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Once you get your mind around that one, tricky bend, that hard-to-grasp concept that, no matter where they exist in the world, the two portals act as a single doorway, the universe melts beneath your feet. And then, several levels later, the game really pulls out the rug.
I walked into the freak show tent fully expecting to get robbed. The pictures on the marquee looked compelling, and the suggestions of the man over the PA sounded incredible. He told me I'd be surprised, amazed and even frightened. My imagination ran away with me, and by the time the line wound around to the entrance, I was all too willing to hand over my money to be let inside, to see the chupacabra, the two-headed cow, the live sheep with four horns and the Mongolian Death Worm.
In researching this article I found a disturbing trend that seems to bear itself out across most of the media: Game developers are so uncomfortable with the current situation that they aren't even able to discuss how concerns over violence in video games affects their design philosophies.
To most people, we're all still boys in bedrooms, Peter Pans with joystick thumb who're putting one over on society at large and laughing all the way to the credit union.
Microsoft wanted installation to just work, more uniform interfaces, better community building features, online integration between PCs and consoles, and a unified retail attack to give the platform the cohesive appearance it's sorely lacked. But what we've ended up with is just prettier packaging and a pretty good magazine.
But here I go again. In digesting the experience of playing Halo 3 I keep finding myself stuck in a schizophrenic feedback loop, alternating between thinking it's the greatest game ever made and wishing it were more great.
Every year, the gaming media descends on widely covered conventions like GDC, E3 and the Tokyo Game Show, where great floods of humanity swell and surge while the biggest names in the industry try to convince us that have the skeleton key to gaming bliss. But these are not the only conventions eager public relations masterminds and confident executives attend, and the unseen and largely uncovered conventions have more power to direct the casual consumer than E3 ever has.
The King of Kong's director, Seth Gordon, takes pains to highlight Donkey Kong's early-'80s domination of the arcade scene, as well as the game's notorious difficulty. He doesn't, however, chronicle the near-total decline of the North American arcade since then, or note that Donkey Kong's status in the modern gaming world is that of a low-resolution relic, appreciated mostly for nostalgia and historical value. And Gordon doesn't really have to, because the film's events speak for themselves.
A game is just a game. My Halo 3 pre-order isn't generating interest for anyone but EB/GameStop, and when I finally cash it out next week, it will have instantly depreciated by about 50 percent. This is what we call economics of the stupid.
If WotC isn't aiming to be the Blizzard of the tabletop gaming industry, it's certainly putting on a good show.
That Electronic Arts pretties up the lawsuits brought against it or that Dow Chemical wouldn't want you to know about what happened in Bhopal is both obvious and a great example of why you should be skeptical of anything derived from a source anyone can edit.
"One of the locations we'll be taking you this evening is a construction site," said the NCsoft representative at the front of the bus. "Because they're using blasting caps, there's a very real danger of injury. So we'll need to collect your cell phones."
Russ Pitts takes a trip to Richard Garriott's Castle Britannia and lives to tell the story.
I'm not a religious man in any sense of the word, but I've heard of the Seven Sins. Employed a few of them, even. But in the gamer hierarchy of evil, no sin is greater than envy. It's the yarn entwined into the fabric of our beings. True, we lust after the latest gadgets, games and gewgaws, but show us a picture of someone else possessing that object we covet and all before us turns to red.
BioShock was released four days ago and is already on most publications' "must buy" lists. Reviews are trending toward 10, and everyone who's anyone in game writing has something to say about it. But should you buy it?
We here at Team Humidor think you should make up your own mind, and to that end, have offered up the following reasons to buy (and not to buy) BioShock.
The game opens, literally, with a bang - your airplane crashes - and you find yourself immersed in the world of Rapture before you even know who you are and of what you're capable. This, like so much else about BioShock is a stroke of genius.
