Common Sword is the new Dungeon. Bring your Dragon.

Earlier this week, my Xbox 360 succumbed to the Red Rings of Death. It now sits lifeless in my room, awaiting valkyries astride UPS trucks to carry it to Microsoft Valhalla - which is apparently in Texas. Having three 360s fail to make it to their first birthday, I thought I would be more upset about this. Instead, I feel a calm resignation, accompanied with a slight apprehension on how long it will take for my repaired 360 to return to me. Apple offers overnight shipping for their repair services. I guess Microsoft's valkyries have to walk it. Just as well. Judging from Windows Vista and the 360's reliability, they'd probably just crash.

It is remarkable that so few people are outraged by the 360's abysmal rate of failure. To be fair, Microsoft's free 3-year retroactive $1 billion warranty did help cushion the blow. Still, I feel that the 360 is just so damn lovable that people just want to get back to playing it. It's like a puppy that chews up your shoes. You want to be mad, until it turns those cute brown eyes on you. Just replace those brown eyes with green and white X's.

With my Xbox officially out of commission, I've finally found the time to discover why IGN's Daemon Hatfield deemed Disgaea DS the deepest strategy RPG on the market. To say that Disgaea DS is deep is to say that the Pacific Ocean is deep. There are depths to this game which I can only begin to fathom. Indeed, it may even be deep to a fault, as its game mechanics still remain unfathomed one third of the way through the game. It makes me wonder if I will be able to come to understand them by the time I complete the game, or if I will come to the end of this story still relying on the haphazard party development and battle strategies that have miraculously delivered me victory thus far.

Yet, for all my confusion, I cannot help but admire the ambition of the developers at NIS. They created a game in which the most mundane and basic of items contains a multi-tiered dungeon capable of improving the stats and quality of the item - a dungeon for which ten challenging floors requiring an advanced understanding of the game's battle system represents a mere glimpse of the dungeon's true scope. One can only wonder what power lays buried deep within the common sword you started the game with. Perhaps it's possible to transform the most basic of weapons into an Excalibur-like blade, capable of serving the player to the very end of the game. Such an ability to upgrade and develop one's weapon, instead of simply trading it in for more advanced blades, resonates particularly well with me, and opens up an entirely new avenue for character development that I feel motivated to explore.

Still, with many Disgaea DS's core mechanics still incomprehensible, it remains to be seen if my character will ever pursue that fabled "Common Excalibur" or if he'll simply beat up the Netherworld Assembly until they commission the castle store to carry better items. Oh the decisions a demon prince must make...

- Mike

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STFU: Why Gamers Have Such A Short Fuse

I'm not a fan of Charles Dickens.

Sure, the guy has good story ideas, and has, on occasion, drawn me in to one narrative or another - but on the whole I find him overly verbose, plodding, and dare I say it, boring. You, on the other hand, may enjoy Dickens' work, but I somehow doubt I'll find a flurry of angry, pseudo-English slurs questioning my mother's heritage and nightly activities in the comment box.

On the other hand, were I to bash Fallout 3, Call of Duty: World at War, and Halo 3 on a site frequented by gamers, I'm pretty sure more than one person would take serious umbrage with my words and subsequently take me to task over it. (In order to avoid angry comments here, I've chosen three games that I own and enjoy. Granted, now that means someone may take issue with me enjoying these games...) Why are gamers such a reactionary bunch when it comes to their choices for entertainment? Certainly my hours spent on Fallout don't prevent you from playing Gears of War 2. So what gives?

When I think about the possible reasoning behind this "over-enthusiasm," a few potential factors come to mind. Let's explore them.

Age of the Gamer: While the patience required to sit through Tale of Two Cities (Sorry, I'll stop bashing Charlie now) is limited to either the young and bright or the old and tempered, video games pride themselves on accessibility to a wide and varied range of people. Many a time have I read a post on a forum waxing poetic about how "my mom iz a bich cuz shez a11 'git of the game' n im lik stfu bich," I can only hope a sentence like that originates from a preteen who has no business being on the forum anyway...rather than a sad commentary on our state of secondary education and communicative skills...but I digress. The point is online, in-game, and offline, you can find many preteens and young teens who are definitely "gamers" and who have their own opinions. The same, however, can be said of music, movies, and television shows, however - so age can't be the only reason.

Age of the Medium: Gaming is "new." Obviously, video games have existed for decades, sure, so new is a relative term. But when you look at the age of literature, music, and image appreciation (moving or not), gaming is the new guy on the scene. Are these arguments the "growing pangs" of gaming's awkward adolescence?

Nature of Interaction: Unlike the previously mentioned forms of entertainment, gaming offers participants a way to actively engage with the medium. Instead of passively viewing or listening, gaming requires the gamer be a part - indeed, the catalyst - for its success. This requisite interaction may form a different sort of relationship with the gamer than they might have with other media, causing them to feel the need to "participate" even outside of the game.

Nature of Competition: Like interaction, competition is really an experience limited to gaming and not many other entertainment venues. Even if you're playing a single player game, you are competing against the computer or yourself - besting a time, killing an enemy, finding armor, advancing the story, hitting the faux drumset - and you either persevere or don't play. Of course, add multiplayer components to the mix and you're trying to beat other living people at a certain objective. Does the competitive drive that underlies most of our gaming experience also subconsciously drive our need to tell each other how much their favorite game suX0rz? Perhaps.

Forums of Communication: As if the internet hasn't been blamed for enough, it's partially responsible here as well. The wonderful thing about the internet is that it allows anyone to speak their mind about any chosen topic under the sun. (See: This Entire Site) The downside of the internet is that it allows anyone to speak their mind about any chosen topic under the sun. Users of the internet are encouraged to let their voices be heard, and certainly gamers are no exception. Where such arguments were once reserved for the "Letters to the Editor" of your gaming mag, you can now find a topic, post, argue, and call someone a whore in less than ten seconds flat.

I guess when you really get down to it, it's not one simple over-arching reason - more like a clusterf*ck of too much dynamite and not enough fuse. And I haven't even mentioned pressure from the gaming media, gaming companies attempts to foster platform/game wars, and peer pressure...

Oh, and by the way: Final Fantasy VII bored the crap out of me.

-- Matt

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Rebel FM

As a true testament to the spirit that made 1UP Yours and the 1UP Show my favorite podcasts, the former employees of 1UP have come together to create two great new internet broadcasts: the Rebel FM podcast and the Area 5 YouTube video series.

I'm simply at a loss for words for how impressed and humbled I am to see these guys carry on the 1UP Yours and 1UP Show's legacies using spare and scrounged equipment not even a day after being laid off. So all I will say is to check out the Rebel FM podcast on iTunes and support the Area 5 video series on YouTube. Leave these guys some love, because I can't think of anyone in the games industry more deserving of it right now than them.

--Mike

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Of Walls and Blowing Holes In Them

Though I was able to procure - through purchase and other means - several of the hot releases for this holiday season, I've been the most satisfied by the titles I've managed to score at various sales and out-of-business clearances. While none of the titles I've picked up are by any means bad, it is also becoming evident to me why these titles have failed to stand out amidst the torrent of triple-A calibur titles that flooded the market these past two months. I'm convinced that this satisfaction stems from something intrinsic to me. Perhaps, in another life, I was a carrion bird, contentedly picking at flesh of creatures too weak to defend themselves. It is sad that in this analogy, video games parallel my source of sustenance.

I've been playing a bit of Battlefield: Bad Company, and I'm surprised that it is competing so well with Call of Duty: World at War for my attention. I guess that it shouldn't surprise me this much, as it appears to be the very antithesis of the Call of Duty franchise. While CoD does a very good job at evoking the visceral nature of warfare, it is something one experiences on tracks. It is reminiscent of a carnival horror-house, where one sits on a cart while shit jumps out at you. It's effective, and it's damn entertaining, but it's something you see from a passenger's seat. There is never a doubt that the game, and not you, is driving.

Bad Company, on the other hand, presents the player with a veritable sandbox to decimate. While one isn't free to roam on the scale of Mercenaries 2, one is never limited to a single approach or solution to a problem. Tired of hoofing it? Jump into a tank. Anti-armor got you down? Gank that gunboat. Tired of the high seas? Evade tank shells in a golf cart. The gameplay variety isn't limited to the level design and vehicle options, however. Anyone who remembers the hype over the game last June should remember the high destructibility of the environment. To say that everything can be blown up is a bit deceiving. The game doesn't aim at a fully destructible world. One can't level every building. Indeed, bathrooms and internal structures seem miraculously invulnerable to all forms of conventional weaponry, like some form of low-tech panic room standard for wartorn Eastern Europe. What the game does aim at - and succeed at - is revolutionizing the micro-encounters that characterize the FPS experience. For all of CoD's production values and emphasis on cinematography, they have yet to match the sheer thrill of cowering in a house from a tank only to have the wall blown apart from behind you. The number of strategic and experiential possibilities such a seemingly simple addition brings to the game is profound.

It's an odd day when blowing a new entry way into a house, right next to the front door, becomes profound.

--Mike

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A Moment of Silence for 1UP

Wow.

For those of you who haven't heard the news yet, 1UP.com has been purchased by UGO, and have seen half their staff slashed and their podcasts terminated. Electronic Gaming Monthly, the publication out of which 1UP.com grew, was not part of the purchase, and will publish its last magazine this month.

I'm not one who is easily perturbed by things like company closings, mergers, and hostile takeovers. When electronic retailing titans Radio Shack and Sharper Image, and more recently CompUSA, disappeared from malls and shopping districts, I barely batted an eye. The absence of the massive and bustling CompUSA at 42nd Street seemed jarring at first, but the shock (if it could even be called that) dissipated over the course of two days, and I can no longer even point to where the store once stood. Even the closing of Lehman Brothers, and the bloody bankruptcy of Iceland, did not seem to startle me any more than the constant stream of negative headlines flooding the media during the early weeks of the current economic crisis. From my perspective, life is proceeding as usual, and so I've had little cause for true alarm.

However, I am in a genuine state of shock over the sale of 1UP and the termination of EGM, to the point where I can barely think of what to type in response to this news. 1UP has always stood out as one of the pillars of video game journalism, offering well-respected opinions on recent and upcoming releases and the industry as a whole, and enjoying a rapport much on par with international gaming network IGN. While I've never been a follower of EGM, I vividly remember my friends excitedly referencing their articles and features as far back as grade school. That a publishing house with such a long history of successful coverage of the video game industry could be bought up and downsized so quickly is, quite frankly, jarring at the least.

What strikes me the hardest, however, is the knowledge that I may never spend an afternoon's commute listening to the banter of 1UP's editors and writers. While the closing of a print magazine as old as EGM is a somber thought, only so much can be conveyed through articles and the written word. An article does not convey the individual behind the writing as well as the mediums of audio and video, and while one can get a good sense of the author's preferences and tastes through editorials and features, one never comes to know the author. Admittedly, I've never met Shane Bettenhausen or Garnet Lee or any of the 1UP staff. I can no more claim to know them than claim to know Obama. Yet, the 1UP Yours and The 1UP Show podcasts at least allowed me to sit in on their rants and to revel in their enthusiastic arguments on everything gaming related. It was an opportunity to see why they loved gaming, what they loved about gaming, and why each of them chose to enter and pursue a career in games journalism. It was their unfettered enjoyment of games and the industry that inspired me to start this blog with Matt, and to at least dream of being a games journalist. While I will still be able to listen to the hysterical antics of the IGN staff or the opinions of some great independent podcasters on the Gamers With Jobs Conference Call and Cheap Ass Gamer, I find the absence of their voices a weighty quiet. The announcement of the purchase of 1UP and EGM on UncleGamer Radio resounded like a death knell in my earbuds during my commute home today, Parris' loss of words to comment on the event an unofficial and disquieting moment of silence.

I wish the best of luck to the staff of 1UP and EGM, both those who must now seek new employment in a turbulent and inhospitable economic climate and those who must deal with the loss of much beloved colleagues.

--Mike

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