Big ass mobile games publisher, Gameloft announced Monday plans to dive deeper into development of games for Blackberry smartphones. Since controlling a game with a keypad mostly sucks, it’ll be cool to see how they use the trackball on the Blackberry Pearl and Blackberry 8800. It’ll also be cool to hear about execs getting canned for playing Centipede in board meetings.

Our gaming expert decides to come to his own conclusions.

Apparently I was playing the wrong “Splinter Cell” over the last couple of weeks. I learned this after listening to the 1UP Yours podcast on Friday (1UP.com). The hosts explained that the odd-numbered “Splinter Cell” games are the best. They said the evens are inferior.

But last week I finished the fourth game of the series, “Splinter Cell: Double Agent,” and I had fun. What did I do wrong?

I hadn’t played much of the “Splinter Cell” series since it was introduced in 2002. I played a few missions of the first game, less of the second and none of the third, which I think reviewers said was the best one. Then I got the fourth, “Double Agent,” from Ubisoft in the fall and decided I needed to get with it. Sooner or later, I would conquer a “Splinter Cell.”

Now, it’s a life lesson that you learn when you’re about 10, but it bears repeating anyway: The things “everybody else” says aren’t always going to mirror how you feel. (A friend of mine just told me Thursday that she’s trying to play the much-acclaimed “Shadow of the Colossus” and is finding it difficult and tedious. Well, there you go.) So bow to peer pressure, I did not. I didn’t dismiss the fourth “Splinter Cell.” I played through it.

“Splinter Cell” games are stealth games. They star Sam Fisher as a spy for the U.S. government. What I remembered from the first is that I’m not much of a ninja. I frequently tripped alarms in that one, and the unforgiving game would force me to restart missions ad nauseam. Ubisoft’s designers have eased up. They now let you save at any time, allowing you to compulsively preserve every safely snuck step. They also have proven great at going big. Missions are now Hollywood-blockbuster set pieces. You emerge from under ice floes to take hold of an oil tanker. You raid a Shanghai skyscraper at the stroke of Chinese New Year, rappelling down the side as fireworks blast the night sky. You assist a prison break.

One of the reasons judging a game is such a subjective process is because any game packed with enough variables can give one player a significantly more or less interesting experience than another. I don’t know how any “Double Agent” naysayers played, but I got myself into one situation that was so interesting that I’ll be speaking highly of it for a long time coming. It happened when I had my character kill a man.

The game has a morality system, one that isn’t much more complex than the Dark Side/ Light Side dichotomy of the “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” games. In this game, you don’t get certain Jedi powers depending on how you behave, but you do gain or lose credibility with two opposing factions. The U.S. government wants you to carry out your missions one way; the terrorist group called the John Brown Army that you infiltrate as a double agent wants you to do things their way. The JBA doesn’t care if you kill a civilian. The government does. The government wants you to find the frequency of the bomb the JBA assigns you to plant — so it can be turned off. The JBA wants to know why you’re snooping around for that kind of info. If either side gets too ticked with you, then you fail the mission. For most of the game, this system had no impact on how I played. I never strayed too far from my directed paths and did just fine.

In one of the game’s late missions, you’re put in the middle of an urban war zone. There are quite a few civilians to save and numerous other things to do that might aggravate the JBA. As I played through that mission I did some of those things, paying little mind to how that gradually eroded the JBA’s trust in my actions. Near the mission’s end, I had a high level of trust with Uncle Sam and about 50 percent trust with the terrorists. Those proportions had served me well earlier. At the end of this mission, however, I had to take a sniper rifle, squint into the scope and watch a man from the CIA raise a fuss. In my ear I heard two conflicting whispers: “Kill him” and “Don’t kill him.”

I decided I wouldn’t kill the CIA man. I’d been playing on the good side for most of the game and didn’t think this CIA guy deserved to go. I didn’t shoot — and got yelled at for it. My JBA trust meter emptied. My mission failed. What I realized is that I had done just enough nice things at that point that the one thing I couldn’t afford to do was the one really big good thing: save the CIA guy. To proceed in the game, I would have to kill him. I felt wretched about this. I tried to make something of my character. Circumstances forced him to be someone else. I wanted him to be a class act. He had to be the killer of an innocent man (well, as innocent as the average video game CIA character is, anyway).

Maybe I did play the wrong “Splinter Cell.” Perhaps I could have played better and would have enjoyed one of the odd-number games more. This fourth one did all right by me, even if I finished it feeling bad — just not for the reasons for which I’d been warned.

The Stock Report:

» Number of games at MTV HQ: 288

» Last three games to arrive: “TMNT” (PS2, Xbox 360, Wii), “Virtua Tennis 3″ (PSP), “Made Man” (PS2)

» Last system to arrive: PS3

» Last swag to arrive: No new swag for the second straight week!

Intrepid Gaming-Age.com reporter Tony “Matlock” Barrett recorded this video, as THQ debuted its WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 for the Nintendo Wii.

Please note the game’s ultra cool controls, where you actually raise your hands to pick up an opponent and then thrust your hands down to slam him to the relatively unyielding video canvas.

Stare ye, in wonder…

 

‘Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars’ supports spectator mode; ‘Katamari Damacy’ is fun to watch too.

One theory as to why there hasn’t been a hit TV show about video games yet is that it isn’t nearly as fun to watch them as it is to play them. Think about it: When is the last time you had more fun — or even as much fun — watching someone else play?

Next week Sony will release “SingStar Pop” for PlayStation 2, the latest in the company’s line of microphone-enabled karaoke games. The song and music-video lineup includes the All-American Rejects’ “Move Along,” Britney Spears’ “… Baby One More Time” and My Chemical Romance’s “Helena.” It also supports the PS2’s USB camera, EyeToy, a feature one of my friends tipped me to check out a couple of weeks ago. I discovered that it makes the game fun to watch.

When I first checked out the game, it was in a fancy hotel on the East Side of Manhattan in New York, where a Sony spokeswoman kindly spared me from having to sing and put her own vocal cords on the line for a rendition of the Fray’s “Over My Head (Cable Car).” I asked her to turn on the EyeToy mode and then sat down a little behind her, a little to the side, to see how things went. She sang as lyrics and color bars streamed across the TV screen. Looming large on the screen was an electrified outline of the spokeswoman and a little crackly outline of me. Thanks to the EyeToy, the TV was acting like a high-tech fun-house mirror. Next we showed up in some sort of “Predator” vision, then through a kaleidoscope effect. I don’t know if the spokesperson was having fun singing, but I was enjoying seeing myself go through a few on-camera contortions.

I think “SingStar Pop” will go in that small fun-to-watch category. That’s not to say I will race to play it, but it’s to say that if I do, I won’t race to shut it off when my girlfriend sits down on the couch and says she wants to watch something. She just might enjoy watching the game. I know that wouldn’t work with a “Zelda” or “Gears of War,” because it hasn’t before. What she liked watching, of all games, was “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” partially because the prince was indeed a dashing rogue, but more so because for much of the game I had the prince climbing to vertiginous heights. She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen at those times. That game cleared the spectator test. “Grand Theft Auto” games haven’t worked with her but they have with other friends who are eager to suggest new ways to cause mayhem. I’ve found that series one of the few that I enjoy watching when someone else plays. The quirky roll-up-the-world “Katamari Damacy” game also seems to click with bystanders.

Many PC first-person shooters have spectator mode, a feature that has been used to popularize competitive gaming. I don’t enjoy watching an FPS myself though, especially one played by the experts. They zoom through the levels like lab rats on a sugar rush. I don’t know the maps and I just get dizzy.

In South Korea, public tournaments of the 1998 PC game “StarCraft” remain so popular that concert-size crowds line up to watch. The game’s graphics are dated, but so many people understand how the strategy game is played that a large group of people can enjoy a bout of “StarCraft” without having to have their hands at the controls.

The PC version of the new EA strategy game “Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars” supports not just a spectator mode but a commentator system that enables an in-game telestrator. EA hopes that the opportunity to watch someone else draw circles and lines, à la “John Madden,” will entice people who might not feel like playing a match of the game themselves.

Games were made to be played. That’s for certain. But there’s an argument to be made that “spectator appeal” is a quality that deserves praise — especially for those of us who have to share our TVs.

When I first encountered the almost psychopathically kawaii glare emitted by the female chef mentor in Majesco’s Cooking Mama: Cook Off for the Wii, I had little to no understanding of what a ‘cooking’ game could possibly entail.

Lacking the culinary skills to begin with (hey, I’m a college-kid and subsist on ramen and quick-dials to the pizzeria), it took me a while to adjust to slicing, dicing, and meat grinding.  But with a little practice, I’m no longer culinarily (is that a word?) challenged. Hey, Cooking Mama herself said that I was, “Wonderful! Better than Mama!”

In fact, I have been entered into the Cooking Mama’s Cook Off gaming competition to be held this Saturday, March 31 at the Nintendo World store in Rockefeller Plaza.  Will I aptly make the G-Hole crew proud and become a virtual iron chef?  Shall I be utterly owned by a Cooking Mama obsessive who can mince polygonal shallots effortlessly?  Only time will tell. Though I hear they’re serving complimentary deserts at the event, so there’s no question I’ll be partaking.

How does DS stylus compare to Wii remote?

Is the pen mightier than the remote? So far it seems that way to me.

Having finished “Hotel Dusk: Room 215,” I’ve switched to another game in my Nintendo DS backlog, “Wario: Master of Disguise,” a side-scroller released a couple of weeks ago. The game got mixed reviews. One of the main criticisms was the controls, which require the player to move Wario with the buttons with one hand and use the DS stylus in the other to draw shapes on Wario, transforming him into a painter, spaceman, dragon and other disguises. Reviewers found the sketching controls a bit … sketchy.

I’m in chapter four of the 10-chapter game, and I think the drawing controls are fantastic. To turn Wario into a spaceman, I start the stylus on his neck and draw a circle around his head. To turn him into a sailor in an inner tube — yes, you can turn him into that — I put the stylus on his torso and draw a long bump on his belly. To make him into Arty Wario, a painter who can’t move or attack but can draw blocks and teleport doors, I have to start the stylus on Wario’s face, then draw a rectangle, and then slash a diagonal line from one corner to another. These might sound like complicated etchings, particularly the last one, but they are surprisingly easy to execute.

What’s striking about this system is that I can even see how badly I’m drawing these things and how little the game seems to mind. Any line I draw on Wario briefly is actually briefly drawn onto the screen, as if written in magic, shiny ink. Quite a few times I’ve seen that my rectangles are kind of pudgy, my circles kind of blocky and my belly-bumps a bit sloppy. “Master of Disguise” has no trouble reading them. Consider that I handwrote a birthday card to my father Wednesday morning (March 28) — while riding the New York subway, no less. I suspect “Wario: Master of Disguise” will prove to understand my scribblings better than my dad when he gets my chicken-scratch greeting.

One of the “Wario” levels I played Tuesday required me to quick-change through several disguises in the span of 30 seconds. I was a dragon to melt an ice bubble, a thief to run fast over a chasm, a doctor to look for a secret cave and a spaceman to shoot bad guys in my way. If you were sitting across from me on the subway and could only see my hand moving across the screen, you would have thought I was dashing off a note to someone using my stylus pen. Every transformation worked.

Essentially what I find successful with “Wario” are the gesture controls. Compare that to the other type of video game gesture controls many people, myself included, are writing about these days: the way you play games on the Nintendo Wii. On that home system, gesture controls remain unproven. They work well in some games (the tennis in “Wii Sports” being the most popular example). But I’m not the only one who has been vexed by the gestures asked of players in games such as “SSX Blur” and “Cooking Mama: Cook Off” or even parts of “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.” In those titles and others, I’ve had problems great and small executing certain gestures. For example, a recurring problem I’ve had with “Blur” is that I sometimes can’t tell what I’m doing wrong. The game asks me to draw a “Z” in the air or a complex loop. I draw the pattern I see on the screen, but nothing happens, or I get a notice that I gestured wrong.

Part of what makes the Wii gestures more difficult is that I’m making these moves with my hands in midair. No magic Wario-ink patterns appear onscreen to indicate how the shape I’m making compares to the shape I’m supposed to make. That’s what gets me wondering if the Nintendo DS stylus pen may prove superior to the remote for intricate gesture control. On the DS, I can see what I’m doing. On the Wii, I can’t. Wii developers do have some options available to alleviate this. They could marry the gesture controls to the remote’s laser-pointer functionality and program games so that the way players tilt and wave the remote is “drawn” onto the screen. The problem is this would require the player to point the remote at the screen all the time, a potential inconvenience incompatible with free-motion play. Developers could try to use the remote’s speaker and rumble feedback to tell players when they are deviating from the proper course of movement, but that feedback will be vague, at best.

When the DS was in its infancy, I had similar doubts about how useful and how intricate stylus-based controls could be. The new “Wario” is just the latest of a line of games that have proven me wrong, including “Kirby Canvas Curse,” “Trauma Center” and “Elite Beat Agents.” Will I find myself wanding the remote through the air like a world-class graffiti artist a year from now and laughing at this article? Or is the stylus truly mightier?

Gamers can keep their standard TV sets — for now, at least.

There’s nothing wrong with my TV. And, I’m guessing, there’s nothing wrong with yours.

Over the last couple of years, major video game companies have promoted the idea that we now live in the Microsoft-coined “HD Era.” In this gaming age, apparently, a high-definition TV is required to appreciate cutting-edge games on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

That’s what I’ve been told. But I recently stopped believing my ears and instead started trusting my eyes.

A couple of years ago, representatives from game publisher Capcom showed me an early build of the company’s zombies-in-a-shopping-mall game “Dead Rising” for the Xbox 360. They were showing me something that couldn’t be made on an older game console. There were too many detailed zombies rendered on the screen and too many loose items on mall store shelves for me to pick up and swing at the undead. Like every Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game I’ve ever been shown in a game company demo, “Dead Rising” was displayed on a high-definition set.

Last summer “Dead Rising” came out, and I played it at home. I saw everything I’d seen at the demo event. But I was playing on my standard-definition TV set, the one I bought in 2001.

Then last fall I played “Gears of War,” a game I’d been shown in HD many times before. One thing the developers liked to show off was how you could walk up to a brick wall during a storm and see rain glistening on each individual brick. Guess what I saw when I tried that out on my SD set? The same thing.

Some of my friends thought I was being stubborn and maybe a little cheap because I wasn’t going out to buy an HD set. I told them that it didn’t look like I needed to. Technically there is a difference between the two technologies: SD sets display as little as a sixth of the pixels of an HD set, which means that an SD set will never be able to show as much detail at as grand a scale as an HD one. Watch a sportscast in either format and the difference in how real the athletes look will pop right out. But when it comes to game graphics, we’re not talking about ones that can make characters look even as good as the actors on old ’80s TV shows appeared when I watched them two decades ago. Why should I need HD?

My hunch was that video game graphics still had a lot of room to improve on standard sets and that the “HD era” didn’t need to be enjoyed only on HD sets. “Gears,” and more recently the photorealistic “MotorStorm” on PlayStation 3, seemed to be proving me right.

Last week I found an unlikely ally: Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, the company behind “Gears of War.” He was in New York to demonstrate “Unreal Tournament III” — a game that, like “Gears,” is designed to bowl over players with industry-leading graphics. I pegged Rein for an “HD-era” guy. I asked him what he thought of my love for my SD set. He told me, bluntly, that I was right. He told me Microsoft’s marketing pitch about HD sets being needed to appreciate HD visuals was an overstatement.

“The amount of crap that can go on in the scene isn’t defined by the monitor, it’s defined by the graphics capabilities,” he said. “I think Microsoft made a mistake when they tied Xbox 360 so much into HD TV. What they should have done — it’s complicated jargon, but they should have talked about high-definition visuals and high-definition TVs as separate things. Yes, the high-definition TV will improve the look of the high-definition visuals, but you still get much higher-definition visuals on Xbox 360 than you do on Xbox or PS2. Much higher.”

I was ready to walk away and declare victory for us salt-of-the-earth folk still playing games on old TVs. But Rein wasn’t done. “In actual fact, the apparent resolution goes way up on an SD TV,” he continued. “Because what is ultimately happening is the picture is being down-sampled.” He was getting technical and starting to lose me. He told me to imagine looking at a really detailed picture on my computer and then shrinking the window the picture is in. The image would look even better than an image initially made for the smaller window.

I thought he was just trying to butter me up. Following that argument, “Gears” and other games should look even better on my TV than on a big HD set. Not quite, he said. To see “Gears” on a big set in as much detail as I see it on mine, I would need a high-definition TV. ” ‘Gears’ looks every bit as good on an HD TV as it does on your TV, except there’s more of it.”

So there you go. A man whose company is based on providing gamers with product that has great graphics says it is OK for me to stick with my 2001 TV. Take solace, old TV people, we’re not as wrong as the marketing folks said we were.

I hereby declare sudoku an epidemic; en route to some game demos Tuesday, we noticed the taxi driver was playing the game while weaving through midtown traffic. Scary, sure. But it may get worse.

The New York Times reports today* on sudoku csar, Maki Kaji - the man responsible for triggering the phenom. His magazine, Nikoli lets readers submit and refine game concepts and he’s got some 250 more brain blasters ready to publish.

Like auto manufacturing, consumer electronics and videogames, suduko originated outside Japan. They’ve just managed to improve upon the concept brilliantly, subjecting the whole planet to the sublime pleasures of frustration with numbers.

*as in last week

Remembering your 16-digit code can be as easy as dialing 1-800-FLOWERS.

It is my job to report about video games, and some would (hopefully) say that does a service to gamers out there. But sometimes I wonder how I can really give back to the gaming community. I could invite people to my office and give them free games that I don’t want, though not many people are really within driving distance. This weekend I dreamed up a more far-reaching charitable effort: I would help Nintendo system owners memorize their friend codes.

If you don’t own a Nintendo DS or Wii, you might not be impressed by the effort I decided to make. If you’re more of an Xbox person, you’ve built your friends list over Live just by sending invites addressed to your friends’ Gamertag player nicknames.

The Nintendo fans out there, however, have had a harder time matchmaking with friends on “Mario Kart DS” or building a buddy list on their Wii to trade Miis. To do that kind of networking on a Nintendo system, both parties interested in linking up need to exchange a system-specific 16-digit code. These Friend Codes can’t be transmitted through the DS or Wii. You’ve got to call your friend or e-mail them — maybe even see them in person! — to swap info. This makes the system more kid-safe, but it also makes it much harder to build up a big list of friends. Who can remember a 16-digit code? I still haven’t memorized my credit card number, and I’ve been using it for years.

I got a Wii back in November and soon exchanged Friend Codes with about a dozen friends. Each time, I had to send them my code, input theirs, and then wait for the Nintendo network to recognize we both wanted to be on each other’s friends lists. A couple of months ago, however, my Wii broke. I got a new one. I was excited, but then spotted the dark lining to my silver cloud: My new system would force a new Friend Code on me, a Friend Code that I’d need to send out to everyone and hope they’d be willing to cancel my old listing and type in the new. That’s when I realized the true pain of these 16-digit codes.

This weekend I envisioned a solution: Friend Sentences. Have you ever seen a 1-800-MATTRESS commercial? Or have you ever had to dial 1-800-FLOWERS? I want to help people make similar, easy-to-remember word combinations out of their 16-digit Nintendo codes. This would help people more easily remember their number and pass it around. I’ve discovered the name for the telephone version of these things is “phone words,” and there’s a whole industry out there for them. You can hire an Australian company called the “National Dial-a-Word Registry” (DialaWord.com.au) to get yourself a great phone-word phone number. Their slogan: “The unfair advantage.”

I wasn’t ready to hire the Australians, so I hopped around the Web looking for sites that would translate Friend Codes to words. I found several sites where I could just punch a number in. Unfortunately, though, they are all built to handle phone numbers, none of which are 16 digits long. The best site I found is PhoneSpell (PhoneSpell.org). It can handle six to 10 numbers at a time and will even add an extra letter if it helps complete a word.

It’s not a perfect setup, but it was good enough for me to try it with my old Wii number: 8088 6878 9715 7557. I put in the first eight digits. The best results were 808 TOTS 8, which wasn’t so hot. When I let the system add an extra letter, I wound up with 808 UNTRUE. Next, I punched in the final eight digits. The Web site sent me a discouraging reply: “Believe it or not, we did not find any interesting mnemonics for 971-575-57. Everything is working fine, this is not a bug. Some numbers just have such odd combinations of letters and/or too many zeros and ones that they simply do not have good mnemonics. Sorry.”

I got creative and entered the middle eight digits of my Friend Code. I got MUSTY 715. The last four digits could be PJPJ. The first would have to be 8088. So consider, what’s easier to remember? 8088 MUSTY 715 PJPJ? Or 8088 6878 9715 7557? Did I crack Nintendo’s Friend Codes? Or did my idea just crack into a mess of unusable pieces?

My new friend code is 3536 6979 4706 2132. PhoneSpell offers the following: ELF ON OX 7 YIP 06. I think I can remember that. And I think the rest of the world can too. Now people I give that Friend Sentence to will just need a cell phone nearby so they can remember which letter stands for which number.

There you go, Nintendo fans. I hope that helped.

Multiplayer: A Surprise Late-Night ‘Boogie’

New dancing game, slated for release later this year, is standing out from crowd.

It was past midnight. I don’t remember how late. I was getting a chance to see a new exclusive Nintendo Wii game that I wouldn’t be allowed to write about until it got a title. Now it has one. “Boogie” is a dancing game that has you groove with your hands and is slated for release later this year. I nearly missed playing it altogether.

That was two weeks ago, in San Francisco, on the second floor of a bar called Swig. Electronic Arts rented the place out for a Wii party, showing the just-released “SSX Blur” and the then-untitled “Boogie.”

When I arrived at Swig at about 10 p.m., “Boogie” was getting packed up. Electrical difficulties in the back of the bar had shortened the floor demo, and I was left chatting with gaming industry folks. I played some “SSX” and failed a little more at pulling Uber tricks in “Blur.” I asked an EA publicist to help me figure out the identity of the only two people in the bar who were making out instead of making industry connections (or maybe they were?). We were stumped. By midnight I was heading to my hotel a block away.

Then my cell phone rang. I was being called back for a special demo. Someone had found a way to make things work. Now it was past midnight. Could I honestly do my job and assess a game past that hour? Well, Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman at around 5 a.m. local time back in the ’70s, so I could at least try.

EA reps ushered me and three other gaming reporters to an upstairs room where the game’s lead designer, EA Montreal’s Vander Caballero, was setting up a Wii. We were in some sort of VIP room with big windows overlooking the rest of the partygoers on the show floor. I couldn’t spot that couple anymore.

Caballero had the Wii running and took the remote and nunchuck controllers in his hands. Then he paused. He was into the party spirit. In fact, I’m still not sure if the guy whose beer he then grabbed and sipped from was a friend or not. Now he was ready to “Boogie.”

All partying aside, the game is a family product. Caballero showed us a portly alien in a leisure suit standing on a dance floor ready to perform for a crowd. The song “That’s the Way (I Like It)” by KC & the Sunshine Band started up, and Caballero started loosening up. He explained that most rhythm games primarily require players to press buttons or step in patterns that follow a routine. The games are programmed to reward a right way of hitting each note and dock points for trying to play any other way. What Caballero and his team are interested in, however, is a rhythm game that lets people dance with a sense of style, that doesn’t just leave room but rewards improvisation.

To demonstrate the style theory, Caballero started shaking his nunchuck hand in small circles — not with the frantic reel-in-the-fish move required by some other Wii games, but more slowly, like he was feeling the music. As he moved his hand, the fat alien danced. Onscreen cues required Caballero to do other types of shakes and rolls that triggered different dance moves.

The style part really came in with the way Caballero used the Wii remote. The nunchuck moved the alien’s body, but the remote moved its head. The remote had to be pointed at the screen, the point of focus showing up as an icon of two eyes. Wherever those eyes landed on the screen was where the alien looked. Spinning those eyes got its head twirling. Moving them up and down forced a cool nod. As he and the alien got into it, the crowd cheered and lights flashed. A good time was being had by all.

Caballero passed the Wii controllers around. He said to think of them as pulling puppet strings. I took my turn and, mostly, the crowd booed. I can’t dance well in real life, I pointed out. Caballero said my problem was that I was repeating my moves. I didn’t have enough variety. Maybe I just don’t have style. Or maybe it was the late hour. I can play a game at home well into the wee hours. But in front of a crowd? I’m no Muhammad Ali, you know.

Caballero and his EA colleagues pointed out that “Boogie” was still a work in progress. The game’s cartoon-ish graphics looked to me as good as the visuals in plenty of already-released Wii games, but they were talking more about gameplay. They wanted to still work on the dance moves and the scoring system, and probably mess with the controls. They’re promising a karaoke element but haven’t explained how they’d handle the need for a microphone attachment. They also want to include a video capture tool to record performances.

I think we were done by 1 a.m. The Wii got packed up again. The then-unnamed game was retired for the night. The bar was closing.

That late-night session made it clear to me that Electronic Arts, the biggest third-party game maker in the world, is about making games for the Nintendo Wii that stand out from the crowd. I just hope I don’t really need to know how to dance.

— Stephen Totilo

The Stock Report:

Once a week, Multiplayer provides a Stock Report that should give you a sense of what actually is streaming into the office and how companies are trying to grab our attention:

» Number of games at MTV HQ: 285

» Last three games to arrive: “Earth Defense Force 2017″ (Xbox 360), “Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords” (Nintendo DS), “Cooking Mama” (Wii)

» Last system to arrive: PS3

» Last swag to arrive: No new swag this week!

Multiplayer: Getting Over Gaming Shame

Our games reporter has trouble saying goodbye to ‘dull’ game.

03.22.07

I thought I had nothing to be embarrassed about. I thought I had no secret shame. But now I’m ready to admit it.

Once a week, a group of editors and reporters at games magazine and Web site publisher Ziff Davis Media record a podcast called 1UP Yours, and since I started listening to it a couple of months ago, I discovered that they have a pile of shame. They even started a blog about it, although apparently their shame is so great that they don’t even update it. Their pile is stacked with supposedly important games they’ve never played, like the critical favorite — and commercial flop — “Psychonauts.”

When I first heard of this pile of shame, I think I smirked. I felt superior. I’m quite proud that I play a lot of games and have few blind spots. I’ve filled in my game-playing gaps. In the last few years, I played some “Pokémon,” some “Final Fantasy” and even beat an entire “Suikoden.” I played “Half-Life 2” a year late. I’ve given “Madden” a go. If there’s an important critical favorite or major series out there, I’m pretty sure I’ve sampled it. But you do know what happens to people who feel superior, don’t you?

I have come to realize that I have a gaming shame. It is the opposite of the 1UP embarrassment: I can’t give some games up. I’ve written before about when I bail out of games, but the truth is that some games I just don’t quit even when maybe I should. Even worse, I’ve started lying about it.

About a month ago, I told some friends and associates that I was giving up on the Nintendo DS’ “Hotel Dusk: Room 215.” I liked the mystery-game premise. I liked the adventure-game design. I liked the black-and-white graphics. I was just growing tired of the game’s crawling pace, and the main mystery of the game was losing its allure by the hour. I even told one of those 1UP guys, News Editor Luke Smith, I was bailing out. He had tried the game and decided the same. He was helping me quit. He told me not to worry. He said the game’s praise was inordinately due to the blind devotion of Nintendo’s most hard-core fans. They sometimes fall a bit too hard for a product, he pointed out. I should be able to walk away clean. I told him and I told others that I would give it up. I was done with “Hotel Dusk.”

The shameful part, however, is that I didn’t quit. And it’s not that I kept playing because the game was good. I was in chapter three of 10 and not loving it. Back in college, I had a girlfriend who, in my opinion and that of some of my friends, didn’t always treat me right. I’d unload my problems on my friends who’d just about get me to commit that I would walk away or not try to win her back. Next time I saw my friends? I had to admit, I was getting back together with my girlfriend.

For the last month, then, I’ve been living a lie. I’ve been playing “Hotel Dusk” and not telling anyone. I’ve gotten beyond the game’s dull chapter three and reached sleepy chapter four, creeping chapter five and tedious chapter six. Why did I keep going? I recalled that the frequently un-fun “Killer 7” had some great moments near the end. I was worried I’d miss something.

Surprisingly, my shame may not turn out to be shame after all. I’m in what I think is the final chapter of the game — there’s a showdown in a hidden basement, people are confessing — and the conclusion is turning out pretty well. I can’t believe how many hours I’ve spent thinking I’d rather be playing something else as I tapped away at the next little bit of “Hotel Dusk,” but it might possibly prove to be worth it. Or at least there might be a good dessert to a meal that had a blander-than-hoped for, tough-to-chew entree.

If it all falls apart again, however, I’ll consider “Hotel Dusk” to be on my very own pile of shame. My pile will be constructed of games I couldn’t say no to and saw through to the end. Looking back on the games I finished last year, I think my mid-game impressions of the original “Lego Star Wars” and “Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter” should have stopped me from charging to the end. I thought both games were fun but limited in scope. But I’m the I-finish-my-games guy, so I finished them. I wasn’t the richer for it. Let’s put them on my pile. There are probably other games I played too long. I’m just too embarrassed to even remember them.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Lara Croft, Zombies And Ponies — Together In One Room

Eidos showed off next round of games Tuesday in New York.

03.21.07

It happens to me often. It’s happening three times this week. A representative from a game company gets in touch with me and we set up a meeting in a hotel room. It’s nothing bad; it’s to show the company’s round of games. I get to see inside fancy New York hotels I’d never stay at. The reps get an hour or so to show me everything their company has coming in the next season or so.

Tuesday was Eidos day at the Dream Hotel in New York. Eidos is a company whose hotel requests I usually answer. Honestly, some companies’ I’m not so sure about. But the Eidos people publish “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” so they make the cut. They also published the first “Lego Star Wars” game. But some of their work? Let’s put it this way: The last time I wrote about an Eidos NYC demo, I focused on why one of the games they were showing was already banned in Australia (see “GameFile: Why Australia Banned ‘Reservoir Dogs’; Nintendo Wii, ‘ShellShock’ And More”).

So, with reserved expectations, MTV colleague Craig Goldstein and I hustled through Dream’s lobby Tuesday, past a supporting column that somehow doubled as a cylindrical fish tank, and up to the Eidos suite on the seventh floor we went. A trio of Eidos specialists were running the show. One started us off with “Tomb Raider: Anniversary,” a PS2, PSP and PC remake of the series’ original game. It’s slated for late May. The game looks good. Lara moves fluidly — almost too fluidly. Apparently Lara’s movements from the recent games allowed her to bound through the development team’s initial, faithful re-creations of the levels from the original game. The Eidos rep said sections that used to take five minutes to get through could be conquered in 20 seconds. So the remade levels needed to be tweaked and stretched. I was intrigued by the remake but not quite blown away. I wanted to see more.

What I saw next was a music-creation tool for PSP called “Traxxpad.” It’s not a game; it’s a beat-maker. Different PSP buttons cue different sounds that can be recorded and tweaked as if the portable console were a little mixing board. The product seems similar to the PSP music-creation program “Beaterator” that Rockstar Games is also promising. “Traxxpad” will allow the beats to be exported to MP3 files for use outside the PSP. It also supports a microphone that allowed Craig to threaten our friendship by recording a loop of him trying to rap: “Rollin’ with the demo, one, two, three.” The PSP played that snippet again and again. And then it played it some more.

Some of the rougher games shown were the PSP game “Pocket Pool” — which combines a very simple billiards design with the ability to unlock pictures and videos of barely dressed models — and a Wii game called “Escape From Bug Island.” The Wii game, a story of one young man smashing bugs in the woods to claim the girl of his dreams, was released in Japan as “Necronesia.” Reviews of “Necronesia” were poor. An Eidos rep claims improvements are being made for the U.S. release, but the 15 minutes I played were dull. The gesture controls that had me shaking a stick at big bugs were uninteresting. I swiped with my hand. The hero swiped with the big stick. Creepy bugs were smashed. It was fun for a second but old in five.

I did not have time to try the company’s DS title “Pony Friends,” which I know nothing about other than it’s an awww-cute virtual-pet horse game and surely won’t include a label on the box that says, “From the people that brought you ‘Pocket Pool.’ ” I had to split. I couldn’t, though: A zombie DS game was put in my hands.

I’m not one of those people who loves all things zombies. I do, however, appreciate that zombies work well in one-line high-concept pitches. There’s a Japanese game I want to import simply because it’s called “Zombie vs. Ambulance,” a title that tells me all that’s needed to make me want it. In this case, I was being shown zombies in a prison in the DS game “Touch the Dead.” The title evokes a Sega Dreamcast charmer called “The Typing of the Dead,” which had players hook a keyboard to the console and then, well, type shuffling dead people out of existence. “Touch the Dead,” which Eidos initially planned to call “Dead and Furious,” is a first-person shooter on rails. You don’t control where the character moves, you just tap the touch screen in the right spots to shoot at the zombies. When you’re out of ammo, you drag bullets to the gun.

In later levels, the zombies throw their heads at you. The player has to touch those craniums into oblivion. The game, which is slated for May, is running off a crude 3-D engine. It may have been the worst-looking game that Eidos was showing. But it doesn’t matter. It had me using a stylus to tap zombies to their doom. So I crown it the best new game I played Tuesday.

After that, Craig and I rolled out of the demo. One. Two. Three.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: The Game That’s So Flawed, It’s Awesome

Our games expert can’t hide his love for ‘Earth Defense Force.’

03.20.07

About a week ago, I was offered the chance to do an exclusive review of “Earth Defense Force 2017,” a new game for the Xbox 360.

I’d never been offered a chance to do an exclusive early review before, probably because we don’t review games on this site. But a perceptive publicist noticed something I haven’t hidden very well: I’m kind of nuts for “Earth Defense Force.” The affair has been going on for 11 months.

Last spring I was sent on a last-minute reporting trip to Tokyo and returned with a game labeled “Simple 2000 … Vol. 81,” which was actually the second “Earth Defense Force” game released for the PlayStation 2.

Weeks earlier I had read some rave reviews of the PS2 “EDF” game on the Neogaf.com message boards. The game featured a guy in a red jumpsuit and a woman in a purple skirt and jetpack. He shot bullets. She shot laser beams. Players could control either character or join with a friend for split-screen co-op. The plot was in the title: Defend the Earth.

Level One involved shooting giant ants that were crawling over Big Ben. Later the targets would be giant spiders, robots and flying saucers. I didn’t need to read more than that, and for the most part I couldn’t. Many people posted impressions, but nearly every message was about yet another level, each apparently more pyrotechnic and awesome than the one before. Much of the thread was censored in black, to block the spoilers, but the cackling glee of people playing the game was clear to see.

So I picked the game up in Tokyo and took it home to Brooklyn to play on a PS2 I have that runs Japanese games. I called up my friend and fellow Brooklynite N’Gai Croal of Newsweek (NCroal.Talk.Newsweek.com) and we made a plan to get together for some co-op on Memorial Day. N’Gai took the guy in the jumpsuit. I took the jetpack girl. We shot some ants off Big Ben. We shot them off Parliament. We shot them in the London Underground. Yes, we cackled with glee.

And, as we often do, we found something to disagree about.

There’s one other thing that the Neogaf boards had promised: The game didn’t run all that well. The developers, a Japanese team called Sandlot, had clearly prioritized their desire to march about a hundred giant ants at two players at any given time over the players’ desire to have a smooth experience. Too many ants or exploding giant robots on the screen at once caused the game’s frame-rate to chug down to a slideshow pace. You could practically hear the PS2 wheezing and sputtering as it struggled to keep up with the mayhem depicted in the game. Also the game would take control of the camera away from the players at key dramatic moments, regardless of how that affected my ability to get a bead on a marauding killer robot. So you’d have to run blindly until the programming released the camera view from, say, the tops of jetpack girl’s shoes and to a proper behind-the-back angle. N’Gai thought these problems were a pity. I thought they were great.

We blasted through a dozen or so levels and then retired the console for Memorial Day. On the Fourth of July, we reconvened and blasted through about 20 more. By this time N’Gai was certain that “Earth Defense Force” could be an even better game if developed by “Battlefield“-maker DICE or “Ratchet and Clank” team Insomniac, both groups known for making smoothly produced big-budget spectacles. The raw elements of B-movie plot and over-the-top action were there. He next wanted to see some polish. I protested. Part of what’s great about a B movie is that you can see the strings holding up the planes in the special effects, that the boulders and robots look like cheap paperweight props. “Earth Defense Force” wouldn’t be better if it was better, I said. It would be worse.

We considered getting together on Labor Day to finish saving the planet. Some priority got in the way, though. I can’t remember. I found another friend to battle it out some time in September, but we couldn’t get to the end. I began to worry my PS2 — and my own senses — couldn’t handle it. Plus news trickled out of Japan that the series was getting a sequel on the Xbox 360. I started calling around, and sure enough made enough of a spectacle that “Earth Defense Force 2017″ for the 360 was offered to me for what could have been an embarrassing love letter of a review. I resisted. MTV Games reviewed the game Sunday, scoring it a 1512.75 on a scale of 1 to 2017 (see the review here).

I haven’t played much of the new game yet, though I did annihilate some evil robots threatening a beautiful beach. I also cleared a city of lots of giant ant. So far so smooth. I haven’t lost hope, though. I’m looking forward to finding some flaws.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Do Games Make Us Worse Drivers?

Germany study suggests games like ‘Need for Speed’ could provoke unsafe driving.

03.19.07

Traveling across the Internet faster than the speed limit Monday morning (March 19) was news that German scientists believe racing games make gamers more dangerous drivers.

An article in a publication I don’t read every day, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, has been getting a lot of play. It takes a familiar scientific critique of video games and goes down a new path. Traditionally we hear about scientists studying whether violent games such as “Doom” incite violence in the real world. Four German researchers, however, wanted to study the effects of “Need for Speed.” The conclusion in their report? “Playing racing games could provoke unsafe driving.”

If you’ve ever heard vague details about one of these gaming studies and had a strong reaction to either agree or disagree, then this is the study worth dwelling on. Many gamers have played first-person shooters, but the number of them who have committed egregious acts of violence is thankfully low. Millions of gamers have driven a virtual car, however, and a good portion of that population has gotten behind a real wheel as well. So do you think games can affect real-world behavior? Average gamers can more likely judge this study for themselves. How do you think racing in “Need for Speed” or “Burnout” affects the driving of you or your friends?

I live in New York, where mass transit is the most efficient way to travel, so I don’t need to drive very often. I grew up playing “Mario” and “Zelda,” not “Pole Position” and “Mario Kart,” so I don’t play a lot of driving games. When I see a report like this, I recognize that I’m not the best-equipped to add a personal reaction. If you wanted to know whether games make someone more likely to rescue princesses, then I’m your guy.

When a study like the German one comes out, I’ve noticed that few outlets actually dig into the details. You’ll read that some German researchers have studied the effects of racing games, and that’s about it. I gave it a read this morning and found some interesting details:

· The German researchers tested the effects of three racing games: one of the “Burnout” games, one “Need for Speed” and a budget title called “Midnight Racer“. For one part of the study, they enlisted about half a pool of 83 students from Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-University to play 20 minutes of one of those games. The rest of the 83 played 20 minutes of “FIFA 2005,” “Crash Bandicoot” or a “Tak” game. After the sessions, the test subjects were shown 10 German words that each had two meanings: a neutral one and an aggressive one. For instance, the report indicates that the word “schneiden” can either mean “to cut (with scissors)” or “to dis someone.” People who played the racing games showed a greater tendency to offer the more aggressive definitions than did the ones playing the non-racing fare.

· Why were subjects given 20 minutes to play the game? The report says: “experimental experience has shown that it takes a minimum of 20 minutes of playing one single game before a participant is really ‘in’ the game.” I’m using that line the next time a friend tries to blow off a game I’m having him try. He’ll need to give it 20 minutes.

· The research subjects got to play their games on a 72-inch screen. I don’t know what bearing that had on the study, but it sure sounds like the participants had fun.

· A final phase of the study was conducted with 68 participants, breaking them out to sample the same three racing games and two of the same three non-racing games. “Crash Bandicoot” got the boot and was replaced with the World War II first-person shooter “Medal of Honor.” Similar word tests and a computer test that showed dangerous driving situations were run. The racing games made the men in the test — but not the women — more aggressive in their attitudes about driving. “Medal of Honor” did not. Maybe “MoH” publisher EA can put that on the box: ” ‘Medal of Honor’ will not make you a worse driver.”

There’s more in the research document, including a discussion on why men seemed to be more affected by the racing games than women. You can read the whole report here.

— Stephen Totilo

About this column: The average gamer doesn’t have the time or cash to experience one-tenth of the games that come out every week. Collectively, the MTV News team does — and then some. With games streaming into the office each day, we see a lot, we play a lot and we remember a lot. We want to tell you what we’re playing and what’s worth caring about it, and we’ll do it every day at MTV News: Multiplayer. To follow the column daily, bookmark multiplayer.mtv.com.