Shooting

No, I Haven't Heard Of Substance. Why?

HIGH Sliding into a wallrun into a dive and scoring five headshots in the process is as cool to watch and perform as it sounds.

LOW "Learning" how to use a shotgun for the third time.

WTF Seriously? You put the plot twist in the manual?

So I finally got around to playing half an hour of Halo 3: ODST last night, and while I'm not planning to write a review of it any time soon, I wanted to comment on the weird experience I had with the game.

I was playing a friend's game, so I just sort of dropped in medias res, and had no idea what was going on plot-wise, so I'm not going to bother commenting on that aspect. What I will say is that for the first fifteen minutes of my playtime I had a blast. So much fun that I couldn't remember why I'd hated Halo 3 as much as I did (by which I mean "not really that much at all").

Been out of action for a while, so I'm catching up on some old news. I did the pre-order deal for Left 4 Dead 2 with three friends, which nets us a discount and the Scout's bat from Team Fortress 2 as a melee weapon. I'm genuinely impressed with what I've seen so far, so hopefully my purchase is justified. In effort to quell some the unrest over the release of the sequel so soon after the original, Valve recently flew two of the most prominent boycotters out to their headquarters for some hands-on time with the game. Now if I'm understanding this correctly, if I complain loudly enough about one of their games Valve will fly me out to their secret bunker and let me play it before anyone else. And so, I'd like to announce my boycott of Half Life 2: Episode 3....

A while ago, my review of the recently-released MMO FPS Section 8 went live. To my surprise, I actually ended up having a very enjoyable time with it, despite not being a fan of the genre.

Although the servers have been full of players every time I've gone online, I don't get the sense that there is a very high level of awareness of this title in the games community—especially in the wake of another recently-released steamroller of an FPS that's had everyone buzzing over the last week. So, as my way of saying "thanks" for making my time reviewing the title worthwhile, I decided to do a follow-up interview as my small effort to help raise Section 8's profile.

No laughing matter

HIGH The Cloud Sephiroh fight.

LOW The rest of the game.

WTF Doing a William Shatner impression does not count as a "joke".

At the most recent PAX show, I was fortunate enough to spend a bit of time with a game I had been greatly anticipating: Dark Void from Washington's own Airtight Games.

Produced in conjunction with Capcom, Dark Void is an adventure game featuring aliens and jetpacks inside the Bermuda triangle. With tight transitions between air and land on top of clever vertical combat, this title is definitely one to watch—it also doesn't hurt that the people behind it are some of the same folks who worked on one of my favorite Xbox titles, Crimson Skies.

Airtight Games' president and creative director Jim Deal was kind enough to spend a few moments talking with me about this upcoming title and I'm quite glad to share what he had to say.

Disclosure: This post has nothing to do with gender, sexism, or the like.

Playing inFamous made me think of other games that I've played where I have the ability to make choices that effect the story or other parts of the game—to be "good" or "evil" so to speak. And after some thought on the subject, I discovered I was hungry and made a sandwich. After that, games such as Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, BioShock, Morrowind/Oblivion, and Fallout 3 came to mind. The question that I pose is this—what makes a good way to allow the player to "choose" their path while not pandering to ideological extremes and still providing an engrossing experience? Ideally I would be able to chose virtually any action I wanted, and have the game respond accordingly regardless of what I chose. Is this even possible? Or has it been done already?

Gives "death from above" a whole new meaning

HIGH The armor design and functions are great.

LOW The single-player mode is over way too soon.

WTF How can it possibly be so hard to land directly on an enemy?