At this point, it seems likely that Gordon Freeman is going to win GameSpot's All Time Greatest Game Hero contest.

This is the wrong choice. There is only one right answer to the question, "Who is the all-time greatest game hero?" That answer is Mario.

You may think that this is a matter of opinion. I am not so sure. To quote Roger Ebert, "There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact." Whether the original Star Wars trilogy or the Lord of the Rings trilogy is better is a question of opinion. Whether Citizen Kane or Boat Trip is better is a question of fact. You might enjoy Boat Trip more, that's fine. But if you think that Boat Trip is the better film, you're simply wrong, in the same way that you're wrong if you think a painting of dogs playing poker is a better work of art than the Mona Lisa.

I am not saying that Mario is the greatest game hero of all time because I'm a slavish fan of all things Mario. I am not. I've barely played Super Mario 64, for instance, and didn't care for Sunshine much at all.

But from a historical perspective, I don't see how any other answer can stand up.

Mario has been there from almost the earliest days of video games. He was Jumpman, for crying out loud, in 1981's seminal Donkey Kong. Since then, the number of excellent, important, and innovative games in which he has starred outstrips the number featuring any other hero by a tremendous margin. I'm not going to start listing them. I think they are already very well-known to most people who will read this blog.

This is not to take anything away from Gordon Freeman. I'm a huge fan of the Half-Life games. But Mario he is not. You can certainly have enjoyed the Half-Life games more than all of the Mario games put together. But the Half-Life games, while certainly important and influential, have not had the same degree of impact on gaming's history as games starring Mario. No other hero's games have.

---

As long as I'm on the topic of greatness, let me also address a recent argument, made on ABC News, that Metroid Prime is the Citizen Kane of games.

Here is an actual sentence from the text version of that argument, which achieves a kind of zen-like beauty in its perfect absurdity:

"In the same way that Citizen Kane harnessed every technical component in film to express its post-mortem reassembly of an irrepressible and heartbroken man, Metroid Prime uses all of its technology to recreate the experience of a woman abandoned on an alien world inhabited by the ghosts of its prelapsarian inhabitants."

To see the ABC News piece, complete with a reaction that sums up my own feelings pretty well, check out this Rev Rant at Destructoid. (Warning: contains adult language.) For a skillful textual destruction of the Metroid Prime = Citizen Kane argument, I highly recommend this piece by Anthony Burch.

I'm all for games being viewed with more legitimacy by the mainstream press. Making absurd claims like this one, though, is not the way to go about it. In fact, as someone who wants games to be taken more seriously, I find arguments like this embarrassing. When people go on ABC News of all places and make patently ridiculous arguments like this one, it makes me want to scream, "Dude, YOU'RE NOT HELPING!"

Let games be great on their own terms. Don't try to compare a game about a space bounty hunter who goes around shooting things to one of the richest, most influential and complex films of all time. Please, just don't.

It may seem a tad early to start talking about the best games of the decade, but I went in to Starbucks today and they're already serving the damn pumpkin spice latte, which is the official sign for me that this decade is on its way out.

Over the next few months, my plan is to write a new entry about my favorite games of the decade, whenever the heck I feel like it. To kick things off, I'm going to write about my favorite downloadable game.

I'm old enough to remember the heyday of arcades. In the early 1980s, games were all about proving yourself, about seeing how you stack up against the competition, people like JIM and AAA and the fabled ASS. And no one separated the wheat from the chaff quite like Pac-Man.

I'm painting in pretty broad strokes here, but it seemed to me that over time, gaming in general became less about testing your skills and measuring yourself against the competition, and more about experiences that nearly everyone could enjoy and complete, if they put in the time and effort. Oh, you beat A Link to the Past? Well, I beat it better than you did! Oh yeah? Prove it. It's certainly true that the competitive spirit flourished in arcades as fighting games rose to prominence, but I always found this genre intimidating and inaccessible. I preferred the simplicity and anonymity of games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. (Interestingly, my appreciation for fighting games has developed quite a bit in recent years, and Street Fighter IV is one of my favorite games of this year. But I digress.)

Throughout the latter part of this decade, though, as online services became more sophisticated and leaderboards more commonplace, there has been a renaissance of straightforward, challenging games where the focus is on scoring more points than everyone else. There have been a slew of excellent titles that fit this bill; the Geometry Wars games would probably be the first choice for most people, and my favorite from this year's offerings is the captivating Shatter. My personal pick for best in category for the 2000s, though, would be Pac-Man: Championship Edition.

Pac-Man: CE takes everything that made Pac-Man one of the most compulsively playable games of all time, and makes it better. It's faster, moving at a speed that just feels right, and it makes the original feel stiff in comparison. The clock is always ticking, creating a new sense of pressure to cram as many points as possible into each moment. The field of play is constantly evolving. The trance-like music is a perfect accompaniment to the zen-like sense of focus one feels when fully engrossed in the action. (Oh, how I love that sense of focus.) And the visuals are stunning; everything is infused with a neon glow that somehow makes the game more reflective of my memories of playing the original in dimly-lit, cacophonous arcades than the original itself.

Of course, it helped immensely that I had a few terrific players to test my skills against. Aaron Thomas, Carrie Gouskos and I engaged in a friendly but very hard-fought battle on the leaderboards, giving me more incentive than I might have otherwise felt to really get good at the game, making victory all the sweeter and defeat all the more crushing. Few experiences I've had with games can match the exhilaration I felt when pulling ahead in the final few seconds, or the sinking feeling when a single slip-up several minutes into a game turned a shot at triumph into a wasted opportunity.

I'm at a respectable 579 on the global leaderboards, and I don't think I have it in me to ever go back and try for better. I lived and breathed this game for a little while. I gave it everything I had. It tested me, and it punished me, and there were times when I hated it, but even when I hated it, I loved it. I can't go back, but I'll never forget the experience.

The high score battle is back, hopefully to stay. There could have been no one better to lead its triumphant return than the Man who helped kick it off in the first place.

I just tossed up some quick thoughts on the whole "Should we boycott Shadow Complex?" question. Given the topic's political nature, I felt my personal blog was a more appropriate place to post it. If interested, you can check out my thoughts here.

EDIT: If you are going to comment here, please do me the courtesy of reading my blog entry first. I welcome comments here but only if they are actually in response to my entry on this issue. Thanks.

I've been off from work this past week, taking a mandatory furlough, like many people are having to do in these harsh economic times. While I am hoping to go on an exciting trip or two in the not-too-distant future, as I wasn't being paid this week, I didn'twant tospend too much money, so I stayed in town. That doesn't mean I didn't have a kind of vacation, though. I've visited the following exotic and exciting destinations during my time off:

Big Surf Island:I was absolutely mad about Burnout Paradisewhen it first came out, and Big Surf Island has gotten me pumped about it all over again. The island is a bit smaller than I imagined it would be, but it's positively packed with outrageous jumps and all the other stuff that makes Paradise such an exhilarating game. The dune buggies you find there are a blast to drive, too, with a great rough-and-ready feel to their handling. I've already completed 40/45 billboards, 13/15 mega jumps and 74/75 smashes. I just know that finding that last one is going to be a real pain. I also have just one event left to complete: a stunt run. Those are the bane of my existence. I'm not generally a completionist, but Paradise compelled me to get 100%, and I know I won't stop until I've jumped every jump, smashed every smash and every billboard, won every event and ruled every road on Big Surf Island, in both the Time Road Rules and Showtime (AKA Katamari CarCrashy AKA Michael Bay Directs a Car Wreck) modes. It's good to be back in Paradise.

The Ring: When I was a kid, I could beat Mike Tyson without breaking a sweat. It seems my reflexes aren't what they used to be. My current record in Punch-Out!!is an embarrassing 20-67, and I'm currently facing Don Flamenco in the title defense section of the game. But I don't mind. On the contrary, I'm very pleased that the game is so challenging. It goes easy on you for a while, but once you get to defending your belt, Punch-Out!! is no joke. At this point, the bouts are tough enough to quite literally get my pulse racing, and each victory feels like an accomplishment. It's hard in much the same way that the NES game was hard,but I think it's harder, thanks to more complex attack patterns from your opponents, which you need to learn during the first phase of your career and then completely re-learn during title defense. If the game had ended when I'd won the world championship, I would have felt like I could have better spent that $50, as fun as the experience was up to that point. But this game has proven to have lasting value and to keep the excitement comin'. I'm thrilled to see this franchise get reinvigorated like this. If only the game shouted "BODY BLOW! BODY BLOW!" like the arcade games did, it would be just about perfect.

Unnamed Middle Eastern Country:In the past I've never really been one to spend much time with online shooters, but I've gotten back into Modern Warfare's online multiplayer in a big way this week. I don't consider myself to be all that great at shooters so I generally shy away from exclusively team-based games like Gears of War 2's multiplayer (that way I can't let any other players down) but free-for-all deathmatch in CoD4 is so exceptional, I keep coming back to it again and again.It's easily the online shooter I've enjoyed the most. Here's a question for anyone here who might play this game online: If I play exclusively free-for-all deathmatch, is it worth it for me to spring for the map pack that contains Creek, Broadcast, Chinatown and Killhouse?

Temeria: This compelling land is the setting of The Witcher, which I downloaded off of Steam this week. I'm utterly taken with the setting, which is rather unlike the setting of any other fantasy RPG I've played, It feels rougher, more lived-in and worn, bleaker, and more believable. I haven't yet been able to spend as much time as I would like with the mysterious Geralt of Rivia, but you can bet I'm eager to do so.

The Sprint Studio: Lastly, I've been enjoying the beta season of 1 vs. 100on Xbox Live. The game itself couldn't be simpler, but I'm excited about the way it's being implemented. I think the opportunity to join a live game that's being played by tens of thousands of other players, that involves answering trivia questions rather than, say,killing orcs and earning loot, is really exciting. (It helps that I am a huge sucker for trivia questions.) I also like the fact that up to four people can play from a single console, as it just feels like a party game that would be way more fun when shared with friend. In fact, I think I'm gonna invite some friends over for some pizza and beer and 1 vs. 100 one of these weekends.

I also want to say just a few things about E3.

When I was a kid, it really bothered me if someone abused a stuffed animal, even though I was well aware that the thing had no feelings of its own. Apparently there's still part of me that harbors that irrational perspective, as the first thing I imagined after seeing the Milo demonstration was thousands of people unleashing verbal abuse at their Milos. It made me sad. Apparently Milo won't respond to abuse, though, so that's good. Maybe if it's utterly pointless, people won't bother to engage in it. Of course, I'm assuming that Milo is actually going to be as amazing as it appeared in the demo, but then, I have no reason to doubt that it will be. After all, it was presented by Peter Molyneux of all people.

There are too many games I'm excited about to mention, but one annoucement I'm particularly intrigued by is Metroid Other M. As a huge fan of most of the 2D Metroid games, I always felt that theMetroid Prime games really missed one hugely important aspect of what makes Samus so much fun to play: she's quick and agile. Metroid Other M looks primed to rectify this issue in a big way, so I'll be keeping my eyes on that one.

So, how 'bout you? What are you playin'? Any E3 announcements strike you as particularly promising or exciting?

Greetings from Tijuana, Mexico, where the thing to do on a Saturday night is stay in your room writing entries in your blog! This is not a list in which I'm arguing that these are the very best games of the year. There were too many games I didn't get to play for me to make those kinds of arguments (I've barely scratched the surface in Fallout 3--PUN INTENDED!) and anyway I'm not interested in making them. This is a quick and dirty, off-the-top-of-my-head celebration of the games I personally enjoyed the most.

For me, the area where games saw the most dramatic advancement in 2008 was narrative. My two favorite games each, in their own way, set a new standard for the kinds of stories games can tell, and how those stories can be told, while also delivering outstanding gameplay.

My favorite game of the year is Grand Theft Auto IV. Games have faced me with choices before, but never have the choices been so difficult, troubling and impactful as they are in Rockstar's masterpiece. In its stylized, thrillingly alive depiction of contemporary New York City, complex protagonist Niko Bellic's journey is not just a shootout-filled crime epic, though it certainly is that. It's also a story about class, culture, loss, revenge, forgiveness, and that most elusive of all concepts: the American dream. I'm not saying this game is The Wire. I am saying it cuts deeper and truer than any other game into the America we live in now, and I was mesmerized from start to finish by nearly every aspect of the game, and how they all came together to create an experience that was as thought-provoking and emotionally affecting as it was viscerally thrilling.

In my number two spot is a game that tells an altogether different kind of story. While one could imagine the tale of GTA IV working as a novel or film--albeit without those difficult, all-important choices, the Metal Gear Solid games, and MGS4 in particular, are uniquely gamey in the tales they tell and the techniques they employ to tell them. MGS 4 is such a monumental success, such a powerhouse conclusion to this series that for me it redeems even the weakest moments of the previous MGS games. MGS 4 is somewhat accessible to even first-time players of the series, but it really shines as a tremendous piece of fan service for those who have been fascinated with every aspect of Solid Snake's long, labyrinthine odyssey. My favorite example of both the gamey storytelling and the deeply interwoven fan service are the X-button flashbacks that frequently pop up during the game's cutscenes. I was frequently surprised and even oddly moved by the connections that were woven throughout this game to past games in the series in the form of brief visual and aural flashbacks. It gave the storytelling a rather stream-of-consciousness feel, as if we were inside Snake's mind, remembering aspects of the past along with him as his journey draws toward what he knows, as his body starts to give out on him, are his final days. Of course, all of this virtuosic storytelling would be for naught if the gameplay wasn't any good, but it is absolutely excellent. Unforgettable setpieces abound, and the final brutal fistfight is a near-perfect sendoff of one of the greatest heroes and one of the greatest villains in video game history, that brilliantly evokes all of the games in this landmark series.

Of course, games are still, first and foremost, about the gameplay, and one of my favorite games of the year has no narrative at all to speak of, save what my imagination conjures up. Rock Band 2 is an endlessly exhilarating fantasy fulfillment machine. I understand that it's not a huge advancement over its predecessor, but the whole Rock Band experience was new to me the day I brought home my RB2 bundle. I've already spent many hours getting lost in the music while playing drums for The Intellivisions, and I hope to spend many more. The people behind this game really understand the culture of rock, and everything about it feels right, from the ambiance of the gigs to the iconic images on loading screens of your band, and your band's name on lunchboxes, bumper stickers and the like.

And then there's the chilling Dead Space, which builds on the framework of Resident Evil 4 by adding some uniquely sci-fi elements like vacuums and zero-g environments, and takes place on a ship so richly detailed and haunting, it feels like you've stepped into a really, really good Ridley Scott movie.

I also want to give special recognition to Fable II. It's a thoroughly enjoyable game whose storybook vibe is very charming, and whose various elements--questing, developing your character's combat and magic attributes, shaping your character's moral role in the world, and buying and selling property, come together to make for a surprisingly compelling, addictive experience. On a personal note, I also love the tacit implication in the game that gay people should be treated as equals in society and granted the same freedom to express their commitment to each other with a bond of marriage that straight people enjoy. Ah, what a ridiculous fantasy world Albion is.

My odd game out for the year is Little Big Planet, which I found absolutely enchanting in the days after its release and would not have hesitated to place on this list. Many user-created levels knocked my socks off with their beauty and inventiveness. Then things got unpleasant as many of the very best levels were nuked by Sony, in many cases for no clear reason. This left a pretty nasty taste in my mouth about the whole experience. I've heard that things have improved since then, but I haven't yet found the time to hop back into my pod and see what's new in the LBP.

I'm giving honorable mention to No More Heroes, Suda51's exhilaratingly original, audacious Wii action game. Fascinating characters, stylish lo-fi graphics, a dizzying story, excellent use of the Wii remote, and tons of fun, ludicrously bloody action. Brilliant.

And Gears of War 2 also deserves recognition. As dumb as Cliff Bleszinski's "Bigger, better and more bad-ass" phrase sounds, it's nonetheless accurate. Gears of War 2 improves upon its predecessor in just about every way, featuring action on a larger scale and a story that's nice and ignorable rather than one whose in-your-face stupidity actually hurts the experience of playing the game. Heck, there was even a cutscene in this game I found rather moving. With a slew of terrific cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes, Gears 2 is an outstanding package.

This was also an amazing year for downloadable games, both in terms of remakes of classics and original titles. My favorite update is Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, which improves the visuals of the 14-year-old cIassic so that they look spectacular in high definition, and polishes up the gameplay, but also demonstrates just how well the fundamental game still holds up.

My favorite original downloadable game, and one of my favorite games of the year in any category, is Braid. It's a brilliant, beautiful puzzler that's not quite like anything I've played before. It's challenging but consistently, unfailingly logical, and each time I thought I might have to break down and look at a FAQ, I instead put the game aside for a day, and when I returned to it, looking at the situation with fresh eyes, the solution was immediately apparent. To bring us full circle, it's also one of the most challenging and rewarding narratives I've encountered in a game, dealing with regrets on both a personal and historic scale, with a jaw-dropping climax that gave me goosebumps and left me feeling utterly amazed.

I think it's hard for people who are too young to remember what arcades used to be like, who are too young to remember SFII's heyday, to understand what a massive impact this game had. I remember riding bikes with friends to the local 7-Eleven to crowd around the Street Fighter II machine, just to watch people who hung out there all day test their skills against each other. What a tremendous, exciting phenomenon it was. But as much as I enjoyed watching others play, I hardly ever played it myself. I think I shied away from competition. At that age I had a tendency to beat myself up for not being very good at things, rather than taking it all in stride and trying to get better. I had no problem testing my skill at single-player games--I thrived on it, even--but something about going head-to-head against other people just intimidated me at that age. And of course the depth of its competitive play is what made Street Fighter II so extraordinary.

When the original Street Fighter II was released for the SNES, my friend Scott and I went to the Software, Etc. at the previous incarnation of the Sherman Oaks Galleria so he could pick it up. This would have been around July of 1992, I guess. And they charged some outrageous price for it. I think it may even have been as high as eighty bucks. If I'd known, I could have told him that an even better version of the game would be made available for play on a home console for the much lower price of $15.00, if he would only be patient and wait 16 years, until he was married with a kid and had hardly any time to play games anymore!

Now here we are, in 2008, and the gameplay of Street Fighter II, a bit refined but essentially the same, still totally stands up. Something about that just warms my heart. And I love the way this updated version of the game looks. Truthfully, this updated version of a nearly nineteen-year-old game is one of my favorite games to look at on my spectacular new humongous 32" HDTV! It looks like a comic book in motion. But unlike 19 years ago, I no longer just sit back and watch. I love playing it, too, even though I'm not very good. I certainly won't be fighting Akuma any time soon. But hey, there's only one way to get better.

I'm positively overwhelmed by great games at the moment, some purchased, some GameFlown. I still need to spend a lot more time with Little Big Planet, and I've barely scratched the surface of Fallout 3. Tonight, I spent some time fending off waves of Locust with friends in Gears of War 2's terrific Horde mode, but the campaign remains mostly untouched.

The game that keeps pulling me away from all the others is Dead Space. I know this is common knowledge, but man, is this game outstanding. It doesn't reinvent the survival horror genre--you can feel the influence of Resident Evil 4 throughout--but it provides an absolutely remarkable setting and tosses in enough pure sci-fi elements to set it squarely apart from RE4 or any other game. Fighting enemies in zero-gravity environments is deliciously disorienting, and the way the sound effects contribute to the experience of running through a vacuum as your oxygen rapidly depletes has to be heard to be appreciated. Putting enemies in stasis and then blasting their appendages off and seeing them slowly twist through the air is strangely beautiful.

In fact, nearly everything about the game is strangely beautiful. The Ishimura actually feels like a once-functional spaceship, and the level of detail makes me feel like I've stepped into a Ridley Scott movie. The sound design equals the visuals in every way, with the ship clanging convincingly and the eerie echo of once-important PA announcements haunting the halls. And although the story seems like pure Event Horizon stuff, it's still told in a way that has me wanting to find out how it's all going to end, with the slick, insane Dr. Mercer giving the gruesome evil a compelling human face, and enough eerie hallucinations to give the game's horror a psychological edge.

Most of all, the game's action is what has me so hooked right now. It's difficult and satisfying, it's constantly introducing new enemies and new elements, and it always has me feeling like I'm fighting for my life.

This is one of my favorite games of the year.

I had posted a political blog here in reaction to last night's events. I've decided this may not be the most appropriate place for it, but if you'd like to read it, you can find it here at my personal blog. Thanks.

http://agameofme.blogspot.com/2008/11/step-forward-step-back.html

I picked up Little Big Planet last night, and after playing through the game's delightful introduction and a few of the story levels, I decided to dive right in to some user-created content. Since it was my first foray into the realm, I opted to see what people had done with subject matter I was familiar with. I was really surprised and delighted by the quality of some of the stuff I stumbled upon.

There were two levels that I felt were particular standouts. One was called something like God of War-Demon Skull Temple. Seeing the brutality of God of War inventively distilled into a Little Big Planet level was an absolute delight.

The real "wow" moment for me, though, was playing Batman: Mission Arkham. It's not a particularly complex level in gameplay terms, but the moody theatricality of it, and the number of wonderful little Bat-details the creator had included, really convinced me that creative designers can do some amazing things with LBP. And if people continue to create outstanding content like this, LBP might be a game worth coming back to for a long, long time.

Have you played any user-created levels you felt were particularly excellent?

So, iPhones. When they were first released, they were, in my opinion, outrageously expensive. But now they are considerably more affordable, and not only that: they're suddenly everywhere. I can no longer ride BART or wait in line at a coffee shop without seeing people looking at pictures, checking their email, and doing things I probably can't even begin to imagine with the magical device. I can do some of these things on my phone too, but not as well, and seeing people drag and whisk and manipulate things on their iPhone screens is enough to make me feel like I've stepped onto the set of a science-fiction film.

And they seem like not just really fun little gadgets, but perhaps, legitimately useful communication devices. Hell, I still send text messages by tapping out letters on my phone's number pad, hitting 4 once for G, twice for H, thrice for I. Oh, I don't even want to think about how many hours I've sunk into hitting 4 thrice for I!

But I'm still on the fence a bit, trying to decide if I should get one soon, put it off for a while, or maybe don't even need one at all. (Well, I'll probably get one eventually, unless there's a better option out there.) If any iPhone owners are willing to share, I'd love to hear from you about your experience with the device--maybe your favorite things about it, how it makes your life easier, or your favorite apps, whether for usefulness or just plain fun. (I looked at the app store and there seems to be just an insane amount of stuff available.) And if there are any naysayers out there, I'd love to hear from you as well.

"HOW DISBARRED IS HE???"

Jack Thompson is so disbarred, he can't even shout "Objection!" into the microphone on his DS!

That was my contribution to Lore Sjoberg's call for "Jack Thompson is so disbarred..." jokes on Twitter yesterday, which wound up getting a mention on kotaku. There's a good chance you've never heard of Lore Sjoberg, but I'm a fan of the internet humorist and cofounder of the late, great Brunching Shuttlecocks website. (Hey, neat! Your Roommate Plays the Indigo Girls is still up, along with all their other hilarious material! Man, that takes me back. Okay, now I feel old.)

I had gotten to Splash Woman--my first boss encounter of Mega Man 9. This came after a reasonably tough level with a few tricky platform jumps near the end that, at first glance, had me saying "You've got to be ****ing kidding me." But I'd managed those, and I had two lives left to contend with the boss. On my first go, I got her health down to about one third, but a few hits from that nasty trident of hers finished me off. On my second chance, my last life of the game, I came out strong. I wore her down considerably with my trusty pea shooter. I got her down to a fraction of her total health. Victory was within my grasp. And then, she fired a few bolts from her trident, I zigged when I should have zagged, and it was all over. I had been so close, and now I'd have to do the whole level all over. I actually cried "Nooooooo!" I was totally invested in the game, and isn't that one of the marks of a great gameplay experience?

So, yes, in a sense, I hate Mega Man 9. But I love to hate it. This is hard the way games used to be hard, and it is definitely a virtue. Its difficulty is a big part of what makes it so compelling, and what makes victory so thrilling. I recently played a game called Commando: Steel Disaster, and that game is difficult to a fault. I started thinking about what makes the difficulty in Mega Man 9 such a big part of the game's excellence, while the difficulty in Steel Disaster is its biggest flaw. The differences are subtle but significant. Mega Man 9, at least so far, in my limited experience with it, does what many of the great 8-bit games of old did: it hits that sweet spot between frustration and fun, giving you just enough encouragement so that the difficulty actually spurs you on, makes you want to try and try again, to get better and ultimately show the game who's boss, while a game like Steel Disaster just bludgeons you into submission with its difficulty.

Of course, it's not just the difficulty that makes the game so much fun. It's the inventive level design, the catchy music, the beautiful graphics. (Yes, I said beautiful.)

Desperate to put at least one boss away, I decided to move on to Galaxy Man. In addition to having those cute little hard hat guys we all know and love from the cIassic Mega Man games, this level has these annoying dudes who try to grab you and carry you straight into the nearest wall of spikes. At one point, after being grabbed and knowing that my doom was inevitable, I once again cringed as the wall drew closer, trying desperately but pointlessly to escape, and again I cursed the game as Mega Man exploded for something like the zillionth time since he made his debut. It was a great moment.

I made it to Galaxy Man, though, and he was a piece of cake, so at least I put one of the bosses down before going to sleep, which I should have done a few hours ago since I need to be at work at 6 AM tomorrow. So, I'm off to bed.

But as for Splash Woman, rest assured, she's goin' down.

I often hear people say that they think Twitter is stupid. My response to them is always the same. "How the heck else are we supposed to keep tabs on Wil Wheaton?!" That usually shuts them up pretty quickly.

In actuality, I get that Twitter is kind of silly if you're just broadcasting the mundane minutiae of your life to a bunch of strangers, but I signed up for it a while back because it was a neat way for me and friends who I don't get to see very often to keep in touch and share moments that you sometimes want to share as they're happening. But, along with tweeting about the mundane minutiae of my life, I also occasionally drop a line or two about this game or that. It's not thrilling stuff, but if your life would somehow be more fulfilled by reading me gush about Pure's graphics or comment on the action in Yakuza 2, feel free to follow me. Just be ready to hear me whine about how the Chinese place at the food court only takes cash, too.

Okay, okay, so Pure isn't technically an SSX game, but the demo sure felt like "SSX on ATVs," and as someone who laments the lack of new SSX games of late, to me that was a very good thing. The SSX series represents some of the best times I ever had with my PS2, and Pure seems poised to deliver a similar adrenaline rush. ATVs aren't nearly as alluring to me as snowboards, but it's the gameplay that matters most, of course.

It's very rare for a demo to sell me on a game, and admittedly it was something of an impulse buy, and it's not like I have much time to play games just to play games these days, but I'm still looking forward to squeezing in some time with Pure soon, and seeing if the full game can live up to the promises made by the demo.

UPDATE: After playing it for a little over an hour, my impression is that Pure is totally, unabashedly, deliberately "SSX on ATVs." The timing of the tricks seems maybe a bit...trickier, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, I always felt it was perhaps a bit too easy in the SSX games. Then again, maybe I just haven't learned the tracks in Pure well enough yet to know what jumps give me the time to pull of uber-tricks, and so I keep screwing up. But anyway, I like it so far. It sort of fills the SSX-shaped hole in this console generation.

I remember once, when I was very young, I was playing Pac-Man on the Atari 5200, and something strange happened. The screen started filling with all sorts of odd characters, and, most disturbing of all, Pac-Man himself suddenly appeared at many times his normal size, all blocky and distorted. It seems silly, I know, but I was legitimately disturbed by this. I had no idea what was happening. I believed in the world of Pac-Man, that when I put the cartridge into my 5200 and turned on the power, I was creating a place that was real and stable. This event shook my faith in that world to the very core. Suddenly everything seemed very fragile, as our own universe will no doubt seem to us all in those microseconds or eons in which it is being sucked into a black hole created by the Large Hadron Collider.

You'd think that, all these years later, I'd be better able to deal with stuff like this. Turns out, not so much. Last night, I finished Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, a thoroughly fun and captivating adventure game (I could have done without an appearance from the pale white wall-crawling creatures from The Descent, but that's a minor issue). After finishing the game, I decided to look at some of the bonus materials. One set of images was called Bloopers, and it showed odd moments during the development of the game. This consisted of things like a screenshot of Nathan Drake with his upper body squished and his legs extended to ridiculous proportions, and an image of the heroine Elena with her eyes and mouth floating outside of her head. This stuff, on some level, legitimately creeps me out. Sure, I don't mind seeing Nathan get shot to death or impaled on spikes countless times, but show me an image of his head looking like it's been run through a cartoon steamroller and I lose it. It's still the same old feeling I got when my 5200 went on the fritz when I was a kid. I believe in the world of the game, in its characters, in the rules that seem to govern it. I become somehow invested in it, and while I'm playing the game, it is, in a sense, real to me. Being shown just how fragile and, in fact, unreal it is--it just gives me the willies.

I finished watching The Wire last night. I just wanted to share a few quick thoughts. There are spoilers here for the entire run of the series.

The Wire is a different kind of show. Most programs that we enjoy provide a specific kind of satisfaction. We know that, ultimately, Jack Bauer is going to defeat the terrorists, avenging all of the innocents who died during the previous 23 hours and 59 minutes. We know that Dexter is going to get away with killing killers who are preying on the innocent. But The Wire isn't like that. It doesn't give a damn about satisfying payoffs. It will often present you with the exact opposite outcome you want to see, because that's the more truthful. I wanted so badly to see Omar Little exact his vengeance on Marlo Stanfield, to make Marlo pay for his arrogance, his evil, for the lives of Butchie and the drugstore security guard and oh for the love of God Prop Joe. The murder of Prop Joe, who I respected for his no-nonsense, co-op minded business ethic, was perhaps the most infuriating, cold-blooded betrayal I've ever encountered in fiction. And even after everything he does, we don't get the satisfaction of seeing Omar blow Marlo away. We don't even get the satisfaction of seeing him get put away for the rest of his life. I tell you right now, if I ever see Marlo Stanfield on the street, I will drop him myself. He got to go. (And speaking of unsatisfying, the fearsome Omar Little could not possibly have met with a more ignoble, unsatisfying demise. But as he was fond of saying, it's all in the game.)

If any Wire watchers have any thoughts on this issue, I'd love to hear them. In season five, to get money flowing for an investigation to put a stop to Marlo Stanfield, Jimmy McNulty fabricates a series of murders. At first, I was appalled by his actions. I thought he'd lost his moral compass entirely. But I eventually came around. In my mind, Marlo Stanfield is such a force of evil, that if good people need to make some compromises to bring him down, well, I'm okay with that. And so the series end left me with ambiguous feelings about Kima Greggs, who had always been one of my favorite characters. I can understand why she did what she did, but I think the more moral choice in that case, the choice that serves the greater good, would have been to look the other way. I think the police institution was failing society by not providing necessary funding for the Stanfield investigation, and McNulty and Freamon did what they had to do, given the inability of the legal institution to deal with this particular problem.

And that's what is most admirable about The Wire, the way it truly holds a mirror up to the crucial institutions and aspects of our society--the law, the economy, our political leadership, our schools, the press--showing how they interlock, how failures in one area contribute to failures elsewhere. Season four, with its look at schools, was the most hard-hitting and personal for me. I saw so much of myself as a first-year teacher in Los Angeles reflected in Pryzbylewski's experiences, it was almost painful. The accuracy of its portrayal of the problems affecting our schools was truly remarkable. No other depiction of what our inner-city public schools are like today comes nearly as close to the truth, and there is no more important institution in our society. When we fail our children, they, and we, will pay the price for years and years to come.

I know that The Wire is going to stay with me unlike any other TV show, that in the years to come, I'll constantly be reminded, by experiences in my life, by stories in the news, of issues raised by The Wire. But it also works purely as a character drama, and I know I'll miss the people who populate it, too. The characters I love on that show are too numerous to mention, but let me rattle off a few names anyway. Bunk. Cutty. Colvin. Freamon. Gus. Bubbles. Bodie. Beadie. Herc. Carv. Yeah, these people and so many more will stay with me. Right now, what most saddens me is that I'll never again get to hear Jay Landsman deliver another one of his stirring eulogies. But in the series finale, he saw Jimmy McNulty out proud. "Natural police," indeed. God rest ye, Jimmy.

""I'll talk about a person which I've met when I was young."

Bionic Commando, NES, 198X

"Let me tell you about the man I met when I was still young..."

Bionic Commando Rearmed, 2029

Like Super Joe, who oddly refers to himself in the third person in the intros to both the original NES and newly revamped versions of Bionic Commando, I was still young when I first met Nathan "Radd" Spencer. I'm not so young anymore, but Rearmed, which I finished on the normal difficulty tonight, reminded me of what games were like when I was younger. The final all-new level is pretty diabolical, a lengthy level filled with situations in which you either just barely make it or don't make it at all, and should you somehow manage to survive all the hazards, and finally make it to the dramatic boss confrontation, and then die, you get to do it all over again. Yep, that's how games used to roll, all right. I'm surprised this game is as challenging as it is. I really would have expected them to make it considerably easier. I'm glad they didn't, though. Swinging through the air just isn't quite as exhilarating if the threat of death isn't constantly imminent, and finishing the game feels like something of an accomplishment.

Red skies at night, red skies at night, Wo oh, wo oh oh oh oh oh oh oh

I really love the look and sound of this game, too. GRIN made a conscious decision about a very distinctive aesthetic they wanted to go for, and I think it's terrific. The air in the game is so thick with color, it looks like you could cut it with a knife. I also enjoy the way that, if you go through a door, you might hear the muffled bass of the stage's music, as if it really is being pumped in to the level.

I'm not thoroughly convinced that the swinging mechanic can be implemented as successfully in a 3D environment as it was in the original Bionic Commando, but I'm definitely looking forward to finding out when Bionic Commando Rearmed 2: The Game Bionic Commando Rearmed is Basically Just an Advertisement For comes out.

I'm of the opinion that Bionic Commando on the NES is one of the best games of all time. I love the heck out of it. I used to beat that game for breakfast. So I was pretty excited for the release of Bionic Commando: Rearmed. And having spent a bit of time with it this morning, my first impressions are very good. It's very faithful to the original, which, as a diehard fan of the NES game, pleases me (and, I suspect, other fans of the cIassic), but it also adds enough new elements to make playing it again feel fresh and rewarding. The swing mechanic is the same as I remember it, but the challenge rooms introduce plenty of puzzling new elements to consider around it. The database of game elements that constantly expands as you encounter new stuff in the game is very cool. And, of course, the visuals are gorgeous. I can't wait to get further into it and see more of what it has to offer. It's already apparent that it's an outstanding value for your ten hard-earned dollars.

I will say, though, that as cool as the new helicopter pilot, Haley, is, part of me can't help wishing that, instead of a tough-as-nails chick (and I'm normally a big supporter of tough-as-nails chicks), you got a slovenly helicopter pilot who responded to your requests to fly to a new area with a roll of the eyes and a reluctant, "Okay, we'll move." I always got a kick out of that line in the original.