes the Disgaea games as much as Madden. Then I’ll get a new free Disgaea game every year.

I have a peculiar, but probably not particularly unique, habit. I like to read reviews of things after I have otherwise consumed them. I do this a lot with movies, music, books and other such “artistic” media. I think part of this activity stems from the engineer/dork need to search out validation for one’s opinions. For example, I was once thrilled to find out that the Trader Joe’s red wine that I had bought was also enjoyed by the wine critic on The Splendid Table. We are creatures of ego, we can’t help it.

This is not the only reason I engage in this behavior though. The main reason is to read interesting writing about something that I enjoyed, or didn’t, as the case may be. Of all of the media that I consume, what saddens me the most is how little interesting writing there is about video games.

This fact was brought into stark relief by the recent gnashing of teeth about C|Net and Gamespot. What was most upsetting about the whole blowup was that nobody seemed the last bit interested in the quality of the content under discussion.

Let’s not kid ourselves. When you strip away all the pretention and self-importance, the economic interests, the difficulties of working on such huge collections of content under a time deadline and all the rest, one basic fact remains: almost all of the writing that you can find about video games is horrible. And I don’t mean this in a Sturgeon’s Law way, where we wink and nudge each other about how most of everything is bad. I mean that almost none of it could even survive as a term paper for a freshman writing class at the satellite campus of a second tier state university.

I have a modest collection of examples. I started playing Assassin’s Creed this weekend, and managed to get enough time in to form some basic first impressions. Curious, I surfed on over Metacritic to see what the collective of Internet Game Critics had to say about the game. You can read the blurbs for yourself here.

I will now unfairly cherry pick some of the most egregiously terrible excerpts from the page above. From Gamer 2.0, we have:

Assassin’s Creed is remarkable in every aspect it performs. From the sprawling city life to the dual-vision storyline, everything blends together to offer one of the most complete and satisfying experiences so far this year.

Deeko says:

Assassin’s Creed is one of those games that could be considered for the “games as art” debate. A lot of times you’ll stop for a second and just stare in awe at how beautiful and graceful the game is. The game is by no means perfect, but it does start to head into the right direction that most sandbox games should.

Meanwhile, Daily Game opines:

The open-world genre has never looked so good, but it could’ve played a bit more realistically given the subject matter. A few fewer Biblical references would’ve been nice, too.

Even the stuff that would not have failed in freshman english class has its problems. Over at Gamecritics, we find a review that takes hundreds and hundreds of words to tell us that the reviewer found the game boring and repetitive. Then, as if to emphasize his bitter contrarian nature, he trots out that favorite clichéd phrase of death: tech demo.

Everything except Altair’s athletics feels underdeveloped and painfully shallow, making the end result an overhyped attempt to recoup the development costs for something that’s little more than an extended tech demo.

I would like to pass a law that forbids the use of the phrase tech demo in any writing about games.

Almost all of the writing on this game follows the same general patterns:

- There are ponderous catalogs of technical features and box bullet points. Gamespot, for example, uses up four paragraphs talking about how the graphics look great, and then segues into how the sound design is great too.

- There are adolescent declarations of unconditional love. The first few 10/10 reviews are always like this. Here is where the poor abused gamers tell us that the user interface is broken, combat is clunky, the load times are horrible, but it’s still the best game ever.

- There are subjective judgements that are not backed up by either objective observations or any sort of well-written rationale at all.

- Finally, there are adolescent screeds against the game, similar to the example at Gamecritics.

All in all, a depressing collection of mediocrity. But, I did find some better writing about the game. First, buried in the inside pages of the New York Times, there are a few dozen tightly chosen words that, even though they are only one third of the text of the whole article, have more to say about the game than anything you can find on the Metacritic page. Second, Gamers With Jobs wins creativity points for framing their complaints as a list of lighthearted bug reports and patch requests to the developers. Finally, Yahtzee maintains his high level of entertainment value, and his status as the best thing the Escapist ever accidently found and published.

I think each of these pieces illustrate what is missing from almost all of the enthusiast press in video games: creative and interesting ideas about video games and a professional level of execution on those ideas.

Of course, we here at Tea Leaves, and I, psu, in particular, fall into this same trap. Here is how I write a new page about some game I am playing:

1. First, write some pithy semi-personal statement about a strange and annoying habit I have.

2. Tie this habit somehow to the item under review. Try and describe how the game plays.

3. Complain a lot.

4. Say something nice. Then write some self-centered pithy filler.

5. Make fun of hardcore fanboys.

6. Tie it up with a pithy ending that is hopefully insulting to hardcore fanboys.

It almost writes itself. Of course, we here at Tea Leaves are just a part time weblog. I write most of this stuff while dinner is on the stove because I can’t play Halo while the kid is awake. Under no circumstances would I presume to put up my writing as anything that could survive in a real commercial marketplace. But there is one thing that I do try to do consistently, and even succeed at occasionally: I try to write something about the game that is more interesting than how they used shaders in DirectX 10 to do the water effects.

This happens too rarely in the enthusiast press about video games. The writing is rarely creative, and when does strive for a higher level it is often poorly executed. Which brings me back to the Gerstmann mess. Over at Newsweek, a publication that you would think would know how to hire a competent writer, we have this guy N’Gai Croal going off on how the poor writers are again being crushed and enslaved in the sewers by the evil monied interests. Actually, I’m not sure what he’s talking about because I can’t follow his writing for more than a couple of paragraphs. All of the shiny hip blinds my ability to understand the text. No that’s not it, it’s because the writing is completely incomprehensible. If I were the interest behind his money I’d suggest he find a new editor, or figure out where the delete key is on his keyboard.

The depressing conclusion that I reach from all of this is that there must be no market that is wiling to pay cash for mature and intelligent writing about video games. The inevitable truth is that the writing is the way it is because that’s how gamers want it. I’d like to be optimistic and think that within my lifetime the medium will have matured to the point where it can actually support professional and creative criticism. But I’m not that young anymore, so I’m not holding my breath.

I have always liked first person shooters. For a long time they were all I played. Every couple of years I’d pick up a new one and play it for a while and then go dormant again. Being slow and uncoordinated, I have never been particularly good at shooters. In online games I am particularly useless, and my main goal is usually to not be shut out.

After the last flood of major releases in 2004, the last few years have been off years for shooters. Most of the releases have been second string franchises or remakes of second string franchises, or ports of other second and third string franchises from the PC world. This year, however, has been different.

Beginning in August, with the release of Bioshock and moving right along into November, our gaming conciousness has been under almost constant assault by shooters and action games. For all the talk of this being the year of the widened demographic, the majority of new releases and new franchises this year have been in the shooter or action genres. Let’s list them, shall we:

- Bioshock
- Halo 3
- The Orange Box (really five shooting games in one)
- Call of Duty 4
- Quake Wars
- Unreal Tournament 3
- Mass Effect (action RPG)
- Ratchet and Clank (platforming and shooting)

Having had my Xbox melt at the height of this madness, I found myself in the middle of November trying to deal with three multiplayer shooters at the same time on the 360. I never did get back to Halo after the machine came back. Our Halo crew has long since broken up and I tend to only play it when I feel like a bit of mindless deathmatch abuse.

I picked up The Orange Box, but ended up only enjoying Portal. I tried to enjoy the two Half-Life episodes but found them to be full of the same boring physics puzzles combined with the same soulless drone-like combat sequences. In addition, I realize that Alyx is supposed to be a bold new experiment in the development of first person shooter narratives, but at this point she is mostly just creepy and gets in my way when I’m trying to navigate the mine shaft. I have long since stopped caring whether she actually lives or dies, and as a final insult I can’t shoot her in the head like I could with the marines in Halo. I finally gave up after a couple of hours of episode 2 while I was lost in the Flood mothership… no wait, I was in a mine that looked just like the Flood mothership. Whatever.

I was hoping that TF2 would save the day, but it does not. First, it’s obvious that this game’s first love and main development target is Steam and the PC platform. There is nothing wrong with this, but the result is that the Xbox Live multiplayer is tragically crappy.

In larger matches, the lag is nearly intolerable. To make up for it, large matches with your friends are almost impossible to create because instead of stealing the lobby system from Halo, which by the way, every single multiplayer shooter should be required by law to do, the TF2 lobby is just the same crappy code from the original Xbox Counterstrike done up in cartoon colors. But it’s a bit worse. Only the host of the game can invite others to the game. And, it is difficult to make any changes to the configuration of the match without just kicking everyone out and re-inviting them. The result is that whenever I decide I want to play TF2 I spend half of my time either waiting for an invite from a friend or half of my time joining and getting kicked from servers. Then, when I get in game, it’s almost always so laggy I have to quit in five minutes and do the whole dance again. It’s a pathetic mess.

The second issue I have with TF2 is that I suck at it, and I can’t tell if it’s my fault. None of the classes really work for me, and no matter how hard I try, the controls just feel a little bit “disconnected.” Every weapon seems to have a little bit of a delay before it fires, or range limitations, or power limitations, or some combination of all of these issues. The whole thing strikes me as too complicated to make second nature. Even after several hours of play, I can’t shake the feeling that everything is happening by accident. I cannot remember one time feeling like I actually managed to manipulate the game world to my advantage through explicit action on my part. It’s always more like there is someone behind the curtain rolling dice and then shooting me in the head.

One thing I do know is the game’s fault is the tedious and boring way it always respawns you in your base. On the larger maps, this means you spend more than half your time running from the base to the action, and then dying, then running from the base to the action, then dying. This makes it hard to get better because you don’t get much time to practice playing the game while you are playing the game.

This is a general problem with all of the current crop of shooters. You can’t practice. I would kill for these people to implement bots to practice against so I could learn the maps and get used to the controls and the feel of the weapons. In retrospect, I think this is what I liked most about the old Xbox Counterstrike. TF2 has a dire need for a deeper tutorial than the little movies that play before the maps start. The learning curve on this game seems steep and full of many humiliating deaths.

By last Friday I was ready to send the Orange Box to eBay, since it had failed to provide me with any more enjoyment after Portal. But, I might give the GWJ TF2 group one more try and see if I can find some kind of connection with this game before I give up for good.

This situation left me in a funk. Here I was, reunited with my Xbox and without a shooter to play in the middle of the biggest glut of online shooters the world has ever seen. Rescue came from an unexpected source. In a moment of weakness, I bought Call of Duty 4. You will recall that Call of Duty 2 was one of the few Xbox 360 launch titles that didn’t suck. I didn’t make it all the way through that game before getting tired of the setting and the general mechanics, so I was not planning to get the new game. But, people told me that multiplayer was excellent. I didn’t believe them. Then I read somewhere that the lobby system was copied from Halo, which, as you know, should be required by law for every online shooter. So I bought it, and I have been saved.

At a game design level, Call of Duty 4 is not as innovative, or interesting, or distinctive as TF2. Your little drone soldiers run around maps that are mostly gray and blue and green and you target and shoot other tiny little drone soldiers from very far way lest they shoot you in the head first. On the surface, there does not seem to be much going on here that is interesting. Where Call of Duty 4 wins is execution. The lobby and matchmaking system is indeed copied from Halo, which, as you know, should be required by law. Games are quick and respawns are nicely balanced in that they let you get back into the game quickly while never putting you right next to a deadly enemy. When you die, the game shows you your death from the perspective of the player who shot you. I’m not sure if this really helps me to get better, but it does show me in a concrete way what I know I’m doing wrong in the abstract (I run in straight lines with my head up). In any case, the result is that I do have the feeling that I’ve been able to slowly improve.

But here is the game’s most brilliant move: In every match you can collect experience points, even if you are completely useless. These eventually accumulate to the point where you unlock weapons upgrades, more interesting game types, extra abilities and all sorts of other RPG-like rewards. I think this is a stroke of minor genius. It gives the game a feeling of connectedness and progression that I’ve never had in a shooter. Most impressively, even though you start out as a gimped cripple, the game is carefully balanced to allow you to still make progress and obtain all the cool gear the other kids already have. I think in less capable hands, this leveling system could easily have left me at a permanent level zero, but instead I’ve been able to slowly make progress towards some of the shinier rewards, and I’ve only played a few hours during the last week.

I probably still suck, but at least now I can suck with a more powerful weapon that has an uber-auto-aiming laser sight on it. I really like it. I like it enough that I haven’t even started the single player mode in this game yet. It’s also the first game in a while that has taken up permanent residency in my Xbox the way Halo used to.

So, in the spirit of the retail season, I’m here to give thanks to Infinity Ward for giving me the game that has allowed me to not totally give up on the online shooter. At least not this year. I wonder if I will manage to survive until three years from now when the next flood hits.

I’m not going to link to any of the handwringing articles over this because I don’t want to bore my readers to death. For those of you who are already following the situation, here is my take:

(1) No one who is talking actually knows why Gerstmann is no longer working at Gamespot.
(2) Everyone who is talking is speculating.
(3) All of the various posts people are citing that ‘confirm’ the rumors, don’t.
(4) In 2 or 3 weeks, everyone claiming that they are boycotting Gamespot because CNET eats babies and rapes puppies will be happily reading it again, and bitching that their new favorite Zelda game didn’t get a high enough numeric score. Every so often someone will ask “Hey, remember Jeff Gerstmann?” and someone else will reply “No?”

But hey, for the sake of argument let’s assume the most scurrilous, scandalous rumors were true, and the guy was fired for a single bad review based on an angry phone call from a cigar-chewing fat guy at Eidos. The bigger issue here is that everyone knows that nearly all “enthusiast” coverage of gaming is awful. All “enthusiast” coverage of everything is awful, whether the topic is stereos, photos, knitting, or what have you. So what’s with the Captain Renault act all of a sudden? “I’m shocked, shocked to discover that there is a feedback loop between publicists promoting games and writers looking for things to write about.”

If Jeff Gerstmann hadn’t been fired, would you think that Gamespot’s ass-kissing coverage and laudatory reviews of terrible games were any more accurate? They — and every other gaming magazine that gives numeric scores — have been doing this for years. If you really think this represents some sort of sea change in the magazine industry, what desert island have you been living on? The tragedy of this kerfuffle is that it prolongs the polite fiction that, were it not for Evil Publishers, game magazines would somehow be bastions of integrity. But as any freelance writer will tell you, you don’t need any sort of formal system of rewards and punishments to learn that biting the hand that feeds you is an activity best left to other, more unemployed writers.

Look: in the long run, readers get the sort of writing they deserve. Gamespot’s reviews are twaddle not because CNET hypothetically sacrificed one heroic editor before the altar of some shambling corporate presence, but because that’s the sort of review the site’s readers want.

I watch too much football these days. Aside from being one of the few things that makes HDTV actually worth the trouble, I am also blessed with being able to follow two teams that are playing at a high level: The Patriots and the Steelers. Which brings me to Monday Night Football.

My beloved Patriots came within a few feet of losing their first game last night. I have nothing really to say about that. You can read about it in the papers. I do have some questions about how football games, and really all sports, are produced for television though.

1. Why is the game on so late? Why should us poor East Coasters need to suffer until almost midnight just to watch a football game? Baseball is, of course, worse.

2. Why is he game so long? We all know the answer to this. But it’s too bad anyway. The best is how you get a 15 minute TV time out so they can get the punt teams on and off the field.

3. Did you know that the last team to go undefeated was the 1972 Miami Dolphins? Just checking. This is an important fact to bring up in every Patriots game from now until they lose.

4. Why did they waste what seemed like 45 minutes of my time continually talking about the tragic death of Sean Taylor while at the same time adding absolutely nothing to the content or texture of the story? Just saying “Hey! did you know Mr. Taylor was shot?” over and over again is both in poor taste and kinda boring.

5. Did you know the Patriots might be the first team to go undefeated since the 1972 Miami Dolphins?

6. I have to ask this again. Why do they have reporters on the field? What are these people for? The most comical part of last night’s production was not the Ravens defensive coaching staff completely losing the game for their team, it was watching the wardrobe, hair, accessories, and the sheets of paper stapled to the set blow around in the 35mph wind. Here is a hint ESPN: digital compositing, look it up.

7. Did you know that the 1972 Miami Dolphins went 17-0 in 1972?

8. If I ever, ever, see that Flashdance car dealer commercial again, I’ll have to poke my brain out of my skull with a pen knife.

9. I wonder what Don Shula thinks of the Patriots being this close to going undefeated for the first time since the 1972 Dolphins. Oh wait. No I don’t, I don’t care at all.

10. Is there a more annoying TV sports personality than Chris Berman? Oh that’s right, Dick Vitale. Never mind.

Every year I make some homemade eggnog, which always sounds disgusting but ends up being pretty good. I’ve made versions with both raw, pasteurized and cooked eggs, depending on to whom it will be served. The raw egg version does taste noticeably different from the pasterurized or cooked versions, and has a thinner and more pleasant texture, but does carry a higher health risk. Life, of course, is full of tradeoffs, and this is one of them.

This year, I was doing a little research and came across a number of recipes for “George Washington’s Eggnog”. But something bugged me about this recipe.

It’s not the taste, or the prodigious amount of alcohol, but one of the claims being made on the recipe’s behalf. This recipe calls for the ingredients to be mixed and then left to sit for “at least five days” to “cure.” Some commentators on the recipe claimed that this had an important health benefit, namely that it would give the alcohol time to neutralize harmful bacterial, such as salmonella, that might be in the nog.

This, it seemed to me, was ridiculous. My intuition says that a given mixture of ethyl alcohol and other materials is going to be either sanitary or not after a few minutes; it’s not going to get cleaner over a period of several days. If anything, I’d expect that waiting period would serve as a growth period for any potential infections. I could imagine that the curing would make the drink taste better, but not that it would make it any healthier.

I, of course, am not a food scientist or biologist. But I know of someone who is: Shirley Corriher, author of the superb book Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed (which everyone should own), and semi-regular guest on Alton Brown’s Good Eats. I wrote to Ms. Corriher and put it to her: does the alcohol in this eggnog recipe make it safe to use raw eggs, or is it just wishful thinking? Her reply was to the point: “I’ve seen the “cured” eggnog recipe and though it sounds like a good thing, the alcohol is not sufficient to kill the salmonella.” She suggests using pasteurized eggs from the dairy section of your supermarket instead.

With that, I wish you all well for this upcoming holiday season. Feel free to share your eggnog recipes in the space below, and let us know your tips and tricks. If you’ve never tried a true raw egg eggnog, I think it’s worth a little risk to try it. Use the freshest and cleanest eggs you can find, and of course please don’t serve it to children, pregnant women, or people who are ill or have compromised immune systems. And if you have any extra, feel free to invite me over for a cup.

Cheers!