Author: aaron-r-conklin

Game developers know that the majority of console gamers—and yes, that includes yours truly—are statistic/achievement/trophy whores. And even the least of Microsoft’s online Gamerscore Nation knows that there’s no quicker way to boost your totals than by popping in a sports game.

EA clearly knows this, too, and it’s a big reason why, as it breaks the line of scrimmage on another anniversary for its annual college football simulator, this year’s big addition to NCAA Football 10 is something called “Season Showdown,” a new mode where you can score (and lose) points on an online leaderboard depending on what you accomplish in-game and—listen up, ’cause this is key—how you play. Rack up the user tackles? Cha-ching—more skill points. Drop your foot on your opponent’s throat by going for a fourth-down touchdown in a game you’re winning by 14 points? You may notch seven, but your display of bad form will cost you sportsmanship points and leaderboard position. I’m guessing pigskin fanatics will be jockeying for more than the student section at Scott Stadium on opening weekend when player-versus-player seasons kick off in August.

In other ways, NCAA Football 10 resembles the Ohio State Buckeyes—a solid outfit that’s achieved a certain level of greatness that often overshadows the fact that it falls a few yards short of national championship-worthy. Specifically, while this year’s offering isn’t the ridiculous interception-fest that NCAA 09 was, it’s not exactly defensively sound, either. Even with the defensive assist feature enabled, it’s still devilishly hard to slow the artificial intelligence’s offense, especially in the secondary, where the defensive backs are still a major liability.

Elsewhere, we get the nominal inclusion of ESPN sideline reporter Erin Andrews in the game’s always enjoyable “Road to Glory” mode—which, given the voyeur scandal surrounding Andrews that broke a few weeks ago, takes on an unintentionally ironic pop-culture sheen. Really, I don’t feel at all dirty when Andrews asks me if I’d like her to follow me as I become a superstar wide receiver at Boise State. Not at all. 

The one thing I could ask for as the series hurtles toward edition double-ones isn’t even something within EA’s control: It’s a long-overdue loosening of the restrictive NCAA policy that prohibits using actual players’ names and representations in videogames. Here’s hoping Ed O’Bannon wins his lawsuit against the NCAA, and we can actually start seeing real players’ names instead of quarterback No. 10 handing the rock off to halfback No. 33.

It’s somehow appropriate that a Guitar Hero expansion featuring Metallica, the band that became the de facto poster child in the early battles against file sharing, should be the most restrictive one yet.  Even though the $60 price tag is the same as what you’d pay for the Guitar Hero World Tour disc, you get about 20 fewer tunes to bang plastic with. And the only downloadable content the virtual versions of Lars Ulrich and company are down with is—you guessed it—the band’s latest release, Death Magnetic. That’s not “Unforgiven,” that’s unforgivable.

That said, metalheads with the coin and inclination to overlook these shortcomings can hardly argue with the game’s setlist. (Also, cranking the volume sure helps.) Not every band can cough up 28 mostly aww-yeah tunes (“One,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “Enter Sandman”), but Metallica can. The game also does a much better job of integrating the band members themselves. Not only do the avatars actually look and act like you’d expect James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett to onstage, each Metallica tune comes with bonus material attached. Throwing in a little Lynyrd Skynyrd (“Tuesday’s Gone”), Judas Priest (“Hell Bent for Leather”) and Thin Lizzy (“The Boys Are Back in Town”) to spice up the setlist hurts so good, too.  

Getting your hands, or rather your feet, on the bonus kick pedal—it was part of a Gamestop pre-order deal, but will be made available more widely—is an absolute must to take advantage of the game’s coolest feature: an expert mode that’ll have your feet kicking through “No Leaf Clover” as if you’ve just been diagnosed with the worst case of restless leg syndrome ever. So much for anyone who’s still screeching that videogames are a sedentary pastime.
 
At this point, your appreciation of Guitar Hero: Metallica depends in part on whether you’ve reached the point of diminishing plastic returns with the whole music-game phenomenon.  But if you’ve somehow forgotten how deep Metallica’s lineup of hits is—perhaps you bumped 3WV off your preset stations list in the Civic?—this is a slick, immersive and, yes, expensive reminder of the band’s influence and scope.  And a great way to psych up for the band’s concert at John Paul Jones Arena in October.

Just remember to leave your plastic guitars at home, fellas. Seriously.

On the heels of three mega-successful first-person shooters, the news that the Halo franchise’s next headline gig would be a real-time-strategy (RTS) game was greeted with about as much enthusiasm among gamers as if Master Chief had announced he’d be starring alongside Joan Rivers in a very special episode of “Celebrity Apprentice.”

The console crowd needn’t have gotten their Spartan helmet straps in a knot. In the hands of veteran PC developer Ensemble, Halo Wars is a strong—if somewhat stripped-down—exercise that really immerses itself in the lore of the Halo universe. 

The story is set 20 years before the events of the original Halo, and boils down to an extended game of Chase The Artifact between UNSC forces and the Covenant. (You can’t play as the Covenant in the campaign mode, only in multiplayer skirmish.) Sometimes mission objectives are linear—advance to point X and destroy Covenant base Y—but at other points, you’ll be forced to divide your armies to defend  a base or fight a war on multiple fronts. Ensemble has also cleverly catered to the Xbox Live Leaderboard crowd by setting up a medal and skull system that rewards efficient strategy and finishing bonus objectives.

The Ensemble title Halo Wars most echoes is Age of Mythology, with devastating Magnetic Accelerator Cannons standing in for Zeus’ lightning bolt attacks. Fortunately, it’s not really any less satisfying to use a MAC to blast a Covenant airship out of the sky before it can drop enemy units into play.

RTS vets who cut their crank-’n’-rush teeth on Ensemble PC classics like Age of Empires may feel initially like they’ve been on the receiving end of a Covenant needler clip. The control scheme is stripped down further than a Warthog parked in South Central L.A.—in the earliest missions, it’s actually possible to score a gold medal by doing nothing more than hitting the left bumper to select your units and the X or Y button to attack whatever’s in front of you.

Eventually, however, the strategic depth emerges. Success in most RTS games usually comes down to who can crank out the resources fastest, but Halo Wars sticks a chain gun in that concept by strictly limiting the size of your bases. At maximum size, you’ll only have eight pods on which to build things like supply bases and reactors, the two major keys to scaling the build trees to the big beat sticks—uberunits like Spartans, Grizzly tanks and airborne Vultures. In other words, don’t rush your early decision making. 

Ensemble’s reward for putting the latest luster on the Halo license was swift and brutal—Microsoft disbanded ’em to bring further project development in-house. Word is that Robot Entertainment, a new shop full of Ensemble vets, will produce downloadable content for Halo Wars. That’s good news—it’ll be fun to see what other corners of the Halo world remain to be explored.

In my mind, the real “hit” sprinkled among the 18 AC/DC classics in this standalone Rock Band expansion isn’t “Hell’s Bells” or “T.N.T.,” but the delicious irony that said track pack is being hawked exclusively at Wal-Mart, the supposed home of apple pie and all-American values. (Same goes for the band’s latest record, Black Ice.) Guess AC/DC’s hard-drinking, drug-addled history fits right in with that whole “Save Money, Live Better” vibe. For those about to shop, we salute you. 

But here’s the thing: While everyone’s talking about how Rock Band and Guitar Hero have “saved” the music business and introduced a new generation of plastic axe-shredders to the joys of ’70s and ’80s rock, I’m watching this sudden spate of exclusive signings and track packs like a bassist who’s down to his last good string. Especially when they’re slapped together like this one, in a $40 package that not only doesn’t feature any digital likenesses of the surviving band members, but doesn’t even let you customize your own rocker. (Unless you import the tunes digitally into your copy of Rock Band or Rock Band 2; sorry, PS2 owners—you’re screwed.)    

Yes, it’s all about the exclusivity and the cash grab, as last week’s announcement that Rock Band has cleared a cool $300 million for developer Harmonix made abundantly clear. While The Beatles and AC/DC are dishing their tunes to Rock Band, the cats at Activision have snapped up Aerosmith and Metallica for Guitar Hero, which effectively means that fans who only have the cash (or the interest, or the space) to invest in one of the two dominant music games are essentially out of luck. It’s like the whole Halo and PlayStation thing all over again, this time with a killer bassline.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Astonishingly, Activision and Electronic Arts have managed to work out an agreement that lets us use the drum sets, guitars and mics with both Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour (but not across console platforms), thankfully saving our living rooms from a nasty plastic apocalypse. So why can’t they agree to share and play nice on this?

Speaking for music-game aficionados everywhere, what we want is what Apple already gives us with iTunes, and what Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network were moving toward: The ability to pay for, download and flip plastic frets to songs we know, love and wanna thrash to. As cool as a Beatles track pack sounds, if it’s only for Rock Band 2, that’s not getting us there.  

In the meantime, AC/DC fans can rock through bare bones, good stuff, if you don’t mind getting live, dialed-down 60-something Brian Johnson vocals instead of the heyday Bon Scott stuff. For the price of four sweet solo sets in “Jailbreak,” it’s a worthwhile if expensive get for fans who feel the urge to break out the schoolboy uniform.  Rock on, dudes.

After years of tweaking, polishing and adding features, the guys at EA Tiburon have finally pinned most of the elements of simulated college football down, leaving the developers free to focus on what really matters.

Mascot games.

No, seriously, while it’s certainly hysterical to watch a front line of Bucky Badgers side-flipping through the hapless Iowa Hawkeyes, the mascot mashup mode isn’t the best new thing about the ’09 edition of EA’s Division 1-A pigskin extravaganza.
 
No, that’d be the new online dynasty mode, a long-overdue feature that fans of the series have been clamoring after for years. Fantasy leaguers will probably do a few side-flips of their own to realize that it’s possible for you and 11 of your Xbox 360-owning pals to run an entire season online with only a couple of glitches. (Let’s just say you’ll want to be careful how you edit and manage your rosters between game sessions.) This is a huge and welcome advance for the series, bringing it into its next generation.

Wreak Cav havoc in the latest—and dare we say greatest?—version of NCAA Football 09.

Just like last year, the graphics here look amazing, with each team’s stadium looking remarkably realistic. EA’s been in love with the concept of home field advantage in its college sports sims for years now, and in NCAA 09, it matters even more. You can pump up or silence the crowd before big plays, and if your quarterback gets rattled enough in that tough road rivalry game—think the Cavs in the fourth quarter at Clemson—your receivers will actually begin to forget their routes on pass plays, and you’ll really be screwed.

Unfortunately, not everything is quite as well implemented or intuitive. Play a handful of games and you’ll begin to notice some of the flaws emerge, like the way ACC teams dominate in October and fall off the charts at bowl time. The way the CPU quarterbacks can complete short passes at will, especially late in games. The alarming lack of sacks you’ll rack up, despite any and all efforts by your linemen to bust spin moves. And the ways the new juke move feature can turn most screen and sideline passes into 80-yard plays after the first tackler whiffs on them.

None of these things are the equivalent of an NCAA death penalty, but they’re the beginning of a sizable laundry list for NCAA “Big” 10, the natural title for next year’s decade edition. Hey, Tiburon: Feel free to send those marketing royalty checks my way.

An appreciation of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series has always depended largely on one simple thing: How do you feel about “cut scenes”?

If you enjoy having your game play routinely interrupted by these 10-minute-to-hour-long animated movies that advance the story, well, you’re in luck: The fourth and final installment in the saga of Solid Snake, the world’s sneakiest covert op, is flush with the rewards-based videos that gamers call “cut scenes”—and they’re all staged with painstakingly beautiful detail, from the sprays of pink mist that erupt from wounded soldiers in the game’s opening Middle Eastern firefight to the ways you can tap the “X’ button and trigger brief flashbacks from Snake’s melodramatic past.

Heavy Metal: PlayStation 3’s Metal Gear Solid 4 proves itself worthy of the hype surrounding it.

It’s fitting that the series finale, a first-class bon voyage with all the graphical and plot-weaving trimmings, is also the PlayStation 3’s first classic game. Thanks to an inexplicable disease, Snake’s aged well before his time, leaving him with an aching back, wrinkled skin and a bitter streak the size of Virginia. Even in his semi-geriatric state, he’ll have to track the war-stirring agenda of his Patriot nemeses, track down Liquid Ocelot and unravel nearly all of the series’ convoluted mysteries and character backstories. If you’re a series veteran, you know that’s no easy task; if you’re not, making this your first foray into the acclaimed Metal Gear universe will result in massive confusion.

Guns of the Patriots improves over its PlayStation 2 predecessor in countless ways, but the most surprising one is this: Snake doesn’t have to sneak. It’s possible, and at times even preferable, to jog through the game’s many fast and furious firefights with all guns a-blazing, especially on the game’s easier settings. A free-wheeling camera system (finally!) helps get the job done, as do two of the coolest toys Snake’s ever gotten his grizzled paws on: the Mark II, a cute little scouting robot that can help find the quickest paths between objectives, and the OctoCamo, a camouflage suit that renders him mostly invisible to enemy fire.

Plenty of games have tried to develop interesting ways for you to upgrade your weapons; dealing with a cola-guzzling monkey and Drebin, his über-slick weapons-hawking master, may be the most inspired of all. Every dropped weapon and ammo clip you pick up—and there are plenty—scores you “Drebin Points,” so it’s sorta like playing around in the perfect armory/candy store.

If there’s a downside to Metal Gear Solid’s excellence, it’s having to suffer through the PlayStation’s intermittent load times to get to the action. But it’s a small price to pay for a game that finally delivers on the PS3’s promise of next-gen gold.

O.K., let’s get one important thing out of the way: Everything you’ve heard is true, both the bad and the good. Grand Theft Auto IV is an absolutely amazing game. Beyond the detail in which Liberty City has been mapped to cop the actual Big Apple, beyond the ways in which the game’s tortured Slavic protagonist, Niko Bellic, transcends the cookie-cutter cartoon killer mold. This is a man with a past and a conscience who ends up having to deal with the consequences of harrowing decisions made along the way to his very own, blood-soaked American Dream.

Developer Rockstar always led the vanguard when it came to giving us this kind of thing, a virtual playground where gamers were finally free to do what we wanted. This time, the menu of options has undergone massive multiplication—from pursuing every last in-game mission to crashing on the couch and watching hilarious parodies of right-wing satellite TV stations, or trolling the game’s version of Craigslist and online dating. As always, it’s the violence and sex  that’ll continue to make headlines, but just like all the other GTA games, there are consequences—and this time, they’re a lot more complex than adding another star to your badass rating and bringing a few more battalions of law enforcement down on your head.

Case in point is the game’s take on drunken driving. Sure, you can do it—much to the loud and infuriated chagrin of MADD—but, aside from the whole “Oh, so that’s how it feels” thing, lurching around the streets like your controller’s been dipped in rubber cement only to be nabbed by the fuzz just isn’t that enthralling.
 
For everything Rockstar did right, it’s only fair (and balanced, for that matter) to flag them for the things that still feel desperately wrong. In a universe in which big-time game development projects didn’t depend on little things like, you know, returns on investment, I could wish that the driving physics didn’t feel like a cross between bumper cars and skiing on the moon. Or, given the number of rounds you’ll pump off in the course of completing the single-player campaign, that the new targeting and autotargeting features approached the ease of just about any console first-person shooter you could name over the last few years.

Ultimately, GTA IV is to gaming what Broadcast News was to TV journalism or Bob Roberts was to presidential campaigns—a pitch-black, scathing funhouse mirror. In this case, the lasting image is of a violence- and media-obsessed culture that’s eating itself while the cameras roll. I’m convinced that’s the real reason why the parenting groups and politicos are so enraged and militant. This is us, guys, and while it’s fun to play and walk away, at the end of the day, it ain’t a pretty reflection.