While Sony has made several blunders in the current gen console war one of the biggest was allowing Call of Duty 4 to go multi-platform. The game has become such a runaway success that it could have single-handedly changed the face of the war as we know it. Perhaps equally as big was allowing Grand Theft Auto 4 to go multi-platform. Although the game sold about 45/55%  on the PS3 and Xbox 360 respectively, there are rumblings that the next installment in the GTA series may become a Playstation exclusive by default.

Wait, what the hell are you talking about?

As has been documented, Rockstar was notably unhappy with the limitations of the DVD-9 format on the Xbox 360 and how it affected GTA 4. As we’ve all seen though, both versions of the game are practically the same. The rumblings this time around though are seem to be much more boisterous. Early rumours have Rockstar threatening to not release GTA5 on the Xbox, but that begs the question: Why? Why sacrifice all the money you would undoubtedly make by only creating the game for one console?

Although one can never account for backroom dealings and shattered business relationships, there is really only one answer.

They want their game to be good.

Was GTA4 lacking on the Xbox 360? Of course not. It was Game of the Year. It recieved rave reviews across the board. But could it have been better? WOULD it have been better if it had only been released for a single console? Of course. This applies to any game released on any console exclusively though. What makes this time around special is that the GTA developers may in fact be willing to part with the extra revenue in order to better perfect their craft which seems absolutely ludicrous in our current economic standings. It is not to say that Rockstar would be the first group to sacrifice sales for art. It is however to say that doing so now could prove to be an earth shaking event that has an indelible effect on how Video Games are made.

In a world driven by profit, and in an industry not well renowned for being bohemian, this kind of move would be as surprising as it would be dramatic. A triple-A developer openly supporting both their own art and A specific console could sway other third party developers to do the same. It would also give other developers a comfortable “out” to abandon a platform they wouldn’t want to develop on for fear of not returning enough profit. After all, in such hard economic times, it’s surprising that more companies aren’t already doing this and attributing it towards a need for the betterment of the game as opposed to monetary restrictions. Keep in mind as well, if Halo 3, Gears of War and Metal Gear Solid 4 have shown us anything, exclusive games can still sell ridiculously well regardless of being exclusive.

That being said, the whole “pursuing art” argument could simply be an excuse from Rockstar after the fact. Rockstar has a contractual obligation to produce 3 exclusive games for the PS3 as reported by the Hiphopgamer (through an interview with an industry insider) and other sources. We know one of these games is Agent, another one of these games may supposedly be the somewhat forgotten L.A. Noire, a sandbox game set in the 1930’s. GTA 5 would probably be not all that different than 4 regardless of development time and console exclusivity, and if L.A. Noire is factored in, that would mean all of the three promised exclusives would be off the table.

If one wanted to be even more pessimistic, this could be seen as also be seen as a moving away from Microsoft has the prime conduit for producing games. Take-Two openly denied Microsoft’s exclusivity bid for Bioshock 2 while EA is now releasing Dead Rising 2 on the PS3. Capcom has also recently confirmed a concurrent release of Lost Planet 2. Along with a slew of exclusives for the PS3, this could seem very dramatic, but there are still a lot of positives for the Xbox.

Don't worry cousin, beeg American teetee's will probably come to all platforms (minus Wii)

Even though EA has clearly made Dead Rising 2 multi-platform, the status of Mass Effect is still up in the air. Microsoft also has Epic, Bethesda and VALVe onboard as companies who are much more enamored with Microsoft than they are with Sony. And of course, staying with the pessimism, Microsoft has one very, very big asset. A seemingly inexhaustible amount of money. Everyone has their price, and a company as rich as Microsoft can probably name yours.

Microsoft made Rockstar rich. Rockstar took at least 30% of every sale from the GTA4 expansion pack, along with the millions of dollars they recieved from the exclusivity deal itself. Ultimately, beyond all of this industry wheeling and dealing as well as speculation, it just doesn’t seem like anyone can resist the siren song of the greenback. Perhaps that’s why I find it so interesting that the such a bohemian notion can be expressed by Rockstar. Even with evidence showing that it could be legitimate and genuine (undoubtedly in the exclusivity of Agent), I’m still not convinced that such dedication to art can even exist in our modern day industry. If it does come to pass though. it might just spur on the innovation and advancement in the industry that some believe is lacking. And if this kind of innovation can occur when times are tough, imagine how sweet it could be in times of plenty.

My first video review. More to come.

EDIT: Redid the audio, so it’s 10x better now.

If you’re unfamiliar, I’ll give you a quick rundown.  There are a bunch of cute little animals you could adopt in a variety of colours and designs, with whom you can play games (Which are more often than not cutely redecorated clones of Apple IIe 5 1/4in floppy titles reprogrammed in Flash), train at various schools to raise their stats, and of course, have the viciously beat the hell out of each other.

The site was initially started by two Welsh people in California, named Adam Powell and Donna Williams.  It was essentially a website full of games for college students to pass the time.  Of course, the cutesy look attracted more and more players, mostly young kids like myself, and the whole thing began to take off.  The site grew, the staff grew, and eventually they realized that they were losing ridiculous amounts of money.  They tried to make it up without advertising on the site:  Merchandise was the way to go.  Limited Too, Hot Topic, Claire’s Boutique and others began carrying stuffed animals, t-shirts, jewelry and action figures, and admittedly, it was pretty cool.

Obviously, it didn’t work for long.  And along with adding small ads to the site, service started to slip: Reports of accounts being banned by mistake, rude responses by customer service personnel, and just an overall feeling of ‘what happened’ plagued the site.  I would later find out that it had been owned by a group of investors, as a publicly traded company, for quite some time.

And it was still losing money.

I quit, for a long time.  It happens, I guess:  It was an addiction I just outgrew, unlike heroin (There are no 12-step programs for Neopets to my knowledge).  I went on to other things, better games, communities with an average age higher than 12.  That was a long time ago.

Recently though, I saw my foster-sister playing something vaguely familiar.  I cocked an eyebrow and asked ‘Is that Neopets?’  She responded that it was, and was surprised I knew about it, after all I’m almost 7 years older than her.  I started to wonder if my old account was still there.  It was.  But it was buried in a mountain of obnoxious flash ads, a cash store for additional content, and many, many ‘updated’ games.

Much of the site now centered around ‘Neocash,’ the game’s RMT currency, with spotlights for the pets who have had the most of mom’s hard-earned cash spent to make the look tacky.  Many years-old promises have not been fulfilled, like finishing old plot arcs, and making the collectible clothes already in existence wearable by your pets.

Worst of all, the flash games are either drawn at such a high resolution, or just so poorly coded, that it takes a modern computer to run them.  Read that again:  IT TAKES A MODERN COMPUTER TO RUN A FLASH GAME THAT TAKES A MAXIMUM OF 3 MINUTES TO PLAY.

I really don’t know what else to say.  Humanity is doomed?  Everything has to evolve and change, but this feels more than a little sick.  I guess there’s not much else to it though:  It’s a publicly traded company, so it exists to make a profit.  Even so, fighting as a Cybunny soldier in the great Sloth wars is one of the few fuzzy memories of my early-mid teens.

I remember Eliv Thade, the great Lord of Anagrams.  I remember the Lab Ray which could perform unwanted Sexual Reassignment Surgery in seconds flat.  I remember my pets who fought valiantly against the evil Dr. Sloth, lord of all things slow and lazy.

I miss Neopets.  As casual-market video games go, it was tops.  Seriously.

As a product of an oddly eclectic Christian upbringing, I’ve encountered quite a bit of radical stuff during my Sunday school classes.  One of the things I’ve always had problems with, however, is the principle of turning the other cheek.

Not that it made  sense to me at the time. For me, not retaliating was the ultimate excuse for being a doormat. Turn the other cheek? Yeah, right. I’d rather do the eye for an eye thingy–even in an MMORPG.

I got my first taste of PvP combat in CCR’s Rising Force Online. That was my first and my last massive scale PvP game. While it was fun at first, the prospect of enduring repeated backstabbing by higher level players got to me after a while.

To make a long story short, I eventually mellowed out, PVP-wise. While I still log onto the game, I tend to use it as an over-glorified chatroom these days.

Strangely, the specter of potential PvP refused to leave me alone. An editor of mine recently assigned me to cover the local launch of a new PvP-based game called Rohan Online.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the game, this is how the Rohan Online revenge system works: whenever someone KOs you, that player character’s name will conveniently appear on your hit list. You may then choose to be instantly teleported to that character’s location (more specifically, behind that character’s back) so that you may exact your  revenge.

The trade-off is that if you ever get to repay him or her, your character’s name will then appear on your foe’s hit list. That way, the cycle of vengeance can go on indefinitely.

This was one of the points that I brought up during the Q & A portion of the launch. Since I was in a bit of a weird mood at the time, I asked the question that some small, inner voice had been prompting me to ask for the past hour.

“Does Rohan Online give you any incentive for not exacting revenge on someone who has backstabbed you?”

The game’s marketing manager looked at me as if I’d grown another pair of eyes.

After he’d recovered, he told me that there was no real reason for not getting revenge. The best thing a player could do, he said, was to “make friends with your former enemy and then go out and backstab someone else together.”

It sounded like a strange way to turn the other cheek. Satisfied, I held my peace for the rest of the launch event, fully intending not to play this game at all.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Rohan Online has the potential to be a good game–for PVP enthusiasts, that is. The local marketing head of Rohan Online here gave a good presentation, but it wasn’t enough for me to get out of my “no PvP” comfort zone.

You see, I’d discovered something even more satisfying than exacting revenge: that of making other players your friends even before they have a chance to become your enemies.

I learned this principle from some of the nicest folks I’d ever met online, and this has brought about a total paradigm shift.  After all, I very well know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a backstab. Why should I do the very thing I hate to someone else, especially when there are better alternatives available? Easy? No. Ultimately satisfying? Definitely.

Maybe there’s something to turning the other cheek after all.

Bioshock, in pieces, was a fantastic game. It included a simple but interesting skill tree, classic FPS mechanics, and creative weapons. It featured a sectoral but open level design. It had interesting and intriguing characters and back story. It’s narrative was well presented. But for all these nice touches, they didn’t mesh. Maybe I’m over thinking it, but I believe being critical of anything exposes why it was so good in the first place. Bioshock does not come together as a single whole or as one work. First of all, it was a lackluster RPG. Some people argue it was never an RPG to begin with, They say it was a Shooter. So why were the guns so arduous to shoot? Why was the game 25 hours? The reason a Shooter lasts at most 13 hours is because shooting for another ten is boring. If it was a Shooter, it was poorly paced. Another problem would be, why did we have free form character building, considering the ‘twist’ at the end? If I was a slave, I would be more concerned with kindly doing what I was asked, not wandering around for ADAM. And if I really was a slave all along, why did I do so much wandering? Now, I don’t know how you played the game, but me, I got into an area and the first thing I did was loot and kill everything I could. I even waited for respawns so I could get more. The only reason I ever progressed in the game was because the loading screen was the last door I hadn’t checked. For a slave, I do a piss poor job.

This was my biggest qualm with the game. They throw this dumb plot twist at you completely out of nowhere, like they were arguing with you, got you to swear and shouted “ha I made you swear!”. You walk through the last door in the area, which get’s blocked off once you do, and Fontaine comes on your comm shouting (in a very bad accent) “You were a slave”. Seriously? I couldn’t tell, I’ve been farming ADAM, I wanted to shoot bees, when did I become your slave? Maybe the RPG/Character Building stuff was too add a bit of irony to the situation. Hey, check out our customizable game experience, but wait! You were a slave all along! Maybe that was the case, but I don’t think so. I think Bioshock was trying to hard to be what people wanted it to be, instead of what IT wanted to be. They wanted to be like System Shock, because people loved System Shock. But they wanted it to be like Halo, because people love Halo. How do we combine the two? Keep the open-ish world and RPG elements, introduce the straightforward gunplay and level progression from Halo, 9.0s here I come! Obviously, and this is true with all products, there were compromises. They needed to sell the game, after all. But the game betrayed it’s own ideas. It’s own design. The game was not that intriguing to me. The only reason I made progress was because I was looking for more ADAM. I wanted to make Big Daddies kick other Big Daddy ass… Eventually I made it to the end, but not because I was being compelled by Fontaine’s nasty voice. Because I was trying to do something for me. Max out my stats.

The ability to choose to kill or let live the Little Sisters also betrayed the concept of the game. Just because Fontaine never said “would you kindly kill her” that doesn’t mean it fits right in. Fact is, giving me a dilemma like that (and so many times) contrasts the fact that I’m supposed to be going forward, following orders. I shouldn’t be stopping to choose to help or unhelp anyone. Why am I given a choice if I am a slave? The irony? On top of all this, the ADAM and plasmid system makes it most obvious. Why is my person being turned into whatever I’d like, at whatever points I’d like if I was just told to go to ______ or to collect ______? Why am I not following orders if I really am a slave? I think all this was poorly delivered. You could argue, “well the type of game they wanted to make wouldn’t guarantee the player followed the tracks we set so you have to take it with a grain of salt. Make a huge bottle, but ultimately come out at one narrow end”. Or you could design the game to play the way the story and characters develop. Linear. Tied to a goal without the choice to do other wise. Narrow paths, blocked exits, obvious directions and markings showing where you need to be. Then, you could unlock everything at the end, make it completely open when you stop taking Fontaine’s orders. That way the gameplay would mirror the design of the narrative.

Let’s look at Half Life 1 and 2. People say the plot of these games are not nearly as good as other people have made them out to be. What people do not realize is that Half Life is not just another shooter with a line stolen from every 1970s sci-fi book. It’s a First Person game. Not just a First Person Shooter, but a First Person game. Want to know why the story is so confusing? Because you don’t know what Breen and the slugs have been talking about, what Alyx and Eli and Kleiner have been up to for the last 10 or so years, what Judith does in secret, or what the Vortigaunts can see. You don’t know because you only have a pair of eyes. No ability to travel outside of your body and magically see what everyone else is talking about. The gameplay mirrored the narrative. It was a first person narrative. You got from the story exactly what Gordon had experienced. The gameplay was linear and the story farfetched because there were holes. You weren’t around to see or find out what happened, because you were in a vent instead of floating behind some Commanding Officer in a plane telling his men to kill everyone in Black Mesa. That’s why you don’t understand why the military is out to kill you. The game was designed superbly, and because Bioshock couldn’t take a hint, Half Life not only remains as one of the only games to do this, but probably the best game that’s done this, and to this day, is groundbreaking.

Now take a look at Shadow Of The Colossus. Everything about SotC was designed to push certain feelings and ellicit certain reactions. Why was the world so big? So you would feel small. Why were the Colossi so colossal? So you would feel helpless. Why was their no music outside of the fights? So you would feel lonely. Why was the colour so monotonous? So you would feel sad. Despite having an open world, there was next to nothing to do besides go to the next colossus. Why was there a never a direct route to getting to them (besides the first)? So you could see how much landscape there was, so you could see how insignificant you are. This game featured 3 story cinematics. The starting, the middle, and the end. Somehow, this game pushed more story, more consistently and more powerfully than any game I can think of before it and after it. Players who weren’t paying attention and who didn’t finish it passed it off as being empty and lacking any story at all. How does that explain the wikipages? The discussion that go on every night on some forum about it’s plot and it’s meaning? The game had a very healthy amount of plot considering dialogue was at a minimum and the only two conversations are between the main character and Dormin, and the shaman and his gaurds. The world and the experience and visuals told the story. Wanders deteriorating through out the game, the doves appearing by Mono, the statues counting down, the ruins strewn about the world, all of it told a story, thousands and thousands of years in the making. SotC is the perfect example of design and focus. Made with a purpose and it achieved so much more then people give it credit.

But for whatever reason, the broken Bioshock is selling millions and topping the rankings. I had fun turning the Big Daddies on eachother, I won’t lie. Hacking sentries was cool. The propaganda was funny. But, like I said earlier, seen in pieces the game is fantastic, but as a whole, it failed. Bioshock looked nice. It was well dressed in it’s novelty world. But deep inside it, where it all began on paper, it’s design failed.

The story begins with the main character, the avatar, the Ego as it were, referred to as Devon Aidendale in the official strategy guide, having just graduated from the famous Adventurer’s Correspondence School for (Fighters/Wizards/Thieves).  He sees a bulletin posted that the town of Spielburg needs a hero ASAP, no experience required.  Looking to become a hero, he sets off on a quest which will eventually send him on a journey all over the world, righting wrongs, slaying beasts, and possibly robbing the houses of some innocent folk.

Each character class has unique paths through the many puzzles of the game:  Fighters bash some heads in and are pretty intimidating, Wizards often hang back and cast spells to solve their problems, usually without combat.  Thieves are my favourite however.  Thieves improvise.  Climbing over impassable walls, sneaking past armed guards, throwing a knife at an unsuspecting lackey.  Plus they get additional robbery segments, in which you sneak through houses and businesses, snatching up all the valuables, which you later fence to the local thieves guild, or another such person.

The humour is the shining star of the series, with bizarre cameos from the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, The Dinosaurs, The Lock Ness Monster, and others, as well as many, many puns so bad that you’ll probably throw up in your mouth a little.

When I was a kid, I got to play through the first three chapters, ‘So You Want to Be a Hero?,’ ‘Trial By Fire,’ and ‘Wages of War.’  I’ve just reached chapter 4 as of last night, called ‘Shadows of Darkness,’ and it is indeed as magical as I remember.

Chapter one, as described, deals with a young man who wants nothing more than to become a hero.  He rescues some royalty, learns some legends, and whacks a witch, meeting a plethora of interesting characters, from anthropomorphic cats to bouncing blobs (Don’t feed the antwerp!) to the Three Stooges.  After saving the land of Spielburg, he takes off to a new land, Shapier, where he fights some elementals, defeats an evil wizard, and meets some silly clowns.  The story is incredibly engaging, especially for such a silly sort of series, and with each trial you finish, you’ll find yourself wanting nothing more than to tackle the next one.  Before you know it, the sun is coming up and it’s time for work.  The best part is, you can import your save file from one game to the next, and have a continuing game through all five chapters!

Anyone who’s a fan of comedy, WRPGs, high fantasy or Adventure games will enjoy this one.  It caters well to many audiences, so it’s a shame it has been reduced to ‘cult following’ status.  However, that limited fanbase has done some amazing things, including a full VGA remake of Trial by Fire.

The only major problems are the in-game bugs.  Many of these have been fixed by fans of the series through downloadable patches, but the infamous Error 47 (No such object) still plagues Shadows of Darkness on occasion.  DOSbox fixes many errors and VDMSound fixes the audio compatibility issues with modern PCs, but the errors are still quite prevalent at times.  Don’t Alt+Tab out of QFG1vga, for instance, as it will permanently destroy your status screen on that save file, and make certain actions not work without restarting your game from the beginning.

Aside from the bugs, if you have a PC and some time in your hands, and you love to laugh, there’s no reason not to play this series through.  A personal thank you goes out to Lori Ann and Corey for bringing another wonderful Sierra adventure to the table.

In all of these years, I’ve never once hit the level cap.

Oh sure, I came close on World of Warcraft (67 priest I think) and I often wonder why I’ve never once accomplished this dubious honor. Well, after much meditation on this subject (minutes and minutes, in fact) I think I came to the conclusion. Instead of blaming my own resolve, I think I’ll do instead what comes instinctively to humans as a species: I’ll blame someone else. MMORPG developers, all of you, pull the old bait and switch on your consumers. At first you mask grinding with quests and other shit but by the time you’re painfully close to the level cap all pretext of distraction is removed. Fuck you, you’re grinding. I suspect the reason they do this is because they reason they already have you paying, and you’re already that close, so you’ll surely endure those last few levels of pain because the glory of a maxed character is forever.

Well they’d be dead wrong. I can appreciate trying to mask the grind, which all MMORPGs do to at least a degree of success. Games like World of Warcraft mask the grind well in theory, because it takes relatively little time to grind your character from 1-70 and I assume to 80 now, but the fact that with every expansion your previous achievement is immediately negated by the crap you find floating around in the first 5 minutes of the new content pretty much makes all you just did meaningless.

I suppose one might argue  that the point of video games and all games in general is to have fun, but there you’d be dead wrong. Tell me, what was the best part of leveling in World of Warcraft? Final Fantasy XI? Yeah, let’s talk about Final Fantasy XI’s leveling. What was the best part of that? Was it killing the snippers, clippers, or one of their ten thousand reskinned cousins? Or perhaps it was the worker crawlers and their reskinned brethren. I challenge, nay, dare, anyone to name one objectively good thing about grinding in MMORPGs.

At this point some might be wondering why I play these games at all when I clearly don’t have fun with them, and there you have a good point. I suppose what I enjoy most is the odd sense of accomplishment at finally hitting a new level, getting a new piece of equipment, et cetera. Games that convince (lie) most effectively that what I did was indeed challenging and worthwhile I tend to stick with the most. Final Fantasy XI’s tedious grind scheme meant each level actually felt like it had meaning, compared to World of Warcraft’s smooth, easy clip. However, the illusion of progress is shattered in Final Fantasy XI when I’m level 41 and still can’t effectively solo enemies 15 levels below me, and in World of Warcraft it’s shattered when everything I had collected previous is immediately rendered meaningless by Blizzard’s latest expansion.

So, to make an already TL;DR post even more TL;DR: MMORPG developers, please learn how to lie to me better. Blizzard, you don’t have to throw new shit my way the second I step into the new expansion’s first zone. My gear can keep until, say, 73. Square, let me solo the banshee. It’s okay. I guarantee I won’t figure out a totally awesome, game shattering scam by being able to kill it without back up. Trust me, I’m not that smart.

The director is truly something never seen before in games. It is able to randomly generate zombies anywhere and whenever it wants to but if it always put them wherever it wanted to it would be unfair and make players not have fun. To fix this Valve made the director analyze the players stress level and adjust accordingly. This makes this game unique every time you play it. You can fight a horde of zombie in one room one time but the next time you play it again there may be none there. It can also tell when to send in a mob of zombies. It sees what the player is doing like if they are staying one place to long, if they are hurt and close to dying, or going in the wrong direction and either sends more zombies their way or gives them a break and time to relax and or heal themselves. It also controls when special class zombies appear like the witch and the tank and where and when items will spawn like med-kits and pipe bombs. The most important thing the AI director controls is tutorials. It always has a list of tutorials of what the player need to know when jumping into a game so they do not die and ruin their, and teammates, experience and once the player does whatever the tutorials says correctly and constantly it will never show it again.

One of the things that most people do not realize that there is music director as well. This director controls what sound effects and music the player will hear while playing the game but the truly great part of this is that each player’s musical experience is different. Like the AI director it uses the players stress level to detect what sound effects and music that will be played. Valve realized that sound effects and music where important to create atmosphere for any horror film, so to recreate this they had to convince the player to not to turn off their music. To make sure that that never happened, Valve made sure that audio would be important for survival. Audio cues can tell a player what is happening with their teammates, if a special infected was around, and when a horde of zombies where coming. It also can make sure that dialogue between characters is never repeated over and over again. Each string of possible dialogue has certain requirement to meet before it can be said; it is even possible that most people have not even heard all the dialogue in the game. For example, if Zoey heals Bill and then a couple of minutes later has to heal him again then a special kind of dialogue will pop up that is unique to that moment.

Left 4 Dead has revolutionized what AI can do. By creating a program that can make the game new every time you play it and making sure that audio and character dialogues never becomes annoying or overused means getting to the point of boredom in this game is near impossible. Valve took a big risk by putting these features in this game and they were worried if they would be able to pull this off. Lucky for us; they did.

In another article I stated that my personal game of the year was World of Goo, and there’s a reason for that, I’m a sucker for games involving thinking and physics, and those are the two things that CP Crayon Physics have a lot of. If you go into this game doing random stuff then you’ll find yourself lost and probably frustrated. The reason being is now you have the freedom to do whatever the hell you want with your situation. You wanna draw a penis bridge? Do it, you can draw anything you want as long as it doesn’t exceed the amount of lines you are allowed to have in the game, and that amount is pretty high.

The thing that really draws me to this game though is the unqiue design, forget flash graphics, forget 3D envoirments, I love the childish setting. The background looks like folded paper, everything is drawn in crayon (well except for the star you’re supose to get). It adds a really warm, homey feeling that makes me remember the older days of drawing stuff in kindergarden. 

Another feature that makes this game just plain great, is the fact that everything is interactive. When you’re not doing a level, you can draw on the level menu different pictures or whatever, and even though this is such a small thing, it’s something others haven’t done before. This game is also quick to challenge you too. I’m only on the end of the second island and I’m already having some troubles with the set-ups.

For an enjoyable experience I recommend you get Crayon Physics, you’ll have having a ball will you draw balls. Having a tablet makes the game 10x more enjoyable because you can draw directly into the game. Still with a mouse the game is amazing and very unique.

For the most part, the graphics are still somewhat the same, there is a slight upgrade, but I still think the original graphics are still good. I know they updated the sound as well, to me it sounds all so much clearer and of course there are the squawking noises some of the characters make when you perform actions, like jumping. If it annoys you so much, there’s always a console command to get rid of it. The only complaint I have is there are no longer any gibs and guts flying all over the place, instead you just get vaporized. I believe this is due to certain countries having something against guts – since this game is international.

The game play is the exact same thing and they haven’t changed a thing, after all, why mess up such a great game? You run, you dodge, you jump, you shoot, you get fragged – all there is to it. To somewhat of my surprise, bunny hopping is in the game as I always thought it was some sort of glitch with the engine but instead it is now encouraged. If you played any another “tactical” shooter before, well you’re going to have a very hard time with this one as it is a completely play style. This game is all about reaction and quick thinking, there’s no time to hide behind corners, it’s time to be constantly on the move and learn how to do split second aiming. There is a bit more skill involved when playing clan arena or duels as then you have to predict what your opponent is going to do next.

Speaking of skill, Quake Live will try to determine the best of your skills when you first start up. Go through a minute obstacle course which consists of jump, rocket jumping, and then bunny hopping to determine your initial placement, and then you have to fight Crash. You know from the first game, the pipsqueak you can frag a million times without breaking a sweat? Yeah well, prepare to get your ass handed to you by her as her difficulty changes on how you play. After all that, you have your skill placement and Quake Live will determine for the most part what games will be best for you. Which is great and all since you won’t be fighting anyone too high or too low for you to handle.

Like I said before, the maps and weapons have been slightly tweaked to better balance them. With the maps, some of the of satanic imagery and such have been replace with giant billboards that say either Quake Live or an advertisement – after the game is free but they still need money. The ads within the game are not inhibiting in anyway so don’t worry; if you are any veteran quake player, you’ll be going way to fast to even notice them.

Since this is a completely multiplayer experience, there’s the online community to look out for. If you read one my of previous articles, you would know I had some sort gripe against the online community in every online game except Quake III and I am so glad the friendliness is still there in Quake Live. Of course there’s the occasional asshole here and there, but the community as a whole is still good – as in good outweighs the bad. Of course, it might different on where you live and since now it is open to the public it might change.

Of course there are some small gripes about one of my favorite games ever, but can’t really pass true judgment since it’s in open beta. For one thing, to actually play, most likely you’re going to have to wait in line to actually do it. Depending on what time of the day it is, it might range from hundreds to ten-thousands of people waiting in line, so it takes anywhere from five minutes to an hour just to get to play. Another thing is, you can’t really start your own server nor have a private one between you and your friends – which I believe is currently being added. Of course, like I said before, there’s just something wrong when I play Quake and there isn’t any flying gibs across my screen. All are really nitpicky stuff and the game is still in beta.

Overall, if you’re a fan of Quake III go play it; if not, go play it anyway – it’s FREE. This game is good, fun, and fast; there is really no need for commitment and there is really nothing to lose besides a measly hour of your time getting it setup. It’s a fun game with a large active community, so I hope I’ll see some of you on the fragging grounds.