Michael Rougeau

Originally posted in November 2010 on thebigpixels.com, which unfortunately has died.

Plus hands-on time with TRON: Evolution and Epic Mickey.

Hanging out at Disney Interactive’s Comic-Con booth over the weekend, I got the distinct sense that the company’s going to be focusing more than ever on video games, starting with the new TRON games and Epic Mickey. The former are part of Disney’s “first big transmedia” strategy, according to TRON: Evolution Development Director John Vignocchi, while Epic Mickey’s developers have been given huge amounts of freedom to explore Disney history. Both represent Disney’s increased interest in making games an integral part of the company’s brands, and with Warren Spector on board, there’s hardly any way the strategy can fail.

TRON‘s “transmedia” strategy means that the games and films (both the 1982 version and upcoming 2010 sequel) fit together like the pieces of a narrative puzzle; the original movie leads into the DS game, TRON: Evolution DS, and the Wii, PSP, and Xbox 360/PS3/PC versions follow chronologically in the fiction, culminating in the new movie.

In other words, Evolution (the game for 360, PS3 and PC) isn’t a side story or a continuation of the film’s plot. In fact, the film will feature multiple flashbacks to the game’s events, which lead directly to the state of unrest seen in the film’s world. Moviegoers don’t need to play the game first to understand it, but those who do will have a much more robust understanding of the film’s characters and plot.

I watched Vignocchi play the game for upwards of a half hour before taking control myself for the much anticipated light cycle race, which played like a version of Wipeout where the track is disintegrating as you jet across it. While I watched, Vignocchi played through an entire portion of the game set in Arjia City. Home to a rare breed of programs, it’s an important location in TRON‘s computerized world, but Vignocchi skipped every single cut scene, according to him, at the behest of the filmmakers. Apparently too many of the film’s crucial plot points are explored in the level, and they didn’t want the movie spoiled for observant Comic-Con attendees.

The on-foot gameplay came across as a mixture of Assassin’s Creed-like free running and combat somewhat reminiscent of Batman: Arkham Asylum. Players are free to run up any wall and jump to any surface they can reach, all while battling multiple enemies with an arsenal of disc-based attacks and using the environmental to their advantage. The demo also included a tank, which controls “like Halo‘s Scorpion” (straight from Vignocchi’s mouth) and lays waste to troops both on foot and in their airborne transport vehicles.

Overall, it seemed like a healthy mix of gameplay styles, with a slew of RPG elements thrown in. Plus, experience and upgrades earned in multiplayer (which players can jump in and out of at any of the plentiful upgrade stations littered throughout the campaign) transfer directly to the single player game.

Vignocchi said the team of self proclaimed geeks is thrilled to be working in the TRON universe. During his lengthy employ at Midway, in fact, Vignocchi worked directly under the creator of the original TRON Arcade.

“As geeks ourselves, we have this opportunity to work on this amazing property,” he said. “Everything is canon.” That may be the most important part for Disney’s current strategy.

Of course, the other side of that lies with Epic Mickey. Spector and the team at Junction Point have been given absolutely unprecedented access to Disney’s archives, and they’re taking full advantage by revisiting countless obscure, rejected and forgotten characters and locales, Creative Director and industry legend Warren Spector told me.

I played through the game’s tutorial level, which takes place just after Mickey Mouse is pulled into a dangerous dimension by a mysterious (and almost certainly evil) ink blot. Lucky for him, he comes into possession of a magic brush that can create or destroy portions of the environment at players’ discretion. Its most basic implementations involve spraying paint to create platforms, or paint thinner to remove obstructions. But Chase Jones, the game’s Lead Desgigner, told me the brush’s applications are too numerous to grasp from such a short demo.

When I asked Spector what his favorite part of working on the game has been so far, he couldn’t think of a single answer. “I’m really happy that people are finding their own play style. You watch five people play, and they’re all doing things differently,” he began. “That’s when games get really special.”

“At the end of the day, the game feels unique. It doesn’t feel like any other game, doesn’t play like any other game. Its pacing is different from every other game, and so I’m really happy about that,” he continued. “I’ve watched dads and sons playing together, you know? I’ve got one picture of literally a five-year-old boy with a controller in his hands and his dad leaning around and helping him out.

“And all of a sudden, you know – games can really be like Pixar movies. They don’t all have to be adrenalized shooting,” he continued. “It’s really reflecting what I hoped it would be.”

Yet it’s impossible to grasp the true importance of Epic Mickey without hearing it in Spector’s own words. “There’s a whole new feeling about video games at Disney right now,” he told me. “The fact that they’re using a game to reintroduce Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to the world speaks to how important video games are to the company.”

Oswald was introduced in the late 1920s, and the character’s close resemblance to Mickey is proof enough of his importance in Disney history. He plays a central role in Epic Mickey, and he’s accompanied by countless other similarly obscure and outdated characters.

“The idea that Disney the corporation would give the team that kind of access and that kind of freedom, that kind of creative freedom, more than anything else, has been surprising, and really special,” Spector said. “I think it really is that video games have kind of come of age.”

He added, “It’s about time.”

TRON: Evolution comes out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, and Epic Mickey hits shelves exclusively on the Wii.

Now that Bungie’s moved on to bigger and better publishers, some say Halo won’t survive for long. Those people clearly don’t understand this industry.

No matter who’s in charge, there will always be Halo fans that legitimately care about the series’s fiction. Bungie and others have spent a decade crafting a pretty fantastic story, through the games, comics, books, anime and more, and despite a satisfactory ending to Halo 3, there are a lot of places the Chief can still potentially go.

A Toast to Onyx

One of the most popular (and probable) guesses so far is that the planet-sized structure glimpsed at the end of the recent Halo 4 trailer is actually Onyx. The “shield world” featured heavily in Eric Nylund’s official 2006 novel The Ghosts of Onyx, and it’s where the few remaining Spartan IIs and IIIs  – including favorites Kelly and Fred – will be found. The all-important Dr. Halsey, who made her first in-game appearance in Halo: Reach, was also last seen on Onyx.

The only problem is that Onyx was sort of destroyed at the end of the book. The entire planet turned out to be made of millions of Forerunner sentinels (the same flying bastards seen throughout the games), who disengaged from one another and decimated a Covenant fleet toward the novel’s conclusion. Halsey and the rest of the Spartans found themselves trapped in a dyson sphere – an inverted planet in a slipspace dimension adjacent to ours – searching for a way out.

The Chief would no doubt be thrilled to reunite with his oldest friends, and Ghosts of Onyx left plenty of unanswered questions. If there’s even a slight chance Halo 4 will answer them, Microsoft’s going to get even more of my money. There are a couple other options I can think of, though..

A Four-Legged Marathon

Halo 3′s ending was hardly ambiguous, but there was one aspect that left some questions dangling in our minds: beating the game on legendary unlocked the briefest of teaser videos showing Cortana and the sleeping Chief’s busted-ass ship approaching a planet that looked more than familiar to long-time Bungie fans.

You see, Halo wasn’t Bungie’s first series. Many of you probably know this, but back in the ’90s the enterprising developers made a series of Mac games (what? why?) called Marathon. Thematically, they were pretty similar to Halo; the Marathon games teemed with lone super soldiers, rampant AIs and millenia-old sci-fi structures. And the planet that makes its cameo in Halo 3′s secret ending has a pretty big Marathon symbol on it. The inclusion of this otherwise pointless scene fueled the already-widespread speculation that the Master Chief and the protagonist of the Marathon series are one and the same. Despite Bungie’s repeated claims otherwise, Halo is in Microsoft’s hands now, and number four may well tie neatly into the Marathon series.

Something Completely Different

Of course, it could always be about something else entirely. Although it seems 343 Studios would be missing out on some incredible narrative opportunities if that’s the case, they’ve probably got loads of perfectly decent ideas that have nothing to do with “the story so far.” Say goodbye to the other Spartans, screw Dr. Halsey’s mom complex, and forget the forerunners ever existed. After all, it’s Microsoft we’re talking about. Selective consumer amnesia is an important part of their business strategy.

I’m sure there are plenty of other good ideas out there, so lemme have’em. What have I forgotten?

Alright, so it’s just the UK, but still. I’m only here for a few months, but I’ve run into my fair share of difficulties trying to keep up on my gaming habit. It’s strange to say, given that gaming is a habit some people struggle to break, but the less games are a part of my life, the less I feel like myself.

I’m still keeping up with industry chit-chat, writing semi-daily for Kombo and Gamezone. The NGP looks amazing – I don’t see how Sony could screw this one up, though of course I won’t put it past them. I even got to play the 3DS again this past weekend at one of the public events they’re holding throughout London. My friends and I stumbled across it at the hip kids-street fair they hold at Brick Lane every Sunday. The little thing hasn’t changed much, and while it’s impressive, I can’t help but be more excited by the possibilities of the NGP. I’ve never liked 3D that much anyway.

Speaking of 3D, I can’t believe 3D movies here cost £15 – that’s almost $25. Dates are expensive, and tangled was cute, but hardly worth it. What was I talking about? Oh yeah..

So for one thing, Steam only works intermittently. That’s not entirely Steam’s fault, as my Uni (Goldsmiths College) purposely blocks the ports that Steam requires to connect. If Steam allowed you to mess with its connection settings a little more, I might not have this problem, but it is what it is. In offline mode, my games, paltry as the selection is (I’m on a Mac, naturally), tend to freeze up every few minutes. Steam support seems mostly stumped on this issue, though their most recent solution may have actually done the trick.

So PC gaming is finicky at best. Bringing a console would have been pointless – there’s no TV in my dorm, and the wacky power outlets they use over here would have probably fried my already-stressed out Xbox 360. Lugging my original, 80-gig PS3 halfway around the world would have been ludicrous, and as for the Wii, well, who the hell plays Wii anymore?

That leaves my PSP, DS and iPhone. The DS has seen practically zero use, despite a friend kindly lending me her copy of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. I think the problem is that I’m just sick of the DS. I’m sick of the entire system. Flipping it open, the battery-draining sleep mode, my stupid scratched-up touch screen, dropping the stylus on the bus.. I just don’t feel like dealing with it anymore.

As for the iPhone, roaming is a bitch. It stays on airplane mode 100% of the time – I just can’t risk the charges if it decides to ignore my wishes and tries to send me my Words For Friends notifications or something. Mostly I just use it as an iPod now, and since most games tend to interrupt your music as soon as you start them up, I just don’t really play games on it anymore. I might, if there was a universal setting that prevented apps from pausing your music, but Apple apparently hasn’t thought of that yet.

So that leaves the PSP, which has seen the most use of any platform I have here. I’ve got a healthy library of games at my disposal: Birth by Sleep, Jeanne D’Arc (which has been on my pile of shame until now), Ghost of Sparta, and Persona 3 Portable. There’s a lot of variety there, though I think I’d be playing a lot more if I hadn’t brought Kingdom Hearts. I’ve been struggling to finish it for months, but it’s just such a stinking pile of crap.

I’ve actually got a pretty good metaphor for this: trying to be thrifty, I picked up a pint of Sainsbury’s (a general grocery store) brand scotch a few weeks ago. Imported Jim Beam and Jack Daniels are too expensive here, so I figured, why not? I filled up my flask and went to see a play (a normal day in the life of Mike Rougeau).

But it turns out the stuff is awful – and my full flask has been sitting on a shelf, unused, for weeks. I can’t drink it, but I can’t bring myself to pour booze down the drain, either. The Sainsbury’s Scotch is preventing me from day-drinking – just like Birth by Sleep is preventing me from playing PSP. There are a lot of lessons to learn when you move to a foreign country.

I solved the flask problem by letting a friend drink all the scotch. Now I’ve got an empty vessel in which to pour whatever I want. I can’t exactly wait for someone else to finish Birth by Sleep for me, though. In fact, I may just write it off entirely so I can get to Jeanne and God of War – far superior games that I’d much rather be playing.

It’s frustrating to have to sit back and watch a  game like Dead Space 2 come and go while I twiddle my thumbs across Europe. There’s ads for it plastered all over the subway. I’ll also be missing the launch of the 3DS – another thing I can’t seem to get away from, yet won’t have access to until months after everyone else does. And as grateful as I am to have Steam on my Mac, the cross-platform library still blows. Left 4 Dead 2 and Deathspank are pretty much it. The first thing I’m doing when I get home (besides grabbing some In-N-Out) is firing up Demon’s Souls.

I do like to complain, but – and I’ll be honest here – there are worse places to be, and I know I’ll get to resume gaming soon.

Where can you possibly begin when you’re talking about The Wheel of Time? I guess the most important part of a 14-book series is the characters; without great characters, nothing could last this long. The Wheel of Time has, according to the last official count, around 2200 named characters. Yet there are a precious few who are important to that world as they are to me. Maybe that’s one of the reasons my love for them is so strong.

There’s something really extraordinary about reading a new book in a decades-old series, especially one you’ve been reading all your life. The attachment you can feel toward characters you’ve grown up with is surprisingly strong. Harry Potter is a great example of this for people my age. If all seven books had come out at once, we wouldn’t be nearly so attached to them; instead, the books kept coming out as we grew up, and they matured in tandem with us.

The Wheel of Time is much the same way, only spaced out over two decades, two authors, and 14 long, long books, the penultimate of which came out at the beginning of the month. The first book in the series came out shortly after I was born. I jumped on board over a decade later, and though that may seem late by some standards, four completely new books (and one prequel) have come out since I became fully caught up as a teenager. Each one was awaited with more anticipation, and each had a bigger impact on my life than the last.

When Robert Jordan died in 2007 with the final book still unfinished, the future of the series was up in the air. Even after Brandon Sanderson emerged as the author who would take the reigns and finish the books, we held our breath in nervous anticipation. Then The Gathering Storm dropped in 2009, and the future seemed more certain than it had in years. The book was incredible, easily matching the best of the series prior to Jordan’s death.

A year has passed since then, and the 13th book, The Towers of Midnight, has finally arrived. I blew through its 850 page girth in two days, and for those two days, the characters and places inside were more real to me than the real world. It was incredible; every important character reached new levels of awesomeness. Best of all, events that were set in motion in The Fires of Heaven, book five in the series, have finally been resolved. Moiraine, by some accounts the series’ Gandalf figure, and possibly my favorite character, has been rescued from the mysterious world of the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn, or the Snakes and Foxes, as they’re not-so-affectionately known.

Every character who witnessed her fate in The Fires of Heaven had no choice but to assume her dead. Though only a year or two passed between her apparent death and rescue in the world of The Wheel of Time, it took far longer in the real world: 16 years, almost to the month. Moiraine played a huge role in the early novels, and her influence is felt, her presence dearly missed, throughout the rest of the series, by other characters as well as by readers.

Reading her lines and actions again after all this time was incredible. The last time I heard Moiraine speaking in my head as I read the words Jordan crafted for her, I was around fifteen; it’s been much longer for some. She’s given a scant few pages at the end of The Towers of Midnight, but it’s clear she’s got a huge role to play in A Memory of Light, the conclusion to an unmatched epic that began over two decades ago, set to come out in early 2012. It will be sad, exciting, and exultant, and while I never want it to end, I really can’t wait.

Many of you already know this, or your subconscious knows it, but I thought why not spell it out in the simplest terms possible. No long winded argument or impassioned diatribe. Just my opinion, presented as fact: Duke Nukem, as both a game and a character, is obsolete.

He’s a rude, misogynistic dirtbag with diarrhea of the mouth who loves strippers and blowing shit up. It was campy back then; now it’s just tired. Movies like Grindhouse have appealed to similar faculties, with debatable success, yet Duke seems strangely out of place 14 years after the game’s original announcement.

Look back at the shooters we were playing in the late 90s, when Duke Nukem Forever was still a “game in development” and not a “running joke.” Goldeneye, Quake, Half-Life, even Duke Nukem 3D – all classics, and no doubt worth revisiting, but it doesn’t take much examination to notice that they can’t hold a candle to today’s shooters.

There is simply no possibility that Gearbox, however respectable their track record, will be able to elevate Forever from its troubled past well enough for it to compete with Halo: Reach, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and whatever other modern shooters have impressed new genre conventions on gamers by the time it hits shelves next year.

I’m 22 years old. I’ve been gaming nonstop since I was three. I don’t remember ever playing a single game starring “the King, baby,” but for this argument, I don’t have to. Actually, that very fact is the nail in Duke’s digital coffin; despite shows of enthusiasm by PAX goers slightly older than myself, the appeal of Duke Nukem Forever lies solely in the novelty of seeing it actually released. Gamers, and gaming, have evolved, and there’s no longer a place for him in our world.

Ocarina of Time is the best game ever. Halo is the best game ever. Super Mario 64 is the best 3D platformer of all time. Final Fantasy VII is the greatest RPG ever made.

Wii Sports is overrated. The Wii is overrated. Ocarina of Time is overrated. And what’s so great about Halo, anyway? Goldeneye is better.

Goldeneye is so overrated. It sure hasn’t aged well. I can’t wait for the Wii remake – I just wish it was on a real console. Everyone knows the Wii is overrated.

Etc. Now, listen. I’ve got something to say.

No game has ever been the best game ever, in any category, ever. There is no best RPG, there is no best shooter, and there is no best motion controlled sports-themed mini game collection (OK, in that category Wii Sports might actually be the best, but only until Sony’s Move comes out).

Likewise (and it may be shocking to hear this), there are no overrated games. There are simply games that garner a lot of attention, people who hyperbolize about those games, and people who can’t understand, for the life of them, why.

But games that attract enough attention to in turn attract the attention of people who like to criticize games that attract a lot of attention – well, they attract that attention for a reason.

And, well, there are only so many reasons a game might attract attention. Some games are given undue attention by the media, like Grand Theft Auto. Some get attention because they’re either nearly perfect (Portal) or pieces of crap (Kane and Lynch); others do it by completely betraying people’s expectations, like Dark Void and Alpha Protocol.

There is another reason why some games get a lot of attention, though: when they do something new. It’s these games that occasion the most hype, homage and hyperbole, and they’re the ones most often written off as “overrated” by those who simply fail to understand their significance, often years later.

Super Mario 64 isn’t the best game ever, nor is it the best 3D game, the best platformer, the best 3D platformer, or even the best game starring Mario – but it sure as hell isn’t overrated.

For people my age, it’s sometimes hard to remember that at the time of Mario 64‘s release, the mustachioed one was already insanely popular. The side scrolling platformer thing was working. The dude practically saved US gaming in the 80s, and it took decades for the Western game industry to catch up with the Rising Sun in the East.

For Mario to make the jump (ha) to 3D was unnerving. No one knew what to expect, and plenty of people probably thought it would be the end of the chubby plumber’s glory days. For the game to be so damn good – that was revolutionary. The simple fact that players could walk forward, or backward, or left, or right, and that it was fun to do so, meant gaming would never be the same.

Halo: Combat Evolved is far from the best game ever, as are Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo: Reach (which I played to death last week – and yes, it’s an excellent game). Why all the hubbub, then?

Think about it; comparisons with Half-Life or Quake III: Arena or whatever else was popular on PC at the time are irrelevant. Half-Life fans weren’t buying Xboxes. The big black boxes were being purchased by gamers who had only recently been acquainted with the concept of the first person shooter. Goldeneye started the revolution on consoles, Perfect Dark bested it in every way, and then, a year and a half later, Halo sent millions of console shooter fans to the hospital with severe cases of bleeding from the eyes and ears.

The jump from Perfect Dark to Halo was, for many, many people, an indescribably awesome experience. Halo and the Xbox brought countless innovations to the console shooter: dual analog controls, recharging health, the two gun limit, the grenade button, vehicular combat, physics, a plot that made sense (more than that – the plot was compelling), ingenious A.I., huge environments, layer upon layer of strategy.. the list goes on.

Halo 2 sweetened the pot by adding online matchmaking, oiling the wheels of the Xbox Live experience, which until then had far too closely resembled the online play found on PCs. Halo 3 brought the trilogy to a satisfying conclusion, ODST was a moody spinoff, and Reach perfects the whole formula. People love Halo because it was different, new, and lovingly crafted.

If you still don’t get it, you’re not trying hard enough.

Final Fantasy VII, while rife with imperfections, inconsistencies and, in general, a whole lot of nonsense, brought RPGs to the Western hemisphere, among countless other accomplishments. Can the value of that gaming triumph really be quantified?

Wii Sports gained the attention of thousands – perhaps millions – of people who would have never given gaming a second glance. It may be trite at this point, but your mom and dad, girlfriend, and co-workers playing video games? That’s significant. It’s a huge deal. The Wii (and Wii Sports, which to many is synonymous with the system itself; “I’m so drunk, let’s play Wii!”) has generated more revenue for our thriving little hobby than anything, ever. If you’re wondering why Nintendo’s lineup right now is so incredible, you can start thanking Wii Sports for the very existence of Mario Galaxy 2, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Metroid: Other M, yada yada yada.

Yeah, I got over it after a month, too, but can you really call that legacy overrated?

Ocarina of Time ushered adventure gaming into the 3D era, much as Mario 64 did for 3D itself. Goldeneye was the first console shooter that was even worth anything at all, much less a challenging, engaging, diverse experience. And four player split screen multiplayer? Get out of town!

Petty squabbling and nitpicking aside, there are similar things to be said about any game that’s ever been called overrated. Games don’t warrant that kind of veneration for no reason, and calling classic games overrated comes off pretty ignorant. So next time you feel the urge to drop the O Bomb, try examining a game in the context of what it accomplished, rather than how your jaded gamer’s brain sees it now. We’ll all be better off.

While Mass Effect 2 was met with generally positive reviews, there was some concern about the “dumbing down” of the first game’s RPG elements, if I remember correctly. There’s no doubt that this occurred; Mass Effect presented players with a literally overwhelming number of weapons, armors, upgrades, and all sorts of other goodies, to the point that it was quite a chore to sort through them all to find the best options for a given situation. That game frustrated the hell out of me, for a lot of reasons; mainly, though, I simply didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

Mass Effect 2 has improved on that, first and foremost, by removing every single irksome element from the first game- even the ones I didn’t realize I was annoyed by, like the inventory management. From a non-gamer’s standpoint, constant micromanagement of a squad’s equipment seems ludicrous, but as gamers, we expect nothing less from an RPG. It’s only natural that we’re forced to stop by the Citadel between missions to offload our supplies of useless extras so our inventories aren’t full when we find that one really awesome pistol. It was a brave move to yank the safety net of familiar RPG tropes from under the feet of us poor gamers, and it threw me for a loop before I realized how brilliant it was.

Now, 15 hours into the game, I’m finally starting to get it. Sure, I wish I had more shotguns to choose from, but at what price? By euthanizing those aspects of the first game, Bioware has allowed me to finally see what others saw all along: the stunning world they’ve crafted. I think I could actually gush about all the improvements this game brings to the table, like the more visceral combat, more intelligent class system (Why did they ever let you carry around a sniper rifle if you couldn’t look through the scope? Why?), more satisfying abilities, blessed absence of the Mako and those Simon Says mini games, and many more. Those old habits were hard lost, and it took me even longer to get into this game than the first, but once it had me, I realized the true appeal of the series.

Most games that claim to allow players to decide for themselves what’s right and what’s wrong fail before they even begin (here’s looking at you, Fable- Yes, you, little darling of miserable ambition). These games can’t really offer any semblance of a moral system to players when the morally right and wrong choices are so obvious. No one thinks it’s morally correct when, at the end of Fable 1, the “hero” murders his own sister, but, hey, he gets to keep that pretty sword. When the only consequences of morally abhorrent actions are a virtual slap on the wrist, the whole system implodes on itself. The choice becomes obvious, notwithstanding the second, “good” playthrough to nab the extra achievements (if that’s your thing).

Mass Effect 2 avoids this entirely by simply allowing players to choose whether to be a dick or not. Even when morals are involved, the game rarely spells out explicitly what the in-game consequences will be. It’s always possible to reload a previous save, but Bioware can hardly be blamed for the bad habits of their fans. Players who get a kick out of being a dick get to be a dick, and those who like to be nice to people and rack up good karma, like myself, can do that, too. Dragon Age was similar, but the heavier RPG gameplay bogged it down in that regard; in Mass Effect 2, it doesn’t really matter two shits which dialogue choice will net you more credits or a better pistol.

Instead, the point of Mass Effect 2 is to simply experience the universe. Tolkien’s and Lucas’s worlds were just as expansive, and probably more so, even at their inceptions, but they mostly existed in the minds of their creators. I know the Star Wars comparisons are tired at this point, but the idea of actually traversing a universe so fleshed out is deviously appealing. Bioware has cleared away all that dusty clutter so that we can see the complexity underneath. This all struck me in the middle of the Assassin mission on the Asari world, Illium, which is by far the most interesting and diverse environment I’ve yet come across in either game.

It helps a lot that the characters are better conceived, the dialogue is snappier and the story is just flat out more interesting, despite not really going anywhere at all. Most of the game is spent simply flying around recruiting its sundry cast of characters. Does it matter, though, that Mass Effect 2 is, story-wise at least, unabashedly little more a means to get to Mass Effect 3 and beyond? How could it, when it’s such a fascinating universe to explore?

This is, technically, a very balanced experience. The red and blue teams take turns defending and attacking, always spawning in the same locations, usually with the same armor abilities. Attackers choose sprint to get to the flag quickly. Defenders choose armor lock, the temporary impenetrable shield, to survive the avalanche of grenades. Once the flag has been carried out into the main courtyard of the level, which rarely takes long, members of each team fall back to the tried and true jetpack-enabled Airborne loadout. The attackers attempt to launch the flag into their base using the gravity lift, which may or may not have been its original purpose, and the defenders attempt to shoot them. Grenades are thrown upon spawning, and clusterfucking ensues.

It’s difficult to defend the flag, but it’s also difficult for the attacking team to carry it all the way to their base, even with the (perhaps unintentional) advantage provided by the central grav lift. (For some reason, I like to imagine that Bungie envisioned players running, pack-like, through the level’s cramped corridors, working together and checking around every corner, rather than spamming grenades into the middle of the level while the flags floats up and down helplessly. If that’s the case, their vision was, sadly, not achieved.)

Regardless, this experience is a far cry from those halcyon days of Halo: Combat Evolved. This is the complaint most frequently leveraged against Bungie’s beloved franchise, and even discounting the heady influence of nostalgia, the detractors have a point.

When the original Xbox’s sci-fi green, quasi-holographic dashboard greeted my 13-year-old eyes for the first time, I was mesmerized. When Captain Keyes handed me that fabled pistol, I hardly knew how to thank him. Getting the feel for the new controller, innovative game mechanics and unearthly graphics was an incredible experience, one made infinitely better by the fact that I shared it with my closest friends. Though technically young, we were hardened veterans of the frenetic battlefields of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, and thanks to Halo‘s multiplayer, making the transition from Nintendo’s trusted quirks to Microsoft’s unexplored frontiers wasn’t as hard as we had feared it would be. We were lucky trailblazers.

Our favorite was, of course, Blood Gulch. A match’s initial moments were spent hurling pistols slugs at one another while scrambling toward the Scorpion Tank in an all-out race for supremacy. Whomever controlled the tank controlled the entire level. The first of us to reach it usually headed for the hills- literally- jamming the Scorpion behind the elevated rocks at the far end of the canyon, raining military-grade death down on anyone and everyone who dared move. The others, like those left behind at the Rapture, tip-toed through the shadows and clambered up the hill, intent on toppling the Scorpion God, lest more judgments be hurled down from on high. These efforts were usually in vain, and matches often ended with vast differences in scores.

It was fun to watch on the Scorpion God’s portion of the screen as you bobbed up and down between the gulch’s hills, brashly attempting to reach the rocket launcher and fire off one desperate shot before being force-fed oblivion by the tank’s main cannon. Equally fun was teaming up, if only temporarily, to man a Warthog and distract the tank with errant chain gun fire and tenacious meandering long enough for a fourth player to get the jump on him. Experimentation was the name of the game, and this proved true on all maps, through single player, multiplayer, in every game type, and in every scenario.

Something happened, though, during the creation of Halo 2. Balance was given import over experimentation, and the three-round burst battle rifle was introduced. All players were equal, provided they didn’t try to pick up any other weapon. The masses of Xbox Live and the elitists at Major League Gaming controlled the tides of gameplay, influencing title updates, weapon tweaks, and matchmaking playlists- elements that hadn’t even existed a few years earlier. Vehicles were gimped by the rocket launcher’s shiny new lock-on feature, and the ‘Gulch, remade as Coagulation, was an over sized mess.

Though the return of Halo‘s assault rifle boded well for Halo 3, the same issues persisted in its multiplayer. It was fair for every player, it was difficult for one team to gain a distinct advantage, and it truly wasn’t as fun as it used to be. It’s difficult to articulate where the magic went, but for fans, the difference was palpable. Halo 3: ODST‘s Firefight mode went miles in the right direction, though spotty connections and a lack of matchmaking (my friends and I live worlds apart by now, after all, and we rarely have similar schedules) made it ineffectual, a blip on the radar.

Halo: Reach may be Bungie’s last chance to recapture some of that old magic. The first few days of the multiplayer beta, which began on May 4, demonstrated that they were certainly trying. The internet weeps at the removal of the battle rifle, though many players shed tears of joy. Its replacement- the DMR- is a far more subtle weapon, capable of great damage, but with numerous weaknesses. That’s as it should be.

Something was still awry, however, and it struck me as my friends and I- the same ones I devoured the original Halo with over eight years ago- stormed the Sword Base’s flag for the umpteenth time.

“This is not why I play Halo,” I said, half aloud.

“What?” responded my friend.

“This is not why I play Halo,” I reiterated. The discussion that followed led to a revelation. After years as a Halo fan- the kind that reads the books and scours the Wiki, not the MLG kind- I could finally put into words some of what I had been feeling for years- I missed the experimenation. The discussion ended with a pang of hope, however, as the following day was to see the release of Bungie’s true ace in the hole: Invasion.

Invasion pits Spartans against elites in a three-part game of territories-meets-capture the flag. Spartans desperately try to hold their ground as the agile, powerful elites storm a simple complex from either side. The Spartans are eventually forced to retreat into a larger base, where more objectives must be achieved before either team can claim victory. Players are no longer evenly matched; elites now possess a versatile dodge maneuver, allowing them to negotiate an advantage against Spartan players in almost any face-to-face confrontation. Spartans possess generally superior weapons and vehicles, however, and the equipment in play becomes more lethal as the various objectives are met. Toward the end of a match, plasma rifles and DMRs are replaced by energy swords and grenade launchers, and vehicles, including that good old Scorpion Tank, are dropped into the map for extra chaos.

Teamwork is important for both sides, but especially for elites, who must decide whether to storm the Spartans’ base guns blazing or opt for the more stealthy Assassin loadout. During the final phase of most matches, players are presented with limitless choices. Spawn far from the action and hop in a vehicle, or ask your teammate to kindly find a quiet corner so you can join the game at his or her side? Elites can choose the deadly energy sword, the long range needle rifle, the plasma rifle or the needler. Spartans have an even harder choice between the DMR, shotgun, grenade launcher or assault rifle. All are accompanied by different armor abilities. There are multiple objectives, only some of which must be completed for the game to advance. Strategies are endless, and teamwork, wit, and, yes- experimentation- win matches.

Invasion is what I’ve been looking for all these years. Halo has come a long way, and I would have never guessed that it would take an experience so vastly different from the original game to finally achieve a similar feeling. If Bungie can deliver even more come September, Reach may be the actual Halo-killer the industry has been seeking for so long. Is it balanced? Sometimes. Is it perfect? No- and thank God for that.

Note: This article was published on Kombo.com, where I work as a News Editor, on April 27, 2010. The article and video belong to them, but I’ve been given permission to post it here as well for the noble purpose of education.

This is a bad time for print.

Let’s begin with some statistics: according to Magazine Death Pool, by December 14 of last year, 367 print magazines had kicked the bucket in 2009 alone. The blog, which records the plights of “magazines which have outlived their purpose,” alleges that’s a victory for print, as the number is down from the 573 magazines closed in 2007. Newspaper Death Watch is a similar blog that chronicles “the decline of newspapers and the rebirth of journalism.” At least there’s a glimmer of hope in their mission statement.

Newspapers and magazines have been struggling to find their place in a world characterized by instant gratification and an information free-for-all. The popularity of e-readers like the Kindle and, more recently, the iPad, have made the future of print media uncertain. Even the New York Times, regarded by many as the backbone of American journalism, has struggled to develop a Web model that’s both attractive to readers and profitable. How can the video game magazines so many gamers know and love possibly have a future in such an unsympathetic climate?

Cue “The Death of Print,” a panel discussion at Boston’s PAX East gaming convention in March. Despite the panel’s macabre title, the discussion veered more toward the future of print than its demise. Panelist John Davison, the editor of GamePro and the catalyst behind its recent stylistic overhaul, said that to save GamePro the team had to “reinvent the brand, not just the magazine.” So far they’ve been successful, as many gamers are beginning to see GamePro in a new light; its future remains up in the air, however.

Davison was joined on the panel by freelancer Julian Murdoch, Electronic Arts’ Jeff Green, The Escapist’s editor in chief, Russ Pitts, and Chris Dahlen, the editorial director and one of the visionaries behind the experimental new gaming magazine Kill Screen. Dahlen and I spoke at length over the phone, and he had a lot to say about the future of print and the ideas behind Kill Screen.

Dahlen and several of his compatriots had been chewing over the idea of starting a new gaming magazine in 2009. “All of us were interested in the idea of writing about games as a form of pop culture, like movies or music, to be more thoughtful, and to write for a more mature audience,” he said. He described an environment in which gamers are shying away from the traditional, “immature gaming enthusiast press” in favor of “smart gaming blogs” like Michael Abbott’s The Brainy Gamer and The Borderhouse, “a blog that celebrates diversity in gaming from a wide variety of cultural angles.”

Kill Screen’s high-quality pages are filled with introspective essays, fascinating interviews, philosophical rhetoric and original art. Reviews, news and industry coverage are conspicuously absent. Dahlen and company have a noble vision for the gaming press; Jamin Brophy-Warren, another of Kill Screen’s founders, said to Gamasutra, “If we continue to buy into the delusion that games are merely software and should be evaluated solely on their graphical fidelity and feature set, then we cannot expect the medium to go forward.” On the phone, Dahlen elaborated on how exactly games should be evaluated.

“I don’t think enough people evaluate the theme of a game. They don’t spend enough time critiquing the representation of people as valid characters. That’s what I would like to see more of,” he said. “There are games like Portal that excel at both, where the theme is beautifully married to the mechanics, and they work together.

“Most people only care about the mechanics, and they don’t think about the theme very much. People will just ignore it. I kind of understand that, because the mechanics are where it kind of breaks down. You can ship a game where the theme doesn’t make sense, but if the mechanics don’t make sense, then the game is broken,” Dahlen said. Several of the articles in Kill Screen’s inaugural issue focus heavily on the thematic elements of games like Resident Evil and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

In addition to its editorial distinctions, Kill Screen differs greatly from other gaming magazines in its physical motifs. Its heavy matte pages are overtly free of ads, and screen shots are limited to those for games that are so far removed from mainstream gaming culture that “people would have no idea what they look like,” according to Dahlen.

“The goal there was to make it classier. We like fan art- if it’s good,” he said. “We didn’t want it to look like other gaming magazines, and that was made easier by the fact that we got a guy who hasn’t designed gaming magazines before.” Dahlen credits most of the Kill Screen’s visual sophistication to the discerning sensibilities of the magazine’s creative director, Anthony Smyrski of Smyrski Creative.

Dahlen said that initial reactions to Kill Screen have been positive. “People just believe in the idea of seeing a nice print magazine that takes the gaming industry as seriously as they do,” he said over the phone. Other gaming journalists, professional and amateur alike, have hope for the future of print, as well, though all agree that magazines are going to have to carve out a new niche in the industry.

Susan Arendt is the senior editor for The Escapist, a popular online video game magazine with rich feature and editorial content. When I caught up with her outside another panel about game journalism at PAX East, she told me she believes print is “on life support,” though she hopes gamers will find a place in their hearts (and their wallets) for print content in the future.

“I love print so much, I really, really do, it’s just- it’s tough, because I think that the audience, having been raised on online so much, doesn’t have the respect and love for print,” she told me. “I would love nothing more than to see a strong print presence come back, but I do think it’s going to have to change.”

Dustin Burg, formerly of game journalism blog Joystiq, spoke with me during PAX East in front of the booth of his current employers, indie developers Ska Studios. “I think there’s always going to be a need for newspapers, or some sort of print,” he said. “Physically holding stuff, I think, has value in it. But they’re going to have to change some things, their model, so to speak, because, heck, we all go online to get our news. There will be a market. Is it going to shrink and almost shrivel up and die? Probably. but I’m sure there’ll be something around.”

Matthew Hawkins, video game journalist, game designer, and publisher of FORT90ZINE, was manning the 2 Player Productions booth during the convention, where “issue no.0″ of Kill Screen was on sale for the first time. FORT90ZINE has, according to the site’s bio, been called “the publication that helped spark the video game zine renaissance currently in effect.” Hawkins told me he started the zine, which is “a print version of his blog,” to combat the impermanence of the web.

“It’s a way for people to get back control of the information, make it permanent, be able to pass it along,” he said. “It can’t compete with the fast information sharing of the Internet, so what it has to do is concentrate on more niche, more introspective, opinion pieces.”

Chris Davidson, a student at UMass Amherst and frequent contributor to amateur game writing community Bitmob, is already subscribed to the newly reborn Electronic Gaming Monthly, which closed in early 2009 after more than 20 years of operation. While Davidson relishes the physicality of magazines, he thinks print publications should look to websites like Bitmob for ways to interact more with their communities.

“Right now, the way community works in a print magazine, other than their online sites, is they either have letters and e-mails from response to articles, or you can be in a stupid art contest where you draw a stupid Sephiroth with cat ears, and win a copy of Guitar Hero: Van Halen. That’s all there is. I think that they can go a lot further in building their communities,” he told me. “I think John Davison bringing articles from Bitmob once per month into GamePro, and publishing them, is a good step forward.”

Dahlen agrees that community is an important part of any publication, and he told me via e-mail that plans for Kill Screen’s community aspects are currently taking shape. “We definitely want to engage our community, and we’re still figuring out the best way to do that,” he wrote. “The magazine was made possible by all of the donors at Kickstarter, and without them, there would be no print product right now – and it’s critical that we keep their engagement and solicit their feedback. Beyond that, as we do more with the website, we will be making more avenues for readers to build a community, but I can’t say yet what shape that’ll take.”

There are other plans for the future of Kill Screen, as well. Dahlen told me on the phone that there will soon be more “Web friendly” content on the website. “We’re still kind of figuring that out right now. If we get, like, a 500 word piece for the magazine, it will stay in the magazine,” he said. “The print magazine will be kind of the flagship product.”

As the Internet has become increasingly elegant over the last several years, much of its content has grown more streamlined. “When I started writing online with Pitchfork in 2002, we would push content once a day, and most of the content was around 800 words long. It was almost like being at a newspaper,” Dahlen said. “Now you look at all the Gawker blogs, and that’s, like, 200-word posts, and they’re being updated every hour.”

A 24-hour information overload has taken shape around blogging and Twitter, but gamers are beginning to pine for the days when good pacing needed to apply to what we read as well as what we played. “Maybe I’m just old fashioned,” Dahlen told me. Far from it, though, he’s embracing the Internet as the valuable tool it is. “We’re a print journal that’s being made with the conveniences of the Internet,” he said. “If we were doing this fifty years ago, we would probably be selling it in one neighborhood in Brooklyn.”

Here’s a video in which I speak with writers, both professional and amateur, at Boston’s PAX East gaming convention in March about the future of the gaming press: