DRM has become an ugly sore on the lip of gaming. While software publishers have always implemented measures to prevent the piracy of their games, those measures have gotten rather drastic in recent history. Gamers cried out against the use of SecuROM in Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Spore due to the limited number of activations it allowed for each respective game, as well as the hassle involved in getting additional activations if the need arose. Meanwhile, pirates played those games easily and freely without any fear of running out of activations, or having to contact the publisher and beg for one more activation after their computer crashed, or they added a new video card.  So, in an effort to thwart piracy, it seems publishers are only punishing the paying customers with restrictive DRM. Still, something has to be done to prevent piracy. The real question here is just what can be done to make people pay for something they could get for free?

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When I first heard Bethesda was taking on Fallout 3, I was terrified. Not because I thought they’d muck it up or anything like that, but because Oblivion took up over 240 hours of my life. It damaged my interpersonal relationships, brought my productivity to a crawl, and caused my skin to lighten by several shades due to a lack of sunshine. That scenario is likely to repeat itself now that Fallout 3 is here.
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Ahh Spiderman, you and I have gone on so many adventures together. From the comic books of my youth, to the AWESOME animated series in my teen years, to the three movies… well, the first two of the three anyway. Let’s not forget games. I’ve played every one of your games since the days of the PS1. The first Spiderman game on the PS1 was a triumph. It was a beautiful blend of comic book story telling, web slinging, and beat em up fights. Then came the game based on the first movie. It took all of the fine points of the PS1 classic, and polished the hell out of them. It was truly my favorite Spiderman game - until the second movie based game came out. Great efforts were made to make NYC as big and beautiful as possible.  There were a lot of places to go and things to do. Those were the halcyon days. Only a short time later came Ultimate Spiderman, which, while still fun, lacked the depth of combat, and the size and scale of the world found in it’s predecessor. Let’s not forget the third movie game, which felt even further dumbed down from Ultimate Spiderman. By the release of Friend or Foe, I lost the rose colored glasses I had viewed Spiderman games through before that point. That game was easily the worst Spiderman game I’ve ever played, and one of the worst over all. Still, I felt a sense of excitement when I first held the Web of Shadows disc in my hands. The missteps the series had taken couldn’t erase the truly wonderful memories of the finer games in the series.

So, with a heart full of hope, I put the disc into my Xbox 360, and prepared to embark on another adventure with my favorite super hero of all time.  

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For those of you who would prefer to read this review entirely in pirate speak, you may do so here.

Age of Booty (formerly Plunder) is a pirate themed RTS developed by Certain Affinity, and published by Capcom. From the start, this game has shown a lot of promise. Capcom aimed to provide some high quality RTS action in a guppy-sized downloadable package, and they delivered.
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I’m just gonna throw this out there - am I the only one who has noticed that the breasts on the nurses in Silent Hill games have gotten progressively bigger over the years? I mean just look at the rack on the naughty nurse from Silent Hill: Homecoming in the picture to the left - she’s popping out of her top! The nurses are supposed to be scary, not sexy.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, on to the actual review!

Silent Hill: Homecoming is the first entry into the series from developer Double Helix, and they managed (for the most part) to stay on target when it comes to making a solid Silent Hill game.  Homecoming has all the ingredients that go into a delicious Silent Hill stew, however, the quantity of some of those ingredients has been altered, and the results are a bit mixed. 

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(image source: Nintendowiifanboy.com)

When Mega Man 9 made it’s triumphant 8-bit leap onto the virtual console on Monday, the online instruction manual lept onto the VC with it. That manual contained some information about future plans for some rather controversial DLC. Just about every video game released in the past decade has had multiple difficulty settings. Mega Man 9 will have them too….. (more…)

Music is a huge part of my life; as a drummer and a DJ there is rarely a moment in which I don’t have something on my iPod that I am listening to. With such a diverse taste in music I find myself wanting music to go beyond it’s normal role in video games as either background noise, or the implicit interaction of the game ala Rock Band or Guitar Hero. I am not saying that the way music is used in games today has no place in the industry, actually quite the contrary.

When the original Guitar Hero for PS2 came out in late 2005, during my senior year of high school, one of my good friends purchased it on a whim after playing it at a game store and brought it over to my house. Lets just say that somehow I got him to leave it at my house where I spent the next month with his copy. Other then playing Guitar Hero, I spent the rest of the time either avoiding him, or making up excuses so that I would be able to keep it for longer. Eventually I had to give it back and purchase my own, and at the time 90 dollars for a game was unheard of, but the experience it provided was at the time well beyond anything I had ever played.

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When I first heard about this game, I was filled with excitement at the prospect of playing a powerful Sith apprentice. Then the Star Wars nerd in me got a good smack in the face from my common sense. See, my common sense remembers the long track record of terrible to mediocre Star Wars games that have come out in my lifetime, and as such, assumed that this game would be no better or different from the rest. I spent the past two days doing almost nothing other than playing Star Wars: TFU, and letting my common sense and my inner Star Wars nerd duke it out over what to think of the game. You’ll find the results below.

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With the recent (and expected) official announcement of Guitar Hero 4 and it’s succession of Rock Band’s extra instruments (vocals and drums), it’s clear to see that the music genre is no longer what it used to be. Merely 5 years ago, I would be hard pressed to get any one of my friends to pick up a controller and play a console music game. Then again, five years ago, there wasn’t anything quite like Guitar Hero or Rock Band.

Oh wait, yes there was.

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So, word has it that Rock Band not only continues to be delayed for a European release, but that it will cost about 200 GBP (around $400 US) for the full ensemble, as opposed to the average retail price in the US of $150. To make up for the extortionist charge, a fifty quid (about $100) game-only version will be available, which will utilize any USB PC microphone.

Well, that’s spectacular if your idea of a rock band is American Idol. In fact, don’t they already have a few American Idol and karaoke games? Why shell out good money for a music game stripped of its most essential elements, namely the controllers? I would normally say that “it’s a bit like” followed by some hyperbolic example to put things in perspective, but my mind is boggled at some base level when it comes to how fundamentally, functionally, stupendously stupid this is.

What we have here is a failure to communicate, or at least a failure to comprehend what makes Rock Band such an awesome game. It isn’t just the ability to become the band member in game, it’s the simulation in real life. As South Park pointed out about the Guitar Hero series, you’re not going to learn how to play a real guitar through any simulator on the market. That’s not the point. The point is that you can imagine yourself on stage, playing a guitar while going through motions that simulate what you’re imaging. If you had to use a regular controller, the whole spirit of the game would be lost.

Rock Band is this at a higher level, as there’s a communal aspect to the game play which is one functionality of gaming that has sustained various titles for years. Sure, online team play and Guitar Hero’s co-op mode do involve player interaction, but the ability to bring your friends together to rock out makes the game communal and interactive in real life as well as in game. Like a real band, bonds are forged or broken based on who is pulling weight and who is sucking ass.

You’re not going to have that experience with a game and a single microphone, though at the prices being set in the European market, you’ll need to have a band of Rock Band-ready friends already established in order to pay for the full kit anyway. Whenever it’s released, that is.

-M. Elizabeth Williams