One-button war

In comparison to systems like Pong or Pac-Man, modern games tend to be extremely complicated. An XBox 360 controller has 16 unique inputs, and many of the games for the system shift the meaning of those inputs contextually to multiply the possible ways a player can communicate intention to the game. But the complexity of controllers is a response to increasingly byzantine game systems, of which there are few better examples than the typical real-time strategy game, with its array of resources, buildings, and units. So it's refreshing to play a game that provides some RTS flavor without the need for a poster-sized command summary. Pax Britannica, from my friend Matthew Gallant and the other guys at No Fun Games, offers four-player deathmatch RTS using just one button.

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Prion diseases: protein is enough

Spongiform encephalopathies are transmissible diseases that can have a major economic impact on agricultural exports, and pose a significant challenge for surveillance of the food supply. Scientists generally believe that these diseases are transmitted via a self-propagating, aberrant conformation of the prion protein (PrP). This prion hypothesis suggests that PrP alone should be sufficient to cause symptoms or death. If this hypothesis is true, then it should be possible to reproduce the disease using recombinant proteins expressed in yeast or bacteria. In tomorrow's Science, researchers from Columbus and Shanghai report that they have managed to do this, establishing that PrP alone can account for prion disease transmission.

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The sea of broken dreams

During the initial hype cycle for BioShock 2, the game had the subtitle "Sea of Dreams". The player can find a recording in Siren Alley that ties this name into Dr. Sofia Lamb's view of Rapture itself. The world's brightest and most creative minds were drawn to Ryan's underwater would-be utopia, each trying to remodel its world to fit their own desires. BioShock drew much of its power from depicting the ways those dreams could grow out of control and become malignant obsessions. The sequel, in contrast, builds its world from the dreams that died. In many ways, the subject of BioShock 2 is failure.

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Why I used to love Santa Destroy

In Suda 51's No More Heroes, I loved the city of Santa Destroy. That's a controversial position, because Santa Destroy bored almost everyone else to tears — the excision of the city from the sequel, Desperate Struggle, was met with almost unanimous praise. Judged strictly by its impact on the gameplay, the town had few redeeming features, and there's not much point in disputing that. But Santa Destroy had value to No More Heroes in other ways. In excising it, the sequel lost something.

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What price eternity?

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks died of an incredibly fast-growing and invasive uterine cancer. She is still alive today, making vital contributions to our understanding of cancer and cellular biology. How a dead, uneducated black woman continues to live and provide valuable scientific insights, and why her children and grandchildren have not benefited from her legacy, is the subject of Rebecca Skloot's new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (which you can buy from Amazon here).

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Regrettable steps

So, the spam has finally gotten to be a bit too irritating. I am leaving anonymous commenting available, but the CAPTCHA is on for at least the time being to see if that suppresses the spam. I have also posted a formal Comment Policy, as well as a Page of Shame describing my most irritating comment spam. Sorry for anyone who is inconvenienced by the CAPTCHA: consider this post to be the place for leaving complaints about that or the comment policy.
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Choosing what to complain about

My review of The Saboteur has gone live at GameCritics.com (spoiler alert: I really liked it!) after a modestly torturous rewrite. It's a vastly larger game than any I've reviewed before at that site, which led to an enormous imbalance between my notes and the size of the review. I spent almost 48 hours in the world of The Saboteur, which means I have many pages of notes that had to be boiled down significantly before I could get anywhere near a readable size. Games like this are so large that reviews could easily become a ponderous, ten-page affair, and there are a number of sites that don't put any reins on that kind of approach. Those bloated, feature-counting reviews are, in my opinion, part of the reason that game criticism has been slow to grow beyond software criticism. Yet, games are software, and they often have bugs or shortcomings that become increasingly obvious as more time is spent with them. A game like The Saboteur has tons of little things wrong with it, and some of the other games I've reviewed had a few little things wrong with them. When I write the review, I discard most of those criticisms, but I can imagine somebody reading those reviews and wondering why I didn't talk about problem X.

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Capsule: The Sky Crawlers - Innocent Aces

Final Status: Completed all main story missions on various difficulties

Put This on Your Box: It's Top Gun meets World War II!

Most Intriguing Idea: Making an arcade flight sim that controls somewhat like an actual airplane.

Best Design Decision: The tactical maneuver commands — done right, there's nothing wrong with "Press A for Awesome".

Worst Design Decision: Brevity.

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Storytelling in Silent Hill

My review of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories went up last week at gamecritics.com, and I really regret that I had to pan it. The game had some good ideas buried in it, but the overall experience was just miserable, oscillating wildly between deadly boredom and screaming frustration. I covered most of the gameplay issues I had in the review, but I only lightly touched on the positives and negatives of the game's storytelling. My reason for this is that it's difficult to talk about what's really going on in the story without revealing the game's central twist. I think it's unfair to even slightly spoil a game in a review (I felt I had to change the review's subtitle for just this reason), and like many Silent Hill games the twist at the end is profoundly important to the player's experience. Here on the blog I don't feel so much restraint, however, and I think it's worth discussing what the game gets right and wrong in terms of the characters, locales, and echo messages. That means the following discussion has massive spoilers, so be forewarned.

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Glitches in the Animus

I think it's fair to say that one of the things Assassin's Creed II is about is immersion. The fiction of the game concerns a completely immersive virtual world reconstructed from one character's DNA, which allows him to inhabit the bodies of his ancestors. The game world itself is constructed to resemble, with startling fidelity, famous locations in Italy. The game also adopts a 3rd-person open-world approach that produces at least a competent illusion of player agency in the game world. Genuine player immersion is, at least with present technology, an unreachable goal, and so of course Assassin's Creed II never manages to achieve it. What struck me during the course of play, however, was how many times the game simply gave up on the pursuit, falling back on old game tropes that betray the illusion, despite how easily this could have been avoided.

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Haiti

I can barely imagine a worse place for a devastating earthquake to hit than Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. Even worse, the main shock originated very close to its largest city, Port-au-Prince, and nearby aftershocks are continuing. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, died in the earthquake itself, and given the lack of infrastructure even more may perish in the near future from disease and starvation. Many of the nation's most significant structures (including the National Palace) have been destroyed, its slums have been flattened, and many of the buildings still standing have suffered irreparable damage and will have to be demolished.

You can help the survivors by donating to the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Partners in Health. Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti is also taking donations for earthquake relief. I know as well as anyone how hard things are right now. I know a lot of my readers are unemployed, or living on a limited budget. Small donations add up, though, and much of what will be desperately needed in Haiti in the coming weeks and months comes very cheap. If you can spare $50, that's great, but if you can only spare $5, give that. No matter how bad your lot is right now, I can guarantee you it's better than living in a shattered country without power, food, medicine, or clean water.

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The ones I'll remember

It's the end of a decade, which means a vast array of retrospectives for video games and movies and whatever the hell else. Assembling a "best of" list for games is a tricky and probably futile task, especially for a one-man show like this site. Games take too long to play, are too diverse in their experiences, and are spread across too many expensive platforms for one man to sample everything that might be a classic, or even everything that other people think is classic. Besides that issue, many games that are awesome experiences at the time trickle out of your mind to be forgotten until you see the case sitting on your shelf. So this is not the definitive best-of-the-decade list, nor is it even my best-of-the-decade list. This is my best-remembered list. These are the games I think about when I play other games, when I'm reading books, when I'm watching television. They are the games that have stuck in my mind long after I removed the disc from the tray, the games I think of playing again at least once a week. I'm not sure they're the best games of the decade, or even the best games of their respective years of release, but they're the games I'll remember.

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