Jeff Gerstmann Senior Editor	Now Playing: Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO (Xbox), Midnight Club II (PS2), Made in Wario (Import, GBA)

SOCOM: SO BROKEN

The high point of Sony's online PlayStation 2 launch lineup was Zipper Interactive's military-themed team-based shooter SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs. SOCOM was an awesome game at the time of its release. Once it got past some launch-week server trouble, the game became extremely addictive and one of the most playable team-based shooters ever released. Unfortunately, since that time, the online game has essentially fallen apart, and it currently sits in a nearly unplayable state.

How could a game that started out so well suddenly fall to pieces? It would appear to be due to a real lack of foresight on the part of Zipper and Sony. Cheating has completely ruined the online portion of SOCOM. Anyone armed with an Action Replay (or, if you're old-school, a GameShark) and some Google skills can quickly and easily find a hefty collection of cheat codes for SOCOM that work in the game's online mode. After spending some time wondering why the people I was shooting simply weren't going down, and listening to my roommate's vocabulary slowly regress to a mixture of cursing and caveman grunts, I began to realize that something was wrong. Eventually it got to the point where the only thing people used the SOCOM headset for was to swear about the game's extreme cheating problem.

If you haven't played SOCOM yet, don't bother. You've missed your window.

Why the hell do companies put out online games without putting in some sort of check for this sort of cheating crap? I'm no programmer, but the few developers I've spoken with about the issue have assured me that putting in some sort of integrity check for online games to prevent them from running when a cheat device is present is a somewhat trivial process. Considering that the difference between doing this and not doing this may make or break an online game's longevity, you would think that more developers would take the extra time to cheat-proof their games.

As it stands now, SOCOM is pretty much unplayable online. It seems like more and more people are discovering the joys of the Action Replay every day, and everyone is too busy yelling into their headsets about how messed up the game is to plan any sort of team-based strategy. The more things that are left on the client side of the client-server equation, though, the easier it is to hack that stuff.

Hopefully next time around--if there is a next time around--Sony and Zipper will take this sort of stuff into consideration and put in some heavier anti-cheat stuff into the network code. And that goes for everyone else, too. If online gaming is really going to take off, it has to be a level playing field. Anyone who buys SOCOM and a Network Adapter today is going to bring those things home, hook them up, and immediately have an unpleasant experience, thanks to the game's cheat problems. And I'd have to guess that a person in that situation would be less likely to be excited about the future of online gaming as a result.