House of the Dead 2 - WII

Stone Cold Steve O'Blenis is everything you could want in a friend.
Honest.
Loyal.
Funny.
Big enough to handle himself if we get into a bar fight.
He's a good guy trying to make his way in the world while raising a great daughter and trying his best to enjoy the things he enjoyed as a child: Star Wars, professional wrestling, sports and video games. It's no surprise he and I became fast friends when we worked together at the same newspaper more than 10 years ago. Back then he had a fiance and I had a rotating door situation with women, which is to say I had nothing and no one. The fiance became a wife who became an ex-wife. Out of this relationship he got a fine daughter and a clear head. He spent the next few years of his life working hard, getting to know his little girl and, I believe, getting to know himself again. And at the right time, when he least expected it, a girl named Diane walked into his life.
I met Diane one night and liked her immediately. She's a good girl with a good heart who isn't afraid to be generous and caring to anyone. She's like Steve: Honest, solid, and extremely good looking. (She really is. Steve aint so bad himself.)
So I was relieved when he said he was going to marry her. Part of me thought the big guy got burned too bad to go back. It happens. But he's a strong dude and she's the right woman and I couldn't be happier for him.
And this is what we talk about these days when we finally carve out some time for cocktails at the local pizza joint down the street. Last night we celebrated his upcoming marriage and did a few shots of tequila. We ended the night by watching the Hulk Hogan scene in Rocky III and then blasting some zombies in House of the Dead 2. For all the press the Wii gets for being a party games machine, few of my friends are interested in anything more than bowling or light gun games. Bowling is good enough to warrant buying the system in the first place. When you play, you might as well be in a bowling alley. You've got beers and a couch and everyone gets up and takes their turn and then cheers for the next guy. It's social.
Demented and said, but social. (With apologies to John Hughes.)
House of the Dead 2 - and all quality light gun games for that matter - offer the perfect mindless backdrop for two grown men to talk about their love of certain women and Hulk Hogan. The zombies keep coming - if you're good enough, because the game is hard - and the violence and story are so ridiculous that you feel compelled to either shout at the screen or lay back and ignore it while you discuss something important.
And that's just what we did.
Big Steve and I may not get as many Monday night play dates as we do now once he gets married, but I know I'll cherish them all just the same.
Good luck, brother.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Jet Set Radio - Xbox

In Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays, "How to be Alone," the author who gained fame for shunning Oprah with his superb novel "The Corrections" talks a lot less about being alone than his titles suggests. I already knew how to be alone, but I figured a collection of essays on the subject would be a good read anyway. Plus, I dug the his other work.
He touches on the sex-advice industry and supermax prisons, among other things. When I read this collection I was A) not alone; B) doing just fine sexually, thank you; and C) not doing anything that would land me in a supermax prison. (Regular prison, maybe.)
It was 2002 and my wife (then girlfriend) and I were living in Philadelphia. We moved there from Baltimore after a brief and passionate courtship so she could pursue graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I left behind a profitable gig tending bar, my family and most of my friends. I was in love and feared nothing. I assumed I'd find a decent bar job quickly.
That didn't happen.
The first gig I found was at an Outback Steakhouse knock-off where they train you for every front-of-the-house position before they let you behind the bar. It was the worst 3 weeks of my life. I wore a uniform and was trained by a nice kid whose mom picked him up every day. The food was lousy, the atmosphere disgusting and the cleanliness was questionable. I once worked a joint in Baltimore where every cook behind the line was on work release from prison. Those guys were spotless and worked hard. These hacks in Philly sent plates out of the kitchen with bugs in the rice and burned the bacon nearly every time.
Meanwhile, my wife spent her days walking the halls of knowledge in one of the world's greatest cities. She worked hard and made friends. An academic at heart, she loved it.
I struggled.
With $18 in tip money in my pocket I would hit the cheapest dive bar I could find for a few drafts before coming home, defeated. Annie was often asleep by the time I got in the door. I would either read or play a game on the Xbox. When I read, it was Franzen's collection of essays. Despite the love I had for my wife, I felt as alone as ever. Franzen offered nothing.
The Xbox, on the other hand, was just the mind-candy I needed to forget about the fact that I was a grown man with a writing career behind him who was currently upselling diners on fried onion appetizers in the world's worst chain restaurant.
This is when I turned to Jet Set Radio. Imagine a cell-shaded city in the future where odd-looking characters on Rollerblades tear through the landscape spreading counter-propaganda and graffiti of their own design. The game was beautifully rendered – the world it conjured as unique as Blade Runner and as imaginative as Oz. Easy to play, hard to master (the hallmark of gaming greatness) Jet Set Radio took me out of the hellhole for long enough for me to remember I was not defined by the place that issued me a paycheck. I was a young man in love who had the opportunity to write freely, meet new people and explore a new city. I eventually did all of those things, and have come to look back on my time in Philadelphia as a second college experience of learning and good times. (It helped that I soon got a better job in a better bar.)
Most of the entries in this blog are of fond memories of the good times in our lives and the games that helped to shape them. Jet Set Radio was a fine game that came to me in a terrible time. When I play it now, I remember everything I gave up in that time and all the wonderful blessings I've received since.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

100 Essays in 100 Days

This is the 100th post to the Phoenix Games Blog Project. What began as an exercise in discipline - post one gaming essay every day for a year - has become a devotion to the subject of people and the games they play; our fond memories of the seemingly benign video games in our lives.
Some of these posts - by myself and a small crew of writers - are beautiful. Some are the grinding of gears.
Looking back now, I'm glad the quality of these 100 essays is largely excellent and I am forever grateful to the folks who have helped to make this happen (especially the Pride of Riverside: George Morse).
Tonight I will celebrate with my wife and another couple. No one at the table (save for myself) would call themselves a gamer. I think each of them would call their relationship with video games to be marginal at best.
I would disagree. To wit:
Megan is a close friend of mine. I've known her for longer than I've known my wife and longer than she's known her husband. I respect her in every way you can respect another human being. She is funny and smart and beautiful. And when she has a few glasses of wine and the party here is breaking up, she's pretty keen on coming down to the basement and playing some video games. I've talked her into playing Rock Band and Wii bowling, but she's a Super Mario girl at heart. I was impressed with how quickly she remembered the patterns and secret passages on the NES classic. The last time we played it she had a blast and swore she would write a blog entry for me. It hasn't happened. If someone polled her on the street and asked her if she played games I bet she would say no.
But does she have fond memories that exist because of gaming?
Absolutely.
Her husband, Jack, is an engineering type who owns a high-end bicycle shop on the East Side of Providence (www.legendbicycle.com). I've liked him since the day we met, well before he and Megan got married. The two of them fell in love at our home. Not exclusively, of course, but their courtship dovetailed with a variety of parties and dinners held here up to the point when Jack proposed to Megan on the way to our home one evening. She said yes and we drank champagne. On any one of those evenings we likely wound up in the basement, playing Warlords or some other old-school title to offset Jack's self-proclaimed ineptitude at games. He may not be a gaming champion, but he likes to play. And now he knows that his wife was a Mario junkie in the 80s. A fact that should not be kept from any husband.
And then there is my wife … my long-suffering wife. She's not a gamer. Not even close. In the near-decade I've known her we've played games maybe a half-dozen times. She claims she has a problem with depth perception or something but the truth is she just doesnt enjoy it. That's fine. No problem.
You know what one of the first things she told me about her youngest brother was?
That he owned an Xbox. We were walking in the woods on our second date and talking about our families. I told her I also had an Xbox and that he and I could link up and play together over the Internet. She thought that was cool. (She was wrong, by the way, he had a Gamecube.)
Then she told me a story about her other brother who wanted a Sega Genesis more than anything in the world back in the 16-bit days. Her parents believed any sort of media other than books or newspapers was evil so they refused to buy one for him. Not long after they ruled on this he actually won a Sega Genesis in a TV prize drawing. The first game he ever played was Altered Beast.
"I can still remember the game talking to you," she said.
"Rise from your grave!" she said.
Yup. That's a fond gaming memory.
Gaming has been in the homes of Americans since the early 1970s. We all have memories that involve video games. Whether we know it or not, these games that were once distractions have become a part of all of our lives. Some of these memories are trivial and some are as precious to us as the first time we heard a rock and roll song. On this blog we've got 265 more to go.
Thanks for coming along with us.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Scorched Earth - PC

Brian was a genius. Still is, probably. I haven't seen him in a decade (we're not the kind of guys who call each other every Sunday afternoon to chat)
Through the magic of Facebook and the rare e-mail I hear he is alive and well.
A self-taught computer programmer who grew up in the Commodore 64 era, Brian was the kind of guy who could question anything and not come off as a know-it-all. We'd see a news item or documentary on TV and he'd say something such as "That doesn't seem right," and then explain why it wasn't. A new technology would emerge and he'd talk about how it probably worked - and he was usually right. I always thought he'd make a fine newspaper reporter, but he wasn't interested in the career path I had chosen.
Brian and I were friends in the middle of my college years. We were the only guys with real jobs at the time. He programmed computers and I was a copy boy at the Baltimore Sun. Maybe that's why we hit it off so quickly, or maybe it was because he looked so much like Michael Knight's evil twin from "Knight Rider" that I just had to get to know him.
Either way, Brian and I spent many an evening - especially during periods without girlfriends - shooting the breeze over late night cocktails. As a backdrop for these conversations, a video game was always being played. Most often that video game was an early PC classic called Scorched Earth. Developed back when DOS was still relevant, Scorched Earth was a turn-based strategy game featuring a tank on either side of a randomly-generated 2D map. The variety of weapons at your disposal was staggering but the interface was simple: Adjust your speed and altitude for one shot at a time. Then wait for your opponent to do the same. Scorched Earth is the archetype for an entire genre of games that has become more sophisticated since Brian and I stayed up until the wee hours discussing politics, health care, foreign policy and girls.
Of course, Brian was far superior at the game than I. This was also true for most of our other nerdly pursuits: Magic The Gathering, anything on Sega Genesis, arcade games. Having a friend such as Brian is humbling. You know he's smarter than you are and you know he has the mad skills in the dork Olympics that you'll never have. Yet he's still willing to hang out with you. Maybe that's the reason. It's like dating a chick out of your league. You know she could do better, she knows she could do better, but something about your charming self keeps her coming back.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Ninjatown - Nintendo DS

I went to my first gaming convention last weekend. It was PAX East in Boston and I met some nice folks, played great games and spent too much on food and cocktails. I had a blast and am looking forward to my next convention. While I was there I met a lot of industry folks I know but have never met in person. All my gaming coverage for the newspaper stems from e-mailing contacts all over the world (though mostly on the West Coast). There are probably 100 people I speak to via e-mail frequently but couldn't pick out of a lineup. I met a few of them in Boston and made some new contacts as well. The one guy I was most looking forward to meeting was Rob from Sandbox Strategies. Rob's a Rhode Island guy working in New York. He's a family man and a gamer of a certain age (that age would be close to mine). This all means he's a fan of games, a real fan. He can talk about the classics as easily as the newer titles and he takes none of it too seriously.
We had dinner and talked about our mutual passion and the one game he kept mentioning was something called Ninjatown for the DS.
Ninjatown is a tower defense game published by SouthPeak Interactive. It has a cute and fuzzy exterior that belies the serious game hiding beneath. There are sunny skies, lush forest and rolling hills in the land of Ninjatown where adorable and honorable Ninjas live. After the mysterious eruption of a nearby volcano, Ninjatown is attacked by hordes of sinister enemies lead by Mr. Demon, who, of course, is bent on destruction.
In a classic yet inventive take on the genre you will build armies to beat back the large variety of Mr. Demon's minions. I'm not keen on blowing into the microphone of my snazzy DSiXL (it's a loaner from Nintendo) but I did so with abandon when prompted to by the game. I also yelled into the microphone to activate a special attack, something I find hard to explain to my wife who already thinks I'm a little crackers when it comes to the whole gaming thing.
Fans of the tower defense genre should absolutely be playing this game right now. Despite great reviews this sleeper title wasn't on the lips of anyone I was talking to at the convention.
Except for Rob, that is.
There were plenty of other games he could have been trying to sell me on that night but he kept coming back to Ninjatown. It is by far my best memory of the weekend – talking shop with a guy who cares – and it's currently the only game I want to be playing. Seeing how I have yet to defeat God of War II or Just Cause II, that's saying something.
There's another game Rob mentioned a lot over the weekend, and that game is Shaq Fu for the Sega Genesis. He claims he's going to write a blog entry about it for me soon.
Well Rob, the clock is ticking . . .
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Football - Atari 2600

The guy next door worked at Westinghouse. He was an engineer. I've known him my whole life. I can remember when I was a kid thinking he looked like the guys at mission command watching rockets blast off. When an astronaut said "Houston, we have a problem," the guy they were talking to looked a lot like this guy. Black glasses, salt and pepper hair cut short, short-sleeved white dress shirts with no-nonsense ties.
And he was smart. In between building bombs or whatever it was he built all day he and his engineering buddies figured out how to hack an Atari 2600. They built this metal box that connected to the cartridge slot. On top of the metal box were two slots for computer chips and tiny levers that locked them in place. As soon as a new game came out, somehow he would come home with the chips. It was brilliant. Looking back now I realize it was illegal and probably the wrong message to send to the neighborhood kids.
But back then I was happy to be one of the neighborhood kids who got to play new Atari games as soon as they came out. His youngest son was my best pal.
And we loved to play Atari Football.
This is at once the worst sports game ever made and the best. It is ugly, clunky and about as realistic as the football game you played in school with the triangle made of paper. But it's also an absolute blast to play. Richie and I played this game for hours while the summer sun rose and fell outside. To our credit, we also played outside. But many an afternoon was spent choosing to pass or run with the three lunchbox-shaped players on the flickering screen of the giant Zenith in his living room.
Madden is the undisputed king of virtual football these days, and it deserves its success. But you didn't need an encyclopedic knowledge of professional football to enjoy a gridiron match-up when I was a kid. All you needed was the ability to decide whether to pass or throw. And if your best friend's dad was an early hacker, all the better.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

God of War III - PS3

It's my night with the kids. My wife works night shifts at the ER so I have supper and bedtime duty on my own when she's working. Supper is fun. Getting both of them to fall asleep on my own can be tricky.
Tonight was warm - near 70 degrees in the middle of March in Rhode Island. When I came home from work the kids were playing in the back yard with the sitter. Henry, just 5 months, was outside playing for the first time in his life. He wore a denim hat. Charlotte - just over 2 - giggled as she slid down her little plastic slide only to run around to the back of it, climb up and do it again over and over.
The dog chased the cat.
You know what I mean?
It was perfect.
I gave Charlotte her favorite dinner - rotini pasta with dad's sauce. She always helps me make the sauce. She adds a little sugar at the end, her little hand able to grasp the perfect portion. Henry sat in his bouncy seat and giggled while I pretended his bare feet were stinky. Charlotte couldn't take it. Every time I sniffed the little guy's feet and made an exaggerated face of disgust she laughed so hard that rotini bits flew onto her plate.
Good stuff.
They both went down easy tonight. (As I wrote that last line he started crying. Damn.) While I watched her pull the covers up I thought of the new game I have waiting for me downstairs. It's God of War III. I've played the demo and beat the two previous installments. I've read nothing but stellar reviews so far and I'm sure I will not be disappointed. The God of War series offers some of the best of what gaming has to offer: Near perfect gameplay and level design, stunning graphics, a story rooted in something the whole world can relate to (Greek mythology) and, basically, an insistence on excellence in every way.
As a sworn gamer I should be flying down the steps right now to play this game until my eyes bleed. Instead, I'm here writing this blog entry, and I'm cheating.
How?
Well … This blog has been going strong since Jan. 1, 2010. I've managed to file an entry every day for 75 days. I've written most of them, but I've had help from some stellar writers who believe in gaming and the memories it creates. I am humbled and honored by their contributions and by the readers I know (or hope) are out there. It's not easy coming up with one essay a day about a game that moved you but we've managed to do it. So tonight, as I write about my kids and the little piece of perfection I found when I came home from work to see them enjoying their young lives, I am cheating a little bit. The only way this is about a game is because I will absolutely play God of War III for hours as soon as I file this entry.
Which means I will forever associate God of War III with this perfect day in March.
Which means, I guess, I'm not cheating after all.
Nice.
See you tomorrow.
Kratos awaits.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

XIII - Xbox, PS2, Gamecube

I was living in Philadelphia, running the bar at a Greek restaurant in a ritzy neighborhood called Manayunk. Actually, just the main street in Manayunk was ritzy - Manhattan salons, upscale restaurants, expensive boutiques. A few blocks up the road where I lived with my wife (then girlfriend) was a working class neighborhood with narrow streets and a lot of churches. (The part in the movie Unbreakable where the kid is playing football in the park was filmed there.)
I'd come home at 3 a.m. after closing the bar and get in some gaming before passing out. One of the games I remember fondly from this period was XIII. If Manayunk was a working class neighborhood fronting a fancy facade, XIII was a B-list shooter fronting a spectacular veneer.
Sometimes style is enough to trump substance.
It's rare, but it happens.
In XIII, a daring title from the previous console generation, the attention to style overwhelmed everything else. For me it was an obvious buy: I love first person shooters and I'm a big fan of cell-shaded graphics. XIII had both, and it played out like a 1960s espionage film.
You wake up on a desolate strip of New England beach. The near-fatal impact of a bullet has left your head pounding, and your memory erased. And you've got the number XIII tattooed on your chest. A pretty lifeguard in a red swimsuit helps you along. In your pocket is a key to a New York City bank box. You struggle to your feet and get assaulted again. You're shocked with how easily you're able to dispatch the bad guys.
It's not the most original beginning to a thriller (game, film or novel) but it's intriguing and it gets better.
And the game features Adam West in what was probably his last serious role before playing the mayor on Family Guy. (Come to think of it, it may be his only serious role. Ever.)
XIII took a lot of criticism for having more style than substance. I can't argue that. But I can say that at 3 a.m. when I would come home from work it was nice to have a game with a great story, good looks and gameplay that I could easily master before my eyes fell shut under the weight of the day.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Spider-Man - Nintendo 64

In the year 2000 I turned 28, took on a second newspaper as editor and rented a one-room apartment across from the newsroom. With the extra responsibility at the paper came a few extra dollars in my paycheck. I treated myself to a new TV and a copy of Spider-Man for the N64.
I never once regretted choosing the N64 over the Playstation. For all the raving about Sony's first console (and, I admit, it was a revolutionary console) I will still take the N64's best titles over the PS1's any day.
Spider-Man, which came out on both platforms, is no exception.
You should know, however, that I'm a Spidey geek. I've got a sleeve tattoo of Spidey and my favorite villains as well as a life-sized statue of him in my den.
One of the greatest moments of my journalism career came when I got to interview Stan Lee. I was writing a profile of a local comic books store - trying to get at what kept them afloat in the age of eBay and kids' waning interest in reading comics. I got it in my head that I had to interview Stan Lee for what was, at best, a local human interest story. After much wrangling with his PR flack I finally got the interview.
"Please hold for Mr. Lee," his secretary said.
Ten seconds passed like ten days.
And then:
"Is this the valorous Victor?"
Then I gushed over the phone for about 5 minutes and did the least objective interview of my life.
"You have been to the mountain," said fellow reporter, the late, great Arthur Turgeon.
He was right.
So imagine my delight when I began playing Spider-Man and was greeted by Stan Lee's narration in the game's opening. I knew right away that this was going to be a quality title that would do the hero justice. It certainly did. (I still love the Spider-Man game form the Atari 2600 just as much. You can bet that one will make this list as well.)
Some things define us. For me one of those things has always been Spider-Man. I've loved him since I was a little kid. My brother once took me to a face-painting booth at a carnival and I made the lady paint my face like Spidey's mask. My 2-year-old daughter knows more about Spidey than she does about Elmo. And on the first date I ever had with the wonderful woman who is now my wife, I laid out the (abbreviated) mythology of a character who has resonated with me for as long as I can remember. I knew I loved her the minute I set eyes on her so I wanted to lay it all out there right at the beginning.
I guess it worked.
This game honors each and every memory I have of the web-slinger.
Rare is the game that can top that.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Frontlines: Fuel of War - Xbox 360

Somewhere in the timeline between DOOM and Halo first person shooters got a reputation as being senseless endeavors with little substance. It’s true that cookie-cutter titles exist in the market, but that’s true of any genre. Especially in this glorious console generation — where A-list titles pop up year-round for all systems — there has been a backlash against what some people perceive as stupid shooters.
Into the flooded market appeared Frontlines: Fuel of War. It had neither the hype of Halo 3 or the depth of Bioshock.
But guess what?
It’s fun.
I mean really fun. I mean “keep it in the console until you’ve beaten it and then take it online immediately” kind of fun. Does it have to be anything else? Does it have to aspire to touch the heart and bridge the gap between film and first person shooter? Does it have to make a difference in my life on a personal, private level?
No. It has to be fun. And it is.
This is not to say that Kaos Studios didn’t round out the game with a decent, timely story about our energy crisis and one possible future. They did. They even included a journalist embedded with the soldiers that I obviously found endearing. But while the story in Frontlines is a fine skeleton, the meat on the bones is the fun factor.
You’ll feel it the minute you fire your first weapon. I don’t think I’ve seen tighter gunplay in a shooter. It’s not just that targeting and hits are done flawlessly; it’s that the guns feel amazing. They’re tight, responsive and satisfying. And they sound fantastic. I bought this game when my wife and I had our first kid. With a newborn at home I played all my games with a set of Sennheiser RS130 Wireless RF Headphones. These are serious headphones, and they came in handy with Frontlines because the sound is so good. (It’s probably better that I didn’t play the game with my surround sound system because the two women who walk their dogs by my house 38 times a day would likely think there was a firefight going on in my living room.)
FPS fans will be able to pick up and play this title easily. When you do you’ll quickly find that the war zone is littered with not only weapons and warriors, but tons of hardware. You’ll pilot a variety of vehicles in this game — which all handle satisfactorily — but the real fun starts when you stumble across the game’s many drones. These are remote-controlled, scale-model helicopters, tanks and other weapons of war that you can safely send into battle while you hide in the distance. I especially liked the helicopters, which pack an amazingly destructive arsenal of weaponry on their tiny frames.
In closing, allow me to explain it like this: When I got my copy of Frontlines I took it to a friend’s house where a poker game was to commence. I figured we’d check it out after we played cards. He was anxious to try the game so I fired it up and handed him the controller.
“This is awesome,” he said after a few minutes.
He was right. (And we never managed to put it down long enough to play cards.)
Frontlines: Fuel of War was not the defining moment that heralded the future of shooters. But it’s fun; a lot of fun.
And that’s awesome.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Personal Trainer: Cooking - Nintendo DS

I’ve worked in my share of decent restaurant kitchens and I’m here to tell you: This “game’s” demonstration for filleting anchovies (among other fine tutorials) is as good as I’ve seen anywhere.
Personal Trainer: Cooking not only makes planning and creating meals easy and fun, it makes you want to cook. That’s an impressive accomplishment for this unassuming little non-game. That’s right. This is not a game. Not even close. As Nintendo continues to redefine what a gaming console (or handheld, in this case) can do, they struck gold with Personal Trainer: Cooking.
Evidence of this is not only in the fact that the software is successful in helping people of all skills turn out fine meals, but that it has the one quality all good cookbooks have: You can’t put it down. Like a good cookbook that is fun to read even when you’re not cooking, Personal Trainer: Cooking is fun to explore any time. I found myself searching the globe with its cool country-by-country recipe finder looking for exotic dishes. Or I’d set a calorie limit (or just punch in the staples I had in the pantry) and see what I could come up with. If that’s not enough, the training videos included are excellent.
One small but important feature: Voice activation. Once you get cooking you don’t have to touch the DS again. You can tell the DS to repeat a prior step or continue on and it will recognize your voice. This beats thumbing through a cookbook with panko bread crumbs pasted onto your hands or fumbling with your remote control to pause that episode of Molto Mario you recorded.
The title boasts well over 200 recipes from around the globe. A calendar feature keeps track of the recipes you’ve cooked. The ingredient manager makes this an easy way to go shopping. There’s even a handy onboard calculator to keep your spending in check at the market.
I’m not about to give up on my obsession with collecting and reading cookbooks, but I will say this is easily the best $20 you’ll spend on any cooking gadget or book in your life.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Scribblenauts - Nintendo DS

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time engaged in one of the greatest debates in all of childhood: Who would win in a fight?
Superman or The Hulk?
The Hulk.
Godzilla or a T-Rex?
Godzilla
My dad or your dad?
My dad.
You get the idea. My next-door-neighbor and I would waste summer afternoons in our Baltimore suburb playing this silly game before we got bored and, of course, got into mischief. (Later in life I killed some time by throwing a tub of BBQ sauce at some dude's garage. I'm ashamed to say how old I was at the time. Let's just say I almost missed the prom because I was grounded.)
Perhaps kids of this generation will be spared the shame of youth with Scribblenauts, a game that lets you do almost anything in its virtual world. If you want to see if God is more powerful than Godzilla, go for it. If you want to see if a vampire can beat a wolfman, have at it. This is not the purpose of the game, however, but it's a plus.
The goal of this ingenious game is simple: Help Maxwell (you) solve challenge after challenge in a game world that you control. The trick here is that you choose what to put in the game world to help complete each task. For instance, let’s say there is a challenge in which you have to rescue a kitten from a tree. Using the Nintendo DS touch screen to insert objects into the game world, you could arm yourself with a hatchet and chop the tree down. Or you could write in a fireman and let him do the work for you. Or you could get a little nasty and use a slingshot to shoot the cat out of the tree (although points are awarded for avoiding violence).
The challenges in Scribblenauts range from the simple cat-caught-in-tree example to helping sea captains avoid ice bergs.
If you can think it, you can probably write it into the game world. The game recognizes some 10,000 words and translates them into characters and objects. And if you don’t feel like a challenge, you can simply write goofy stuff into the game world and see how they interact. I recommend the following: God and Satan; a vampire and garlic; a cop and a crook; Bigfoot and a dragon.
This is easily one of the best games I’ve played on my DS. If I would have had a game like this when I was young, perhaps I wouldn't have been so easily distracted and some poor man's garage door wouldn't smell like ribs.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Resident Evil 5 - Xbox 360, PS3

Awesome.
Summing up the experience of playing “Resident Evil 5” is just that simple. It is awesome in nearly every way. Sadly, that word is so overused that most people have forgotten it should be reserved for things that truly inspire awe – an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration and even fear.
It is the rare game that has you sitting back a bit on your couch so there is enough room for it to exist in your living room. You feel a need to be respectful of its place in the world. All the hallmarks of a first class game are here: Solid story, jaw-dropping graphics, excellent pacing, etc. It’s games like this that remind us why we play games in the first place. “Resident Evil 5” is among the handful of stellar games from this generation that will be remembered forever, such as “Bioshock” and “Fallout 3.”
Considering that the same could be said of its predecessor, “Resident Evil 4,” I think someone at Capcom knows what they’re doing.
You probably already know the major talking points about the game.
There is co-op play (it’s excellent).
The graphics are as good as we’ve ever seen in a game (they are).
It takes place in Africa (and, in my humble opinion, the game is not racist - but it's a good debate.)
The gameplay is similar to that of “Resident Evil 4” (getting a little long in the tooth, but works perfectly).
What else do you need to know? Well, as you once again take control of beefy commando Chris Redfield you are joined by a partner named Sheva Alomar in a mission to take on a bioterrorism threat infecting a fictional African country. I never realized how alone I felt in RE4 until I played through this one with Sheva. It’s nice having someone else around when it’s raining zombies; even if that someone is under AI control.
The game boasts impressive online components, an improved inventory system that is enhanced by the co-op sharing options, and enough thrills to keep you busy playing until the very end. Some say it’s not as scary as other installments. They’re right, but the intensity is so high that you may not notice.
Two minor but frustrating things to mention:
1. Despite the attention to detail and the stunning environments, for some reason a line of clothes hanging in a village will stop you in your tracks. Seriously. The first time I tried to walk through a few towels hanging on a line and was rebuffed as if it were a brick wall I was a little disappointed. I know it’s a small detail, but it immediately took my head out of the game.
2. Sheva, despite being a fine warrior and companion, is a mannequin the rest of the time. At one point I shot a gas canister and the explosion was amazing. Sheva, however, remained stonefaced as if nothing had happened.
Are these small points? Absolutely. In fact, if this game wasn’t so amazing I wouldn’t even bring them up. But it is the intense attention to detail and quality that is evident throughout the game that makes these little bits of silliness stand out.
And this title truly is a stand out title.
I'm not even a survival horror fan. I'm not a big country music fan either, but I love Johnny Cash. That's because the best demands respect.
And this game is one of the best ever.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Halo 3 - Xbox 360

On the week of The Halo 3 launch my mother called and asked me the following question:
“When will you play Halo 3, Hon?”
You know you’ve crossed into a new entertainment phenomenon if a 72-year-old woman from East Baltimore knows when a video game is hitting the shelves. She even knew that some people were lining up at midnight to buy the game the moment it was released.
I’ve spent the past decade heralding the coming onslaught of the video game medium. The industry eclipsed Hollywood in sales a long time ago. No one really believed me when I used to tell them that more money is spent annually on games than movies. No one believed me when I’d defend my hobby by saying your average game player is around 30 years old. And no one even wanted to talk with me about gaming’s eventual crossover from “Asteroids” to art form.
Now that’s all anyone is talking about. These topics are on the lips of TV talking heads, politicians and mothers in East Baltimore.
Now they’re starting to believe.
As a game, Halo 3 managed to exceed the hype juggernaut. It was as great as you wanted it to be. The added features to multiplayer and campaign mode were all excellent. You played as the Master Chief from beginning to end – no offense to the Arbiter of Halo 2, but that was a gimmick I never liked much. The story – twisted and confounding as ever - was tied up. And the graphics were astounding. A lot of people hate on the Halo graphics and I've never understood it. From Master Chief's dramatic crash landing that opens the game through the varied levels and firefights that follow, I found Halo 3 to be a refreshingly bright landscape of impressive graphics (though I agree the faces often look terrible.) Perhaps the original Halo was so groundbreaking in the graphics department that people were expecting photo-realism and were disappointed when all they got were stellar visuals.
In Halo 3 you finish the fight you started in the first game. That reference is obvious. I was more intrigued by the “Believe” tagline. I think it’s a bold way of saying: “Yes. There’s a lot of hype surrounding this game and things rarely, if ever, live up to their hype. This will. Believe it.”
And it did.
Even before the game was released to the masses, critics from gaming magazines and elsewhere in the media hailed it as a triumph. It was not the best game of all time but it was unanimously regarded as an excellent game and a fitting end to the Halo trilogy.
But is it art?
A lot of ink has been (and will be) spilled on the topic of video games as art. I will humbly submit that the question is so subjective as to be nearly irrelevant. The better questions are: Is it fun? Is it well done? Does it spark the imagination? Does it stay with you?
Do you want more?
Here’s my take. If you believe that storytelling is art than it stands to reason that Halo 3 is art. When I first popped it into my XBOX 360 and started finishing the fight, I was certainly impressed by the graphics and the gameplay. The game looks fantastic and is as much fun to play as any game out there. But what kept me in front of the television, what drove me to charge through the game’s many battlefields and challenges without looking back, what sent me through the game as fast as I could with guns blazing is that I wanted to see what happened in the end.
I was happy to finish the fight (because the game is all about fighting) but after getting hooked on the first Halo game seven years ago I was ready to find out what happens at the end of this story. What happens to the many characters who, just like in the movies or in a book, have become familiar and important to me? Who wins the war? What happens to the most important character — me? For this is what the truly great games do for us. Master Chief isn’t just a cyborg space marine — he’s you while you’re playing the game. He is an empty husk in which we place ourselves as we’re running through mission after mission and saving the lives of those characters around us who we’ve grown to love.
Any good movie or book keeps you interested long enough to see what happens in the end. Halo 3 isn’t the first video game to do this, but it does it well.
The video game medium may only be scratching the surface of compelling storytelling, but it’s there.
And it’s art.
Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Stuntman: Ignition - Xbox 360, PS3

There was a game for the Atari 2600 called Human Cannonball. In it, you tried to launch a dude into a safety net. Of course, the "dude" was a blocky stick figure and the "safety net" looked like a highway traffic sign. This game was joined by other titles of the era that tried to put the player into a scenario that was plausible if not probable. Playing "Human Cannonball" as a kid was probably as close as I was going to get to being in the circus.
Stuntman: Ignition is a great game because it captures that childhood fascination of growing up and having a cool job. What kid wouldn't want to be a stuntman? And now my thoughts turn to the late, great Evel Knievel. He was like a super hero when I was a kid. As I grew older, I viewed him more as a punk rock redneck. He did whatever the hell he wanted and didn’t care what people thought.
Even though he sounded like a barroom blowhard in most interviews, the man got up on that Harley Davidson dressed like a Las Vegas Captain America and he really jumped. No computers. No “trick photography” as they used to say. He really did it. No one can take that away from him.
If you asked him, he was a daredevil. That’s fine. Stuntman is another word for it. Playing this game I thought of him often. Also, I thought about some of my favorite movies from that era in the late 1970s and early 1980s that relied heavily on stunts instead of special effects. Just about any movie with Burt Reynolds, every episode of “The Dukes of Hazzard,” and many more. I won’t argue their merits as classic cinema, but they were fun.
So is this game. If you’re patient and persistent, you’ll like this game. And if you’re paying attention, you’ll understand two things: Being a stuntman takes precision, and stuntmen/stuntwomen are cool.
In Stuntman: Ignition you are the stuntman. You will perform six stunt sequences in six films along with a host of other side missions and game modes. You will drive a variety of vehicles that all handle well and are fun to drive. As you drive each vehicle through a series of progressively complicated sequences, a director will call out stunts for you to perform on the fly. Some are easy (jumps) some are hard (two-wheeling).
And sometimes it just doesn’t feel fair.
The icons that show you where to perform your next stunt often pop up too late or are hard to spot. The director’s timing is also questionable. There will be a lot of trial and error before you nail most of the sequences. If you like the game — and I loved it — you won’t mind. If you don’t have a lot of patience for getting things just right, this is not your game.
One thing I didn’t expect: The game is funny. Each movie in the game is a spoof of a Hollywood blockbuster genre. The solid voice acting is as good as any other game I’ve played and the extra features — a level editor and fun (if a bit vacant) online component round it out.
Stuntman: Ignition is a real treat that didn't get the attention it deserved. If you like movies, cool stunts and a challenge, this is the game for you.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Half Life 2 - Xbox 360, PS3, PC

There’s something Half Life 2 does effortlessly that few games do well: It marries tenderness with technology.
In the movies this is nothing new. George Lucas once made us care about real characters struggling for freedom in a fantasy world with his first trilogy. Even the beauty-and-the-beast love story in the original King Kong was as impressive as the ape effects.
These are special effects movies that make us feel something more than excitement. It has long been a criticism of video games that they look great, but they typically don’t have the ability to make us feel anything. “Half-Life 2” and its subsequent episodes are among a new generation of titles that are changing how we feel about video games. It is not only among the best games I’ve ever played, but it is touching as well. There are moments of pure, character-driven drama. Since the drama unfolds in-game (not in cut-scenes) you’re always watching it unfold as a character in the scene. When one character hugs another in the middle of the game you can walk around them and watch from all angles. When a character is in distress or pain you can zoom in on their faces and watch them feel these emotions. It’s hard not to feel it, too. For this, I consider these games monumental achievements.
Aside from making you feel something for a change they are exciting and beautiful, to be sure, with plenty of action and physics-based puzzles to keep even expert gamers busy. I’ve always been a fan of this series for its intelligent sensibilities and complete lack of ego. The two extra episodes go a long way to propel the art of gaming both in play and narrative.
If you don’t feel something while you’re playing through the Half-Life 2 saga, maybe you should see a therapist (or a priest), because this game has a lot of heart.
You’d have to be a zombie not to notice.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Conan – Xbox 360, PS3

The nice thing about writing a daily column about great games for an entire year is that it gives you the freedom to include some games that may not have made a tougher selection criteria. Readers of this blog know our criteria is simple: If the author thinks it's a great came and can support that belief, than it is a great game.
Conan is a game I found great and I know I'm in the minority. I'm hoping this column changes some minds.
Before I graduated to Hemingway and Bukowski, my introduction to macho literature was Robert E. Howard. The prolific writer’s most famous creation is Conan, a barbarian thief and conqueror. His god is Crom. His sword is his sidekick. He despises magic and he loves women. Many women.
Howard killed himself at the age of 30 in 1936 after hearing that his dying mother would never recover. He walked out to his car and shot himself in the head. His mother died the following day.
Some 70 years later his most famous creation continues to captivate. Howard would likely approve of the game’s faithfulness to Hyboria, the fantasy world he created for Conan. From the opening screen the game world looks and sounds just right. Though I prefer the musical score from the “Conan the Barbarian” film, the music in the game is spot on. (However, Howard would be furious to find that halfway through the game Conan starts wielding magic. Conan doesn’t do magic. He hates it, fears it, swears against it. By Crom I tell you Howard would not like the game developer’s inclusion of magic abilities to diversify the gameplay. They do their best to weave a story that has Conan using magic against his better judgment, but still …)
The magic heresy aside, the gameplay in Conan is surprisingly deep for what is essentially eight hours of cutting bad guys in half with a variety of swords and axes. This is not new territory. Anyone who has played the fantastic God of War games will be quick to point out that Conan is a distant second in this genre. However, the Conan canon is simple and the game is faithful to that simplicity. You will kill thousands of henchmen in this game and fight an interesting variety of beautifully rendered — and sometimes impossibly frustrating — level bosses. You are rewarded for your hack and slash handiwork with new combos and moves. With a ton of attacks at my disposal, I still managed to stick with a handful of trusty moves. My favorite plan of attack was to throw barrels and objects at the bad guys and then use dual swords to hack repeatedly at their torsos until limbs and heads were severed.
Surprisingly, it doesn’t get old (probably because the game is relatively short.)
Oh, and the game is packed with naked women. When you discover an abandoned slave girl chained to a tree you can either free her or simply leave her there. Free her and you are rewarded with a little nudity and horrible one-liners from the vixens — such as: “Now crush me with your love.”
Of course, this game is not for kids.
It’s violent, mindless and (probably) sexist. But, in my opinion, having young girls play games such as “Barbie: Mermaid Adventure” is likely more damaging to them than having little boys wield swords and see breasts.
The game is challenging enough that hardcore gamers will want to plod on and win the final (and most frustrating) boss battle. But it also has the “pick up and play” appeal that many gamers appreciate. For me, I was happy to visit Hyboria, embody a childhood hero and turn off that part of my brain that tells me diversions such as this are not propelling me forward as a decent human being. (Those may have been my wife’s exact words.)
So much mediocre sword and sorcery stuff is floating in the popular culture pool that people are often quick to dismiss Conan – the books and the fantastic first film – as more of the same. But Conan is one of the great ones, and I believe the game suits him perfectly.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com