Multiplayer: Teasing 'Grand Theft Auto'

Rockstar Games will debut an online trailer for 'GTA IV' on March 29.

Across the street from the MTV offices in New York's Times Square, there's a giant sign for the "Spider-Man 3" movie wrapping around the corner of a city block. The giveaway is the two big images of Spider-Man's head and a giant "3" hovering between them. When you're really big, you don't have to spell it all out. It's obvious.

On Thursday, Rockstar Games e-mailed reporters an image of a giant "IV." They used Roman numerals, which only get used for really important happenings like Super Bowls and, until recently, Wrestlemanias. They didn't need to say much more except offer the news that the first trailer for the game being teased — "Grand Theft Auto IV" — will debut online March 29. (The trailer will appear at RockstarGames.com/IV.)

A Rockstar PR rep declined to reveal any details about the trailer or the game. The only details confirmed by the company since the game was announced last year is that it will be released October 16 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and will include downloadable content, at least for the 360 and likely for the PS3 as well. Rockstar reps told MTV News in May that the graphics engine powering the company's table tennis game would also power "GTA IV" (see "The First Rule Of Ping-Pong Club: Talk About Rockstar's Table Tennis Game"). That's it.

What might a "GTA" trailer reveal? Typically they've indicated the era and location of the games and given a sense of who the main character is. So if "GTA IV" is going to star a Russian in 19th century Moscow, or a 300-pound man raging through the 21st century United States, we'll likely know by the end of March. The "GTA" games have always employed a cartoonish aesthetic, the somewhat simply drawn characters lacking enough detail to have five separate fingers, for example. A trailer will likely show whether Rockstar wants to continue that not-so-realistic look or provide something truer to life.

What will be harder to discern is if the "IV" attached to the game truly means the series will significantly evolve from the formula introduced in 2001's "Grand Theft Auto III" and continued in "GTA: Vice City," "GTA: San Andreas," "GTA Liberty City Stories" and "GTA: Vice City Stories." The cities got larger, and different types of vehicles came into play. In the earlier games, your character couldn't swim. In the later ones he could. The targeting system improved. But fundamentally the games all played the same. You would look for an icon on the map marking the start of a new mission, you'd take it on, and if you failed, you'd go back to that icon and start again. Or you'd ignore all that and just cause wanton mayhem. As the years progressed, some holes emerged in that layout. Failing near the end of a really long mission would require a lot of backtracking and repeated play. Rockstar threw in some patchwork solutions, like letting players restart a failed long mission from the halfway point.

It so happens that I just started playing "Vice City Stories" on PSP this week. I began it on the subway on Tuesday. My ride from work to home is about 45 minutes, which turns out to not be long enough for me to get in a successful "GTA" groove. Playing the games at home, I can tolerate failing a mission a few times, because once I succeed I often can then breeze through the next few. On the subway, I fail a couple of times and then reach my stop. It had me wondering why they can't "fix" things, which means why can't they make the series easier for me to play.

March 29 will answer some questions. But knowing how secretive Rockstar likes to be, I'm not expecting all my answers until October 16.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Getting The Swing Of Things

How does PS3's motion-controlled 'Virtua Tennis 3' measure up to its Wii counterpart?

03.01.07

I played a tennis video game on Wednesday by waving a controller through the air, but it wasn't on the Nintendo Wii. It was on the PS3. How good is Sony at one of the Wii's most popular feats?

I conducted my experiment on "Virtua Tennis 3," an upcoming Sega game slated for the Xbox 360 and PS3. The "Virtua Tennis" series has been around since Sega's Dreamcast days and has always been a critical hit. On Wednesday, the company's PR team held a demo of the game along with a slew of PSP titles in a midtown hotel penthouse where Microsoft also sets up the New York sessions for a lot of its Xbox road shows. Publicist Jay Boor had the task of showing me tennis.

We started the game using buttons. Tennis is a cleanly simple sport. There aren't that many moves to assign the buttons of a controller. Because of that, tennis video games are really easy to pick up and play. Without a prompt from Jay, I was using the left stick to run Roger Federer around the court. I was using a few PS3 controller buttons to serve and volley. I scored points quickly.

I asked if the game had motion control. He said it did. I was especially curious because of the success of the tennis game in Nintendo's "Wii Sports." That little game has been one of the crossover hits for the system. The game controls the movement of the players on the court. It's so easy to play that all sorts of YouTube-able scenarios have resulted (watch Al Roker try it on the "Today" show, see Conan O'Brien and Serena Williams play a match on "Late Night," etc.). The thing with "Virtua Tennis," however, was that Jay hadn't used the motion controls yet. We'd be learning together.

We asked another Sega publicist, Jennie Sue, to help us out. She switched our players to motion control. She advised us to make small movements. That sounded OK.

Jennie left. Jay tried to serve.

Fault. Double fault.

He tried again and again. We couldn't get it. The PS3 controller is nothing like the Wii remote. You hold it with two hands. To serve, Jay was supposed to be jerking the controller in the air and then ... we weren't sure what.

Jay faulted a few more times, so he got up to ask Jennie for help. He had to turn his back to the TV to do this, and as he went over to talk to her, still holding the controller and no longer facing "Virtua Tennis," the shaking of his hands caused the perfect serve. I told Jay this when he returned. He theorized, "It only works when you're standing next to Jennie."

Soon enough we figured it out. A quick jerk in the air starts filling a meter that sets the power of the serve. A second jerk serves the ball. Shaking the controller from that point on swings the racket. Tilting the controller forward, back or to the sides moves the player around — something the Wii controller doesn't offer at all, since movement around the court is not player-controlled. If the learning curve for playing "Virtua Tennis" with buttons was less than 10 seconds, this learning curve for motion control required 10 minutes. I don't think that's too bad.

On Monday, I wrote about EA's "SSX: Blur," a new Nintendo Wii game that uses motion control for moves that used to be triggered by buttons in earlier games in the series. I lamented that one classic "SSX" set of moves, the Uber tricks, are beyond my abilities to pull off in the new game because I can't seem to swing the proper triggering motions. It's made me question if I am physically capable of enjoying the game to its fullest — do I have the coordination?

By accident or design, "Virtua Tennis 3" offers a counterpoint. It gives gamers a choice. Do you want to try to play the classic way or the newfangled motion way? Is one better? I think, in these early days of motion control, offering a choice is helpful.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Playing Sports Video Games As Seen On TV

PSP's 'MLB 07: The Show' lets gamers control one athlete instead of whole team.

02.28.2007

I don't play sports video games very often, but I think I would if they looked the way they do in TV commercials.

In TV commercials, video game football players tackle their opponents right into the camera. You see virtual baseball stars dive for a steal as if you were watching from the infield grass. Basketball players dunk right through whatever virtual cameraman was snapping the shots. Then you actually play these games, and the action is all shot from the rafters and the sidelines. You're controlling the game from the cheap seats. The games probably would be impossible to control otherwise. You can't orchestrate a squad of athletes if the camera view is riding on one of their shoulders.

Millions of people don't mind this. They buy and play baseball, football and basketball games by the store-full every year. I've just never gotten into them. They don't get me as close to the action as those commercials tease. I assumed there wasn't a sports game for me.

Then I got a copy of the new "MLB 07: The Show" on PSP. The game has a mode called Road to the Show that lets players control a single baseball player through an entire season. There's a similar feature for football players in "Madden," but I've never messed around with it. I checked it out in "MLB."

Yesterday I started myself off in "MLB" as a first baseman for the Yankees. Instead of playing the normal mode, which would have me swing the bats for all nine guys on the team and pitch every inning, I played the Road to the Show. I only had to play my guy's at-bats. The game skipped everyone else's.

I didn't have to throw one pitch. I didn't have to field any balls not hit to first base. This is great for me for a few reasons, among them the fact that it lets me play a baseball game the way I play "God of War," "Tomb Raider" and any "Zelda" game: control one character, advance them toward a goal, focus on nothing else.

Better — well, maybe not better, but still good — were the camera angles. I was fast-forwarded to a fielding moment. A soft grounder was tapped to first base. I had to scoop down and grab it. The game's camera shot the action from just behind first, from a few yards into the sky. Most of my team wasn't even on the screen. This was my player's moment, and the camera view showed it. It was almost like how video game baseball looks in a TV commercial. Now I have proof: It can be done. The sports games I want can be made.

Every year the publishers who make sports games release sequels that tweak the formula a little bit. Games like "Madden" and "MLB" even include an option on the menu that lists what's been added to the new year's edition. It's easy to be cynical, to assume that if a game has to flag players' attention to the new content with a special menu screen then maybe the new stuff isn't so important. Shouldn't good improvements be self-evident?

"MLB: 07" knocked the cynicism out of me. With one fine tweak to the franchise they turned their brand of baseball into something I want to play and brought it one step closer to the kind of video game baseball they know people really want — the version they sell on TV.

— Stephen Totilo

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:

The Stock Report:

» Number of games at MTV HQ: 259

» Last three games to arrive: "300" (PSP),"Burnout Dominator" (PS2), "MLB 07: The Show" (PSP and PS2)

» Last system to arrive: PS3

» Last swag to arrive: Fake mustache and purple Green Hornet mask (for "Wario: Master of Disguise")

Multiplayer: 'God Of War II' - Lights! Action! But Please, No Camera
Developers have control over camera work in game's second installment.

02.27.07

I don't like freedom as much as I thought I did. I discovered that last weekend as I played through a review build of next month's PS2 action epic, "God of War II."

(Check out action-packed "God of War II" images right here.)

The game doesn't let the player control the camera. And I think that's for the best. I don't want to worry about moving a camera around in my Greek Medusa-fighting, Cyclops-slaying adventure. I shouldn't have to. For too long, we gamers have been asked to do too much.

Whether we're talking games, movies or TV, I like good camera work as much as the next person. And while I don't know who just won the Oscar for Cinematography, I'd like to think that I can appreciate a piece of visual entertainment that was shot from some attractive angles. That used to not be a concern in video games. Back in the "Super Mario Brothers" side-scrolling days, gamers and gamemakers didn't have to fret about the angles. The action was shot from afar. The game's camera just tracked the left-to-right movement of Mario as he hopped from mushroom to turtle.

When games started to regularly appear in 3-D around the time of 1996's "Super Mario 64," game makers had to start making the camera move. It had to float at just the right height and distance to keep the player's character and whatever the player was trying to look at — an attacking enemy, a gap needing to be jumped over — on the screen. It had to spin and adjust at just the right moments. That was tough in those early days, and so even the great minds behind "Super Mario 64" enlisted the players' help, granting some control over the camera to the gamers.

Some subsequent games kept the camera largely out of the gamer's control. "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" let players center the camera shot and look around if they stopped moving the character and switched to a first-person view. But they couldn't run and swivel the camera at the same time. The camera moved only as it was programmed to move. The game did the looking for its players.

That proved to be an exception. As the PlayStation popularized controllers with two joysticks, developers popularized the idea that the left joystick would be used for character movement, the right for swiveling a camera. By the time "Super Mario Sunshine" and "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker" came out for the GameCube, even Nintendo's top designers were allowing — or should I say forcing? — gamers to do their own camera work with that right-side stick.

I got used to it. I took it on as another requirement of being a good gamer. I have to keep the hero alive. I have to save the princess. I have to make sure we were getting good camera angles.

So imagine my double surprise when I discovered that "God of War II" didn't let me control the camera and that the game didn't suffer for it. I've played six hours of the thing and haven't yearned to control the camera once. My view has been clear. The shots have been great.

The game plays as smoothly as the first one. You control an antihero named Kratos who uses to big blades attached to long chains to propeller a pantheon of Greek gods and minions into bloody bits, and you do this across an epic landscape. You just don't have to worry if you're getting the right shot. The game's developers take care of that for you. In fact, sometimes they pick shots I'd never think of, like a long-distance zoom-out during an epic bridge-crossing. It makes a simple moment feel epic. If I'm playing a stealth game like "Splinter Cell" or "Metal Gear Solid," I'd like to have control of the camera. I need it to peek around corners. But my experience with "God of War II" makes me wonder if game developers could, in general, be doing a better job and could ask a little less of us players.

When I jump into a game, I want to take on a role. I'm being an actor. In some games, like "The Sims" or "Nintendogs," I'm being a director. That's all good. But, really, I've never asked to be the cameraman. I'm grateful that "God of War II" proves I shouldn't have to be. That's some next-gen thinking as far as I'm concerned — even if the game is "just" on a PS2.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Worn Out By The Wii

Our games reporter shares his reservations about gesture control.

02.26.07

It used to take a button.

I used to jump, swing a sword and flip through extreme-snowboarding stunt routines with taps of buttons. But I'm a Wii player now, so I do that stuff by swinging my arms.

Sometimes I miss the buttons.

I spent a couple of hours over the weekend playing "SSX Blur," Electronic Arts new snowboarding game for the Wii. The game gives a good first impression (see "Multiplayer: A Nintendo Wii Plot Twist"). Its menus are slick; its soundtrack grooves. The graphics are sharp, and they flow as smoothly as the snowboarders and skiers you steer down the slopes. The controls are almost entirely motion-based.
You twist your left wrist, holding the Wii nunchuck, to steer and flick that hand up to jump. When a character is airborne you tilt your right hand, holding the Wii remote, up and down for flips. You lean it left and right to make the boarder spin. If your character is airborne long enough, you can make the little guy pull off an impressive trick combo just by swinging your right arm like an orchestra conductor.

All of that works as well as the conventional joystick-and-buttons control schemes from earlier "SSX" games. And then I got to the "Blur" Uber tricks. These are the peak-moment maneuvers that set "SSX" games apart from real life by launching riders from their boards for some midair breakdancing. The tricks have always been the reward for plowing a good run. Better performance charged a meter. When it lit up in the old "SSX" titles, all the games asked gamers to do was hold down a button or two. An Uber would unfurl, rider showboating through the sky.

"SSX Blur" demands more from its Ubers. Players first must race well, of course. The meter maxes. And then the game wants gamers to draw patterns with the Wii remote in the midair of their living rooms: a "Z," a loop, a scribble in the shape of a key. This weekend I tried and tried. I failed and failed. I couldn't do an Uber. There's no indicator on the TV screen, no sound from the speakers or rumble in the remote to tell you that you're getting it or not. It just doesn't happen. I'm sure I drew a "Z" in the air. I'm sure I swung my arm in a loop. But the Wii apparently disagreed.

This is what I feared from Nintendo's vaunted move to gesture control. I was sure I'd made the right movements, just as sure as my friends who can't use a PS2 controller have been the many times they followed the instructions and pressed an "X" button to punch or shoot but wound up blocking or just standing there — only to die and tell me my controller might be broken. My controller has never been broken; my friends just couldn't handle the controls. Now I can't either.

Nintendo wanted the Wii to level the playing field, to bring experienced gamers and intimidated non-gamers all back to video-game kindergarten and teach us in a language new to everyone. Surely, the point was for us all to rise in new skills together. But right now I feel like I've been dropped to the level of finger-twisted novice.

In three months I've done some very satisfying things with gesture control. I've pointed my Wii remote to zap Elebits, heaved the thing to attack in "Sonic and the Secret Rings" and turned a snowboarder with precise rolls of my wrist in "Blur." But I've also had more trouble using a sword swing to repel energy blasts with the flick of the Wii remote in "The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess" than I did by tapping buttons in previous "Zelda" games. I've shaken the Wii remote to turbo boost in "Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam" and wondered if that could ever be as natural as just hitting a button.

I may yet learn the "SSX" controls and draw my Uber-triggering "Z" with the skill of Zorro himself. And maybe I will feel grateful that the game asked more of me than pressing a button to accomplish the wildest of tricks. But three months into owning the Wii, I feel I have enough experience to express my reservations: Are Wii developers abandoning buttons with too much haste? Let's hope they don't get too carried away with the swing of things.

— 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.

Multiplayer: Thanks For The Memories, GameCube
Our gaming expert has fond memories of Nintendo system.

02.23.07

I'd like to say a few words about my GameCube, a little system that has reached the end of the line.

A couple of weeks ago, at the DICE gaming convention, I asked Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime if Nintendo is still manufacturing GameCubes. "The GameCube is still being made," he said. "The value is tremendous" (see "Where Are All The Wiis, DS Lites? Nintendo Exec Has The Answer").

But yesterday came a report from the Web site GameDaily that Nintendo of America Vice President of Marketing Perrin Kaplan told them at DICE, "Are we producing any more GameCubes? No. But do we have the inventory there for people to still purchase? Yes."

Which is it? I've asked Nintendo PR for clarification.

But let's not fool ourselves: The GameCube, if not dead, is dying. The only new, upcoming, exclusive game I'm aware of for the system is a shoot-'em-up called "Radio Allergy."

So I'm going to consider the system pretty much done. My GameCube is already retired into a trunk where my Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance, two fat Nintendo DS systems and Xbox hang out. Like a good pet goldfish, the system lasted me five years. Here's how it fit into my life:

I bought the GameCube at a very strange time. I remember pre-ordering it in a game store one floor below street level at New York's Rockefeller Center. I lined up at the store sometime in the late summer of 2001. There were a few guys on the line in front of me. They put deposits down on the black version of the system. I was the first person to order the purple one (Nintendo branded it as "indigo"). I don't think I'd ever bought anything purple before.

(To check out Bubba Sparxxx examining a brand-new GameCube back when it launched, click here.)

I wasn't writing about video games for a living yet. I was primarily a fan, and excited for a new Nintendo machine. Then September 11th happened, and I didn't care too much about it.

On a Sunday in November, with the city still shellshocked from the events two months prior, I headed down from my apartment in Spanish Harlem to Rockefeller Center to pick up my system. I'd already bought "Super Monkey Ball," a GameCube game released days before the system. Earlier at home I had taken the disc out and stared at it. On Sunday, I popped it into my machine. I played some "Luigi's Mansion" and "WaveRace: Blue Storm" too.

The GameCube didn't blow me away at first. This wasn't me unpacking a Nintendo 64 in my college dorm and deciding the real world couldn't compete with the three-dimensional land of "Super Mario 64." In fact, the GameCube never really blew me away. I'd eventually play some GameCube games I consider all-time favorites, like "Pikmin 2" and both versions of "Metroid Prime." But I also remember trying to convey to my girlfriend the magnificent importance of the GameCube release of the first new 3-D Super Mario game in six years, letting her play it first as a gesture of selfless love and then taking the controller from her and essentially saying, "Huh, you're right. This 'Super Mario Sunshine' doesn't feel like an instant classic."

Like the N64 before it, the GameCube was plagued with good-game droughts. The first hit early in 2002. I coped in three stages that each profoundly changed my gaming habit.

First, I found a store in Chinatown that modified my system so it could play GameCube games released in Japan, where there weren't as many dry spells. That introduced me to a charming, obscure game that would eventually come Stateside as "Cubivore," but more significantly, it instilled in me an appetite to get games released in places where I don't speak the local language. In recent years, some of my favorites have been imports.

Imports alone couldn't fix the drought, so I bought a Game Boy Advance. I discovered the joys of portable gaming and couldn't believe what I'd been missing. It wouldn't take a PSP to convince me gaming on the go was good.

My third coping strategy was to buy a second console. In 2002 I got a PlayStation 2. I quickly realized how tribal I'd been, championing Nintendo products because it justified my lifelong Nintendo purchases, ignoring great games from other machines — even assuming the worst about those games — because I didn't have a system that could play them. I was never a one-system gamer again.

The fact that the GameCube inadvertently freed me from single-system single-mindedness irked at least one Nintendo fan. Right around the time I became a GameCube owner, I started writing about games on a freelance basis — emphasis on the free part. By 2003 I was writing a GameCube column for IGN in exchange for a free game every month or so. An IGN reader named Olimario hated the columns. I think he hated me too. He started message-board threads calling for my dismissal. When that didn't work, he posted a list of writing tips that I should at least try to follow. Among them, he implored me to make sure that each sentence I wrote had "no fewer than 19 words." And he wanted more pizzazz. He wanted me to show some "lust" for what I was writing about. It should be clear, he admonished me, that "you would jump at the chance to have sex with Nintendo." My IGN work led to actual paying freelance assignments, then games writing for The New York Times, and eventually that path brought me to my gaming beat here at MTV. I owe some of that to the purple cube.

I'm not sure what Nintendo's point was with the GameCube, other than to just keep trucking along. The system didn't exhibit the sense of purpose the Wii (gaming for everyone!) or Nintendo DS (so weird it might just work!) did. It was a machine for playing the not-best "Zelda," the not-best "Mario" and some other games. For a couple of years Nintendo claimed that games made to be played with a Game Boy Advance wired to a GameCube would be the next big thing. It never was.

I had fun with the system. I used its silly handle to tote it into my bag and into friends' houses. I relished its wireless Wavebird controller. I played "Killer 7" to the end. Now it's going in the trunk, its half-decade well spent. It may not be the best system ever, but it sure did make an impact on me. Thanks, GameCube.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Is In-Game Advertising Really Such A Bad Thing Our games reporter sees something he never thought he'd see: in-game ad he actually likes.

02.22.07

I sat for a demo of Flagship Studios' upcoming PC game "Hellgate: London" on Wednesday and saw something I never thought I'd see: an in-game ad that actually contributed to the game.

Over a year ago, I filed a report about in-game ads (see
"Slay A Dragon, Buy A Pizza: Gamers Pitched Real Products In Virtual Worlds"). Companies had figured out ways to integrate billboards and commercials into video game universes, pitching TV shows and pizzas to players otherwise busy saving virtual worlds.

These ads, I was told, could help fray rising development costs or allow players access to persistent online games for free. In some instances, those professing the merits of these things said the ads made games more realistic. What's a sports game without the proper outfield billboards or a racetrack through New York's Times Square without some familiar logos? That's a fair point, but I would consider in-game ads in such situations as simply bringing games closer to even-footing with real life.

In "Hellgate," however, I saw an ad that took things a step beyond.

The game is set in a near-future, post-apocalyptic London. It's made by many developers who worked on Blizzard's multiplayer action-game classic "Diablo" and plays like it has some "World of Warcraft" mixed in its gene pool.

Flagship CEO Bill Roper was running the demo and kept bringing his character to a grimy section of the London Underground subway system, which is nicknamed "the tube." The walls had ads posted all over them, as they do in real life. I saw an iPod ad and one for Guinness, which I'd file in the Ads-in-the-Stadium category. But just as Roper was running his character out of that area and toward some monster-fighting, London-saving quest, he dashed past an ad for the movie "Children of Men." The movie, a critical favorite from late last year, is also set in a near-future, post-apocalyptic London.

Placing the ad in the game, even just temporarily for a demo, I thought, was inspired. It was clever. It drew a connection between the game and a smart piece of fiction, a good movie that might well match the interests of "Hellgate" players. It also gave some extra bite to "Hellgate," since "Children of Men" has a lot to say about why London might wind up in a state of post-world-war trauma.

Roper told me the ads were just placeholders, that his team put them in there to be clever but expects to yank them before the game is released. When he told me that, a thought flashed in my mind for the first time: I'm going to miss those in-game ads.

While I was sitting there disappointed, Roper was running through London streets whacking demons with a sword. I didn't want to talk character classes and spells at that point. I wanted to talk ads. I didn't see any up top. "It actually looks kind of barren up here," Roper said, in reference to the lack of ads there.

One of the early controversies about "Hellgate" — maybe the only controversy so far — has been that the game will require a monthly subscription for players to access the full online multiplayer features of the game. "Diablo" fans complained because that game only cost money to buy at the store but didn't then require a paid subscription fee for online play. Roper has countered, as he did to me, that "Diablo" didn't get a lot of extra content and dedicated customer service because there was no fee. While some undisclosed aspects of the online "Hellgate" experience will be free, the main online game will involve a fee.

Hearing Roper explain that is needed to provide the kind of support players expect from massively multiplayer online games, it got me wondering if there were other ways to cover such costs. Like maybe they could try in-game advertising. And maybe no one would mind if the ads were actually clever. Apparently, such ad placement can be done.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
Our unsentimental games reporter does some housecleaning, saying goodbye to 'Lost Planet' and more.

02.21.07

Say goodbye to my little friends.

Over the weekend I ditched a good 15 games from my gaming shelf. I've written about the shelf before, a 2-by-1-foot piece of wood that I've allowed to dictate the size of my personal gaming collection (see "Multiplayer: One Shelf To Hold Them All"). Once in a while I sit down at the shelf and try to weed some games out. Often that time coincides with a moment I should be doing some more serious housecleaning chore like vacuuming or something.

I was shirking the dust bunnies on Sunday when I sat down in front of my shelf and prepared some careful evictions. It got tough a few times. Here are some of the more tortured ditchings:

"Lost Planet": Capcom was nice enough to send me a free version of the collector's edition, a hardcover-heavy box set of the game. That alone made it a hard game to drop into the giveaway pile. The game itself is beautiful: colorful aliens scrambling from my machine-gun bullets in a post-apocalyptic winter wonderland. I started playing the game and was having fun. So why dump it? Call me petty, but when I got to the first major boss battle, I found myself pecking away at an enemy health bar that stretched the length of my TV screen. This beast was old-school, requiring memorization of its movement pattern and a patient, hit-run-hide counterattack. Nothing makes it easier for me to part with a game than old-school design, the kind of gameplay barriers that slow my march through new content while making me pay my dues with a bunch of punishing jumps or overly tough boss fights. I'm passing to make room on the shelf for other stuff.

"Kirby Squeak Squad": This game is fun. It looks and sounds nice. A month ago, I beat it, and it thoroughly enchanted my 3-year-old niece. Yes, I'm still using the word "beat," even though Alex Ward told me not to.

But there's no room for sentiment on my gaming shelf. Save that for the shelf on which I keep seashells from important vacations. Actually I don't have such a shelf, but who keeps games just for sentimental reasons? Not I.

"Peter Jackson's King Kong": Released in fall 2005, this game was supposed to be the rare movie-based game that wasn't just good but actually innovative. And it was. The designers boldly abandoned such conventions as onscreen indicators for the player's health and ammo supply, replacing them with properly timed cues of angelic near-death music and a series of mumblings about the number of bullets left in the good guy's holster. This is the only game I've scored a full 1,000 Xbox 360 Achievements on. I don't think this game is an all-time great, but it is a nice showpiece for some interesting design ideas. That justification kept this game on my shelf for a year. Now I'm no longer convinced it's essential, possibly because I have new showoff 360 games like "Gears of War" and "Viva Piñata."

"Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime": I first bought this game last year in Japan, and it kept me entertained during some bizarre hours of the Tokyo morning, when my body was still running on New York time. I played half the game without caring that I didn't understand a word of its Japanese text. Then, when it was released in America, I bought it again — yes, bought it; no free mailing here — and I played it from start to finish in English. Maybe you can have too much of a good thing, because playing this game one and a half times and enduring many of its repetitious late chapters in six short months leaves me thinking I'll never touch it again. Away it goes.

I recently sat for an interview during which one of the interviewers excoriated me for living by the parameters of my gaming shelf. This guy said he's got about 500 games in his collection and can't part with a single one. I wonder if, for some gamers, that behavior is born in video games. After all, many games are known — usually derisively — as collect-a-thons. You'll need to grab a few hundred gold coins across the length of a Super Mario game or recruit a rainbow of multicolored Jinjo aliens in each level of "Banjo-Kazooie." Sometimes the collecting is good, but often I see right through it for the busywork it is. The collecting pads things out. It dilutes attention from the good stuff.

I won't let games turn me into a rabid collector in their gaming worlds. And I'm not letting games make me one in the real world either. I had fun with the games I listed above, but I'm less interested in being sentimental as I am in having a cream-of-the-crop shelf of just my truly favorite games.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Want To Hear A 'Million-Dollar Idea' — For Free?
Our games reporter wants his privacy invaded — again and again.

02.20.07

A friend of mine thinks a new video game brainstorm I had is a "million-dollar idea." She told me so a couple of weeks ago. She should know: She's an excellent video game reporter and has interviewed almost all the big names in the industry. She thinks there's gold in my idea.

So I'm giving it away for free, here in Multiplayer.

Honestly, I don't think I could make money off it. And if someone at Microsoft or Sony hasn't already thought of this idea, I'd be shocked. So maybe it's coming anyway and maybe someone else is already on the verge of making the million.

My bright idea? I want the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3 to invade my privacy. Again. And again. Here's my concept: Achievement Photos. That's a million bucks right there, no?

Let me explain. For two years, Xbox 360 users have been getting accustomed to Achievements. Every 360 game is required to have them, and they do, usually about 40 per boxed game. Developers can program Achievements as they see fit — offering some to mark the completion of the levels in a game, others to mark feats like the explosive-aided murder of a few hundred foes or the rescue of a bunch of cats from trees or maybe repeated failure at an online game. When you're playing a game and you win an Achievement, an Xbox 360 icon pops onscreen and a little noise chimes. Over on your gamer profile page, a line of text, a score for that achievement and a little square graphic representing the feat get added to a list of every Achievement you've won. That's your chocolate.

This is the peanut butter: For the past few months, Microsoft has promoted the 360's very own Web Xbox Live Vision Camera, a USB camera not unlike the ones making thousands of regular people famous on YouTube.

So what if I could set up my Vision camera to automatically snap a picture in the direction of my couch every time I score an Achievement on my 360? From that moment on, each of my listed Achievements would be matched with a photo of myself snapped at the moment of my accomplishment. Anyone on my friends list would be able to view them too.

We'd wind up with a visual chronicle of the time I'd spent at any given game. There'd be shots of me bright-eyed and thrilled, winning an Achievement for completing the first section of "Halo 3," followed by a photo of me slouched lower in my seat, winning the Achievement for advancing to another section of the game. There would be a picture of me bleary-eyed next to an Achievement for finishing the game. There'd be ones for me winning various multiplayer Achievements, the photos snapped across several months and showcasing subtle changes in my hairstyle and the décor of my apartment.

In total, we might discover that I have a lucky "Halo" shirt. I might even start dressing up for my Achievements. Let's say I knew I was about to win one for crashing a Warthog jeep a specified number of times. I might wear my bike helmet in anticipation of that photo. I think this could catch on. Other people would be doing it too.

Oh, but what if some people play their games naked? That's the most formidable counterargument I've heard so far. A problem it may be, but not one that seems to be deterring a pair of the biggest companies in gaming. My big idea popped into my head because Sony's head of Worldwide Studios, Phil Harrison, announced at the recent DICE gaming conference that the upcoming PS3 version of the karaoke game "SingStar" will allow gamers to film themselves playing the game with a USB camera and upload the clips to PlayStation's online store for others to see and rate (see "Hints About 'Spore,' Pro-PS3 Arguments At DICE Video Game Conference"). And then a few days later, Electronic Arts announced the purchase of SingShot Media, a company that lets people record their karaoke performances with a webcam and upload them to the Internet. They don't seem too worried that the naked thing is a deal-breaker.

Sony and EA's ideas are clearly inspired by the success of YouTube, "American Idol" and all the other cultural phenomena that thrive on the notion that ordinary people should strive for fame and the rest of us can strive to laugh at how silly they look doing it. The Achievement Photo concept fits nicely with that.

A couple of years ago I finished a boxing game in Sony's "EyeToy: Play 2," a PS2 game that recorded my movements with a webcam. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it recorded a few seconds of video of me as I delivered the knockout blow. It looked hilarious. I looked way too intense and then — suddenly — way too thrilled. I'd like to see more of that.

I'm sure the tech isn't hard, and I'm not even asking for my million.

— 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.

Multiplayer: Ray Muzyka On The Best Eyeballs In Video Games
Former doctor talks about crusade to create lifelike eyes in 'Mass Effect.'

02.16.07

During most weeks, I use Multiplayer to share the things I've discovered in the games I play. This week will be different. I recently attended the Design Innovate Create Entertain (DICE) gaming conference. I spoke with many top game makers and will host the best of those conversations on Multiplayer all week ... slices of DICE, if you will.

Ray Muzyka, a trained doctor who now runs a video game company for a living, has a small but profound hope for the future of interactive entertainment: "It's a small detail, but one of the details I've always wanted to have in our game is eyes that look like eyes."

Muzyka was looking into my eyes as he said this during an interview last Friday at DICE. We sat across a table from each other and chatted about the future of storytelling in video games. It's an issue that both he and fellow doctor and BioWare founder Greg Zeschuk take seriously. "Our mission statement is to deliver the best story-driven games in the world," Muzyka told me. Key to that is delivering emotional moments. And one key to that for Muzyka is creating believable eyeballs.

"There has to be a couple of layers of reflection," he told me, recalling his medical days and rattling off parts of the eye and explaining how they might reflect light differently. He was feeling good about the eyes in his company's upcoming Xbox 360 outer-space role-playing game "Mass Effect," which is expected to come out in the middle of the year. He started talking about characters in the game. "They open their eyes, they look at you, they tilt their head and look you up and down, nodding their head." They don't even have to speak, but the player should be able to tell that they're alive. He turned the conversation to my eyes. "I know whether you're agreeing or disagreeing, whether you're skeptical or saying, 'Yeah I get it.' "

I asked him if he stared at people a lot. "I like playing poker," he said. "It's very important in poker to have a read on your opponent." DICE is held at a casino and Muzyka likes to play against his fellow designers. Last year he cleaned up. "My grandparents taught me how to play poker when I was 8, stole my money and I've never looked back since," he said.

I was surprised we were talking so much about eyes. BioWare has long been a role-playing-game company, one proud not just of its storytelling but of the thousands of lines of dialogue programmed or recorded to tell its epic tales. Muzyka was suggesting that words may be a bit overrated. "Dialogue is actually not the solution to story," he said. An emotional moment doesn't require words. "You don't need to have dialogue."

"Mass Effect" won't exactly be a silent game. It will be full of speech as its lead character explores the galaxy in an attempt to save it. But Muzyka says that the company is learning how to improve on its mission statement, how to make moments matter, and it doesn't have to involve so much talking. As can be seen in a demo of the game available on Xbox Live, players will trigger their character's part of a conversation based on a dial of emotions, not by selecting from a multiple-choice list of replies. Muzyka says the game will employ "a much less text-heavy way to convey storyline."

Muzyka told me he wants the new game to show his company's progress. "Everybody has done this when they're younger, when they're a new developer trying to go for a long experience and a deep experience. But now what we're trying to do is go for not only a deep experience, a long experience, but a quality experience, a sustained quality experience. ...You're better off making a tight experience where every moment is going to be memorable."

So what's the tale of "Mass Effect"? He describes it as "Jack Bauer in space," a reference to "24" and its morally gray hero. "You have complex moral choices to make," he said about the game. "You're out to save the galaxy. You're going to have to do things that don't seem like they're good to do that."

Muzyka talks differently than many other developers I've interviewed. He spends less time dwelling on technical things and more time pondering human stuff. I asked if his medical roots played into that. As a young small-town doctor in Canada, he used to be the only emergency physician on call for a 100-mile radius. He dealt with a lot of people with a lot of problems, sometimes handling problems that had nothing to do with blood and bandages.

"I did a lot of counseling in small towns," he said. "I liked having people come in and talk about how things are going and seeing what I can do to help them. And you think about things differently if you approach it that way, you approach everybody on their own merits and have a relationship or rapport with every person you talk to. And I think we're trying to create that feel in our games."

Muzyka has lofty aims. I asked if there was a scene from art or life that he uses as a benchmark to indicate when gaming storytelling is working. He recalled Steven Spielberg's famous black-and-white Holocaust film. "In 'Schindler's List,' that moment where you see the little girl in the [red] dress ... and then you see her later [among the dead]. For me, if you can convey emotion to that level in a game then we've succeeded. For us that's our goal."

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: What's Next For 'Halo,' 'Viva Pinata' And 'Crackdown'?
At DICE, Microsoft Game Studios' Phil Spencer says 'Halo 3' beta test won't hold anything back.

02.15.07

I was told by a friend in the gaming press that Phil Spencer, the general manager of Microsoft Game Studios, is a good guy to talk to. He's the man in charge of dealing with every game studio owned by or partnered with Microsoft, each making exclusive games for the Xbox 360 or Windows. So at DICE, I found a quiet conference room and asked him to tell me the future.

I wanted to know about "Halo," specifically the status of the Peter Jackson "Halo" project and the "Halo Wars" game announced in September (see "Microsoft Partners With Peter Jackson For Xbox, Reveals New 'Halos' "). Spencer told me that both projects are still in the early stages.

We also talked about the upcoming "Halo 3" public multiplayer beta test. "It isn't really a tease," he said. "People should expect a pretty robust experience when they're playing. Don't call it a demo."

Executives from every game company express pride in the games they back. Usually the top guys at the biggest companies, like Sony, Nintendo and EA, give the impression they're overseeing a vast mall of content. Spencer's description of Microsoft's gaming operations makes it sound more like he's running a boutique. "It is very important that we pick games that matter," he said. "We're going to focus on fewer games and make sure those games are stars when they come out."

He's heard the criticism that Microsoft backs lots of games that feature guys and guns — "usually bald guys with armor and guns," he clarified. He said he's actually looking to back diversity. Last November's "Viva Piñata" is an example, a family-friendly game released in the shadow of the mighty M-rated "Gears of War." But Microsoft has yet to issue a press release announcing the first million copies sold of "Piñata." The company has been able to do that three times over for "Gears." Is that reason to go back to the bald Marines?

"We shipped both the games in a relatively short period of time," Spencer said. "So it was easy for people to lay out a ruler and say, 'Which one is better? Which one is the phenomenon, and which is the flop?' We don't think about that internally. Success for those games was measured differently, and I look at both of them as tremendous successes for us." There's life in "Piñata" yet, he indicated. "It's an intellectual property we're committed to. We'll do other types of games with that property."

Spencer thinks highly of "Viva Piñata" developer Rare, which Microsoft bought from Nintendo five years ago, but it has been slow to reclaim the praise once showered on it for titles like "Banjo-Kazooie" and "GoldenEye." "As somebody who works with the studio on a day-to-day basis, I would encourage the studio to stay diverse," he said. "I think that's the key to creativity." He also wants Rare to keep making games for its former backer, Nintendo. It's an oddity, of course, that a Microsoft-owned studio makes games for a rival company's platform, but it's the way things have been for years. Rare makes games not just for the Xbox 360 but for the Nintendo DS, including this month's "Diddy Kong Racing DS."

"We could have easily pulled the plug on that, but as somebody managing the operation, I looked at it and said, 'Hey, this is something we should foster,' " he said. "If we have a good game idea that could work well on the DS, I think it can be an interesting extension of our intellectual property. 'Viva Piñata' on DS would make sense. I'm not saying that's going to happen. But it's easy to think of ideas like that."

Spencer is a big proponent of expanding Xbox 360 games with Xbox Live, and he's ready to advance that line of discussion in some unexpected ways. Take "Crackdown," the open-city supercop game coming February 20. The game's creative director, David Jones, has already teased the idea of bolstering the game via Live (see " 'Halo 3' Gives 'Crackdown' A Boost — And That's Just Fine With Its Creator"). Spencer wants to push even further.

"If you think about the next experience you want in that game, it might not be to go out and buy a 'Crackdown 2' game," he said. "There might be gameplay that we could actually add to the 'Crackdown' world. And something as simple as adding an island is not what I'm talking about. Do you take this space and these millions of people that are playing your game with powered-up characters and do you create new games for them within that world and let them play?"

I suggested adding a new gang to the city as downloadable content. Apparently I think small. "That's the easy way to do it," Spencer countered. "You could also say, 'Well, maybe the whole world goes [player vs. player],' or maybe you start dumping a whole bunch of people in." He considers "Crackdown" an ideal laboratory to experiment with this stuff.

At the end of our conversation I asked him which 360 games on the horizon deserved an extra look from gamers otherwise distracted by "Halo 3." He tipped "Blue Dragon," "Fable 2" and "Mass Effect," all 2007 titles. Multiplayer's DICE festivities will wrap Friday with a chat I had with one of the creators of that last game.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: How To Hide $200,000
'Perplex City' mastermind Michael Smith talks up Alternate Reality Games at DICE.

02.14.07

One of the more conveniently timed bits of news coming out of last week's DICE conference was Michael Smith's announcement that his company was about to be $200,000 poorer.

Smith runs Mind Candy, a British development company responsible for the Alternate Reality Game "Perplex City." His kinds of games don't happen on a TV screen; they occur in the real world. "Perplex City" sent gamers down a rabbit hole of fake Web sites, puzzles released on trading cards and real-life treasure hunts, all leading a lucky winner to a cube hidden somewhere in the world and a $200,000 prize (see "Want To Live Like Neo? Alternate Reality Games Might Be Your White Rabbit").

On the day of Smith's speech at DICE, someone in his native England had discovered the prize cube. Smith swore to me that it was a coincidence. His players are rabid. I should know. They were stalking me a couple of weeks ago (see "Multiplayer: Have You Seen This Man?"). I talked to Smith right after his speech and got the lowdown not just on how the cube was found, but on the extreme lengths he and his team at Mind Candy went to hide the thing two years ago.

But what was Smith doing at a video game event like DICE? He was sharing a presentation with Jordan Weisman, who presented the "i love bees" ARG that promoted "Halo 2." The two speakers were hoping to excite video game makers about their kinds of games and suggest the area for overlap. For one thing, ARGs tend to be played by global networks of fans who share clues, pool together on hard projects and use their so-called "hive mind" to crack puzzles solo players would likely never complete.

"This has become a bigger issue with gaming," Smith said. "It's so much more than one player playing on their own with their video game. And 'Perplex City' builds up community not just online but into the real world as well, offering players the chance to meet up and connect with other people who are playing the same games in public spaces." He thinks video game publishers should consider encouraging more of those types of real-world connections.

Smith described an ID system his game uses that he thinks might work for video gamers as well. "We have [tags] that players actually attach to their clothing so other people can spot them when they're out in public. And players get different colors depending on how far you've advanced in the game. That could be something that could be incorporated into more traditional video games going forward."

As for "Perplex City," Smith said a second season will start in April. One of the knocks on the original game was that it was too intimidating for casual players, who could safely assume that they weren't going to come close to the $200,000 cube unless they dove into the deep end of the game's mysteries. Season two, Smith said, will involve more prizes for more people to win. More importantly, he said that the April launch would involve some relatively gentle puzzles designed for players to solve solo. That solo segment will involve some of the classic ARG/ real-life crossover, with a surprise phone call and fake Web site or two.

Someday he'd even like to expand that web to "Perplex City" books and video games all weaving a tangled web.

A trailer for the season will launch in March.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Alex Ward Talks 'Black,' Underappreciated Games
'Categories change and evolve, but each game is its own thing,' Criterion Games creative director says.

02.13.07

During most weeks, I use Multiplayer to share the things I've discovered in the games I play. This week will be different. I recently attended the Design Innovate Create Entertain gaming conference and spoke with many top game makers; this week I'll host the best of those conversations on Multiplayer ... slices of DICE, if you will.

Several hundred game executives and developers attended last week's DICE conference. Some of them knew why they were there. Alex Ward wasn't so sure.

"I have no idea what I'm doing here," said Ward, the creative director of EA-owned Criterion Games, the makers of the first-person shooter "Black" and the crash-crazy "Burnout" racing series. "As a game developer, there are a lot of events that happen around the year and you always get invitations to come to them. Me and my team, we never normally come to events like this. I don't know what you normally say at events like this other than, 'Make good games. See ya! Bye!' "

Ward does have more to say than that. On just about any gaming topic, he's got a strong take. See Ward talk about getting political in "Black" and taking great umbrage with my reference to "beating" that game.

He's ready for games to tell great stories. "We're definitely interested in telling a story that's meaningful and hopefully has an emotional resonance with the audience other than, 'Here you go, here's Mr. X. Go kill him.' "

He's ready to rebuff any trends toward making bigger and bigger games. "The big trend in gaming is to overproduce everything. Everything's a Hollywood production," he said. At Criterion, however, they're mixing in experiments on small games potentially for Xbox Live Arcade or the PlayStation 3 network. "We're always developing new ideas. Even while we're working on something big like 'Burnout 5' or 'Black,' we're always trying to develop something in the background. So I'm involved in about six or seven projects at the same time in the background where it's, 'Here's a good idea. Let's work on that. Let's spend two or three days sketching something up. What can we do that's very small?' " Doing that, he said, they can make a game in a week.

He also feels that some fantastic games just don't get the proper respect. "There's a lot of games out there that I think are misunderstood," he said. He wasn't talking about controversial titles or obscure critical darlings. He had another type of misunderstanding in mind. "I think that some games that are seen by some in North America to be old-fashioned are misunderstood. A game that came out could be very arcade-y. Something like [Namco's] 'Ridge Racer' is a good example. It's always going to be an arcade racing game. I know the guys on the team. I've spoken to them because we both kind of make arcade games. It's about fantasy cars racing through a Japanese environment at incredible speed. And I think as that game series has evolved it will always be what it is, and I respect Namco for doing that. But the perception of the franchise has changed and the media now expect them to be something else."

He thinks people expect "Ridge Racer" to have crashes because "Burnout" does. He doesn't want that — not because he can't handle the competition. "The new one on PlayStation 3 is the best 'Ridge Racer' they ever made. I mean, it's really, really good. But a lot of opinion and a lot of noise was put out there that it's not as accepted to do 'Ridge Racer.' ... A lot of games come out. Categories change and evolve, but each game is its own thing, and I think that's what media have to remember. That's a bit of anarchy for you."

That's all certainly more interesting than just saying, "Make good games."

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Cliffy B Talks 'Gears Of War,' Tears For Fears
This week, our games reporter brings you slices of DICE.

02.12.07

On Thursday afternoon, I spent 20 minutes talking with Cliff Bleszinski, a.k.a. Cliffy B, about the big game he finished designing: last year's "Gears of War," which sold 3 million copies. He wouldn't 'fess up to any "Gears" sequels, stating: "There's just 'Gears of War.' The game was always intended to be an action movie and [go from] point A to point B, as far as these guys in Delta Squad trying to find mapping data for the underground and blowing the hell out of the Locust. That's all we're announcing at this point."

Bleszinski described the journey of making the game as "pretty much the most satisfying feeling a person can have in the entire world." He said he'd been itching to do something like it since 1999. I wanted to know how different the "War" we've played is from the one he first dreamed up.

"Starting off, the game had more of a commander-type focus and the order system wound up becoming more of an ancillary feature," he said. But for every change, there was stuff that stayed the same since the start. "Cover was one of those things we knew we wanted to do from the beginning. So the fact that you can take cover quickly and seamlessly — [and that] it felt visceral, it felt violent, it felt hard-core — that was in there from the get-go.

"We always knew it would be four guys with kind of a pseudo-European setting, as far as feeling like it's set in this bombed-out, post-apocalyptic, alien London setting. We always knew that was going to be the environment because, quite frankly, that's what shows off next-generation graphics well."

During the MTV News E3 roundtable last spring, Bleszinski said the game would also be about going home. Watch Cliffy B and other game makers chat with Gideon Yago. The game's hero, Marcus Fenix, starts the game by breaking out of prison and winds up on a mission destined to reach his father's hilltop estate. How personal was that? "I grew up in the suburbs of Boston," he said at DICE. "I lived in the suburbs of Boston until I was about 15 and was able to just explore the woods around that area and the different seasons and be a kid. And that's something day to day I think I miss occasionally. It came through a little bit in terms of going home and the house on the hill."

Something that never made it into the game but that many people likely associate with "War" is a cover of the Tears for Fears song "Mad World" by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews. That version was made for the movie "Donnie Darko" and used as the backdrop for a "Gears of War" TV commercial, its melancholy vocals juxtaposed with visuals of the game's violent gunfights. Bleszinski liked that commercial quite a bit.

"I think what we learned from 'Mad World' is contrast can be a very useful thing in selling your product and getting people's attention," he said. "I believe it could be a very exciting scene in a video game, to be in the middle of an intense gunfight and then have slow, sad music play in the background just like a John Woo technique. I think that's absolutely a very valid technique for game designers to play with in their product."

Over the last few years, Bleszinski has built an image. He isn't Cliff to gamers. He sure isn't Mr. Bleszinski. He's been Cliffy B, the straight-talking, tight-T-shirt-wearing hotshot game designer out to make a more awesome game than the square, bearded game makers of old. I'd heard this was all intentional — a self-imposed makeover. He confirmed as much.

"I like attention and I figured out I would put myself out there," he told me. "Anything I've done to build up any sort of image I have as a game designer has helped to establish 'Gears of War' as a kick-ass game. And that's been the prime directive."

So were there any drawbacks to putting himself out there? "I think it's possible in this day and age, on the Internet, for any game designer or any creative [person] to get caught up reading too many comments in regards to what people think about them or their product. And I think it's possible to agonize over that."

Bleszinski doesn't seem like he's agonizing over it too much. He's got enough to look forward to and keep him distracted. "I have 8 trillion game and universe ideas in my head. Whether I'm able to realize those, time will tell."

— 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.

Multiplayer: The 'Metal Gear Solid' Movie (DICE Day Two)
Are big-screen versions of video games a good idea?

02.09.07

HENDERSON, Nevada — Jockeying from conference to interview, barely uttering or hearing a word that doesn't relate to video games, I haven't had much time to actually play anything in the last 24 hours at the DICE gaming convention here on the outskirts of Las Vegas. But one of the big pieces of unscheduled news coming out of the event involves another game-related activity that won't involve play: the forthcoming "Metal Gear Solid" movie.

On Wednesday evening the reporting team at GameSpot broke the news that Sony will bring the legendary "Metal Gear" series to the big screen. Sony Pictures Digital president Yair Landau let the news slip during an interview with the gaming site. On Thursday, a more formal announcement was hastily assembled. Stories announcing the movie were placed in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, indicating that "Metal Gear" creator Hideo Kojima will serve as the film's executive producer.

On Thursday morning I happened to get an e-mail from some old friends about the old "Super Mario Bros." movie, a live-action bomb that starred Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi. The friends wanted my input. The problem is that I may know video games, but I don't know video game movies.

I covered reports of the "Halo" movie last year, with the due diligence of a journalist safely assuming that a movie version of one of the most popular game series of all time matters (see "Microsoft Announces 360 Games, Nabs Peter Jackson For 'Halo' "). But if you asked me, I wouldn't even know how to begin forming an opinion on what would make for a good gaming movie. I don't even know if the so-called bad ones could have been much better. After all, how could someone make a compelling movie about Mario fighting through a mushroom landscape, trying to rescue Princess Peach?

I have seen "Mortal Kombat" in movie form and watched scenes of the Nintendo gaming-competition road movie "The Wizard." But that's about it. I've avoided the rest and never heard a good word about any of them. I know that people involved with the "Metal Gear" movie were hoping for a grander announcement than this week's, and I am sure that Kojima has been incubating concepts for a film for years. That speaks to a grand ambition and possibly a grand execution. "Metal Gear," unlike "Mario Bros." is a game for which plot and character development is essential, so it may prove a natural fit.

For all the popularity of games and a film, combinations of the two have rarely been successful. Last year the Peter Jackson "Halo" announcement was supposed to change that, and unlike the "Metal Gear" announcement this week, it came with a big splash. But the ripples have stilled. The funding has been pulled. The movie is on hold. Maybe this quieter announcement allows the creators to skip the stage of believing outside hype and will let them focus on content rather than a publicity carnival.

Hideo Kojima told me last year that he used to want to make movies before switching to a career in game design (see " 'Metal Gear' Mastermind Imagines Games That Use Smell, Touch"). He's getting his wish. Now the question, as it always has been with video game movies, is whether gamers are getting what they want? What really makes for a great video game movie? I've yet to meet a person who can tell me.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Trying Not To Get Caught (DICE Day One)
Our gaming expert rushes to finish PSP game before running into creator at Vegas convention.

02.08.07

HENDERSON, Nevada — I arrived in Las Vegas mid-Wednesday for a three-day video game convention held for a few hundred captains of the gaming industry. The DICE convention (that stands for Design Innovate Create Entertain) was a good place to meet game developers last year and report some stories. I hoped this year's would be the same. Arriving in this town the same time as last year, stationed at the same hotel, I felt a wave of déjà vu. Except last year I don't remember feeling guilty.

I had spent my flight in seat 18D, ignoring the couple making out next to me. I worked on my computer, finished a review copy of "Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters" for the PSP and checked the DICE conference schedule. That reminded me that game designer Michael John is scheduled to deliver the final talk at DICE, on Friday at 2:15 p.m. Vegas time.

I met John at last year's DICE, and we had a good chat. I talked to him for a few stories I reported, and we wound up returning to a favorite topic of mine: the ends of games (see "That's It? Graphics Improve But Video Game Endings Still Come Up Short"). He acknowledged that game designers didn't pay as much attention to them as they should. I boasted about all the games I finished. Somehow we never got to talking about the game he most recently designed, last year's "Daxter" on the PSP, and maybe that's because last time he and I spoke, I hadn't finished the game. As of the make-out session in row 18, I still hadn't finished the game. Surely I'd run into John at DICE. What would I say? And how wouldn't he be insulted that I never wrapped up his game — me, of all people?

Thankfully, I had the foresight to pack "Daxter." Flying for work always gives me time to catch up on portable games I neglected, and "Daxter" had been thrown in a catch-up pile for this very trip. When I arrived at my hotel, I checked into my room, saw I had a couple of hours to kill and popped the game in the system. According to my save file, I hadn't played the game since March 26. Now I liked the game; I just got distracted. I had cleared 61 percent of the game. I was diving back in.

I've heard a lot of gamers complain about losing their spot in a game. They take a week off from playing, then they log back in and can't remember where they were. A lightning bolt on the "Daxter" menu pointed me to my next mission, but 11 months had wiped my memory of why I was going there next. I had forgotten the controls. I got back the running and the fly-swatting attacks pretty quickly, but I couldn't remember how to jump long distances. And I couldn't remember if I'd beaten the Saw Mill mission or if I was supposed to focus on the Mines. Both missions were, after all, marked by the same lightning bolt. I think I've got all my "Daxter" knowledge back, but then I don't know what I don't remember. Who's at fault — me or the developer — when I can't pick things back up immediately after a 309-day gap? I'm guessing the fault lies with me this time. By the time DICE was officially beginning, I'd crept up to 63 percent.

When you cover games for a living, you actually have to talk to these game developers about their games and somehow not sound like, A) a fan, B) an angry guy from a message board, or C) a clueless poseur. It's not always easy. At the DICE party Wednesday night, I didn't see John. I did see Keiichi Yano, whose company, iNiS, developed the Nintendo DS' "Elite Beat Agents." I told him I liked his game. He dug a story of mine that mentioned it (see "GameFile: Testing Violence; Nintendo Prez Talks Wii Batteries & More").

Somehow we got to talking about the completely hypothetical merging of rhythm games and real-time strategy games. We fancied some sort of battle of the marching band. Instead of spawning armies of tanks, you'd marshal a drum line. I'm sure I came off a bit as category A, as did a fellow reporter whose excited gesticulations to Yano accidentally caused my drink to wind up on that reporter's clothes.

I spotted Lesley Mathieson, design director at High Impact Games, which made the "Ratchet and Clank" PSP game. I charged over to her and let her know I finished her game on the plane. I got to ranting to her and a developer at Insomniac about the problems with random battles in role-playing games. We talked design for a bit. I was fired up. I hope I wasn't too much of a category B.

Mathieson's game isn't even officially out yet. What would John have thought if he'd overheard my talk with her? Me, a category C? I'm writing this Thursday morning (February 8). I'd crawled a little farther ahead in "Daxter" after the party Wednesday night. But I have little downtime for the rest of the day. And John could be around any corner. I don't want to let the guy down. Then again, his game won awards. This is my guilt. I'll deal with it.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: The PS2-Wii Connection
Consoles will co-host Rockstar's 'Manhunt' sequel.

02.07.07

The oddest news yet about the Nintendo Wii may have come in a press release Rockstar Games e-mailed to the media Tuesday. In a surprise move, the bad boys of game development announced that a sequel to the company's macabre snuff-movie stealth game, "Manhunt," would be coming this summer to PS2, PSP and the Nintendo console currently associated with harmless, armless Miis playing tennis.

That shocked me. I've played "Manhunt." You'd remember it if you did — it's hard to forget sneaking a character through a darkened yard, killing people with guns, knives or even a plastic bag over the head, while a perverse offscreen operator cackles demands for ever-more gruesome murders. This is what the Scottish team at Rockstar North made in between "Grand Theft Auto" games. You wouldn't expect a sequel on the Wii.

And yet the oddest part of Rockstar's announcement may not be that a Nintendo once dismissive of "Grand Theft Auto" would sanction "Manhunt 2" but that it is the Wii and the PS2 that will share console-hosting duties for the title. A year ago, the safe bet was that major publishers releasing games on multiple machines would offer their best new games on the similarly powered Xbox 360 and PS3. The weaker Wii would be left out, required to thrive or wither under the nourishment of games made just for it. Publishers would likely see more potential in going for the two stronger machines.

The Wii, however, is hot right now, and that success is compelling publishers to put more games on it. One option is to downgrade and tweak 360 stuff for the Wii, as Ubisoft has done several times already. But a new technique is coming into play: Both "Manhunt 2" and Electronic Arts' "Medal of Honor: Vanguard" are being made for PS2 and Wii. (An entirely different game, "Medal of Honor: Airborne," is slated for Xbox 360 and PS3). This could be the birth of something between an old-generation and new-generation console, the establishment of a "generation good enough."

Previously, the excitement of the new powerful consoles killed many game makers' — and many gamers' — appetites for games designed for machines being left behind. The allure of a PS2 eliminated the sexiness of even the flashiest PSOne games; the promise of the PS3 could have been expected to make old PS2 favorites about as exciting as 10th-birthday presents to a 15-year-old. But the popularity of the relatively weak Wii negates that. The stigma of a game being a PS2 game — an old game made for an outmoded console — can now be alleviated by that same game going to the Wii, the very machine on the cutting edge of 2007 gaming. At least that's a theory. A new one. And it makes me think back to March, when Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told me that one of his hopes for the GameCube-compatible Wii is that it would make neglected GameCube games seem relevant again. Now I'm thinking it could do the same for neglected PS2 and Xbox titles.

Since Multiplayer is first and foremost a means for me to talk about interesting games I've played, let me kick off some guesswork by suggesting three PS2 games I enjoyed that I'd like to see get a new chance by being brought to the Wii:

· "Gradius V": Konami's side-scrolling PS2 outer-space shoot-'em-up epitomizes the old-school love of pure gameplay that the Wii has seemingly reignited. The absurd amount of aliens and space-stations that can be shot with a dazzling array of blue laser attacks made this the most frenzied game I played on PS2 and one still beautiful enough for today. There's little need for a motion-control tweak. A straight port would do.

· "Bully": An early play-test I got with EA's Wii version of the "The Godfather" proved to me that the complex controls needed to navigate an open-world game could be mapped to a Wii remote and nunchuck. "Bully" sold decently but was a bit lost in last fall's new-console hype. A port to the Wii would give the T-rated romp through a rough boarding school a second chance.

· "Okami": This critical darling about a wolf's fight against demons plaguing medieval Japan reminded some of "Zelda." I thought it was good for other reasons. It didn't sell well at all, and the development studio behind it was shut down by parent company Capcom. The game's main combat gimmick — an ability to pause a fight and paint patterned attacks with a giant virtual brush — might be too complex for Wii remote gestures. But controls rigged to a wireless-connected DS might do the trick.

Game companies don't typically offer reruns of recent games. They stick to brand-new stuff and the old classics. But the Wii has already broken several industry conventions. Why can't it crack another? Rockstar is betting that a game made for a last-gen machine can find a welcoming audience on the newest console on the market. Could the rest of us get used to that idea as well?

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Real Life As A Video Game

Beware: 'Crackdown' can lead to hallucinations.

02.06.07

I stepped out my front door on Sunday afternoon and forgot I wasn't in a video game. I stood on the steps of my brownstone in Brooklyn, New York, looked across the street, saw a three-story building and thought: I could reach that in one jump.

I had just been playing "Crackdown" on the Xbox 360 for a couple of hours. Maybe it was even a few. It was definitely long enough for the sound effects to keep buzzing in my ears even after I switched off my Xbox 360. Serious gamers know the deal: You shut the game down but you still hear it, you still see it, you still think about it. The standout "Crackdown" gimmick lets you jump the main character, a super-cop, from a standstill to a two-story rooftop in a single leap. With a little more effort, you can pump up the hero and he can span an intersection in one step and play hopscotch with the tops of five consecutive skyscrapers.

When you play the game, you get attuned to spotting windowsills, air conditioners, billboards and anything else that might provide a handhold at the crest of a running leap. You can climb a tower in a few hops. How'd I feel doing that? To quote Denzel Washington in "Training Day": "King Kong ain't got nothing on me."

When you start looking at a virtual world this way, it's hard to turn the antenna off. Out on my stoop, I didn't see my normal Brooklyn neighborhood. I saw "Crackdown" jumping opportunities. I could visualize a leap over the basketball court, onto the firehouse, over and across Dean Street, down a row of apartment buildings, up a few ledges and onto the top of Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower.

I could see myself making the jump the same way a baseball player might see himself hit a home run. He's been in the batter's box before. He knows what it looks like. And he can visualize what it could look like again. I'd just been watching a behind-the-back camera view of a man leaping atop buildings. I could see it happening on my street. I could see the ground dropping away, the cars getting smaller, the buildings getting closer and the horizon opening up. The only problem is I can't really jump like the guy in "Crackdown."

The stellar tech and games reporter Clive Thompson once wrote about this. Sadly, not only can I not jump as high as the "Crackdown" guy but I can't Google as well as he probably could. I can't find Thompson's article. But I remember it. He was playing racing games — aggressively — and then having a little time adjusting when he'd jump into the driver's seat and get on a real road. I don't remember how long he said his gaming senses would intrude on his real senses. I know that my "Crackdown" hallucinations only lasted a few minutes.

This kind of thing makes you think. Some people believe violent games spark violence, that games teach the behaviors they simulate. Others say that's nonsense. In my experience with "Crackdown" and other games I've binged in, I can confidently say that games quite literally — if briefly — changed the way I looked at the world. Buildings became springboards. Please don't tell my insurance company, but in the past, real-life cars have looked like the tempting targets from "Burnout." I never jumped a building. I never smashed another car. I never even ate a row of yellow dots. But sometimes the world looked like it would let me. I would if I could.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Hitting A Wall

When enough's enough, our gaming expert bails out. What do you do?

02.05.07

I can't name the game I was loving/hating this weekend. I'm under embargo, and online comments about the game can't appear for another several days.

In a way, it doesn't matter. My hate steamed forth only after I had had hours of fun. So the game was good. Then it just got too hard, smacking me into a brick wall of difficulty, crashing my progress, jamming my momentum and leaving me perplexed.

When a game is good enough for its first several hours to keep you charging through, but then wallops you with an impassable hard part a quarter of a day in, is it worth getting? Or is it an avoidable waste of time that will never satisfy you with a sense of closure? Is it a bad game just because the going gets absurdly tough? How about a more basic question, one that defines many players' tastes: How much of a challenge do you ever want your games to be?

I can name several games that stunted my fun with a vengeance. I was breezing through the GameCube role-playing game "Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door" in fall 2004. I was clearing dungeons, beating bosses, leveling up, nearing the end of the game without more than a handful of Game Over screens, and then I hit it. I fought some creature who I think is the final boss enemy of the game. I died. I tried again. Died. Retried. Again and again. RPGs are games of statistics, and after thinking about the math a bit, I realized I'd never beat this creature — not without backtracking through a significant portion of the game. I couldn't be bothered. Bitterly, I bailed out.

The same thing happened when I played "Final Fantasy X" a couple of years earlier. I breezed for hours. I hit a wall near the probable end. I gave up in frustration. A more recent offender was 2005's "Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories" on the PSP. One friend quit on a mission early in the game that involved raiding a boat full of thugs packing powerful machine guns. That one almost broke me too. I pushed on, only to hit my own wall a couple of missions later. The GameCube version of "F-Zero" includes a race set on a course full of 90-degree turns and expert opponents. I'll never beat it. I'll never see the rest of the game.

My complaint is partially one of pacing. With good pacing, a brick wall is almost forgivable. "Yoshi's Island DS" concludes with some of the most difficult levels I've played in a couple of years, and a first-time clearing of the game unlocks bonus areas that are even more trying. But the game introduces those challenges at the end of a long, steady incline in difficulty. The game's earliest levels are a cinch. Its middle levels present a mild challenge. Far in advance I could see that the game makers were paving my barefoot path with wood chips, then hot coals, then broken glass. I could tell what I was getting into. The unnamed game above offered no such hints. Neither did "Paper Mario" or "Final Fantasy."

In general, I don't like my games to be hard. But that's me talking, someone who gets his games mailed to him from game publishers and doesn't have to worry that breezing through a title has just wasted my $60 and left me with nothing else to play. Back when I was a single-console owner and a paying customer, I certainly wanted the games I bought to last. I'm sure I had a better appreciation for a good challenge back then. Still, I've encountered too many parts of too many games that just felt punishing.

The reason some difficulty-oriented games persist is because it's all relative. A mountainous challenge that blocked me could be an easily traversed molehill for another player. Nevertheless, I doubt my frustrations are unique. In fact, I know they're not. Many gamers I know have hit the walls — just not all in the same games.

Are you someone who thinks hours of effort should guarantee a player a chance to see a game's end? Is there actually an argument for late-game brick walls? I've hit enough that someone must think there is. I'd love to hear it. Otherwise, I'm not compelled. When the going gets too tough, I think I'll quit.

— 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.

Multiplayer: One Shelf To Hold Them All
Storing games isn't as easy as you might think.

02.02.07

The back of the shelf is for keepers. The front of the shelf is for games I still need to try and ones that might someday be keepers only if I ruthlessly evict a game from the back.

The shelf I'm talking about is about 2 feet wide, 1 foot deep. It's in my apartment and holds my games. And if you remember science class — in which you're taught that solids hold their own shape, liquids conform to the shape of a container and gases expand to fill a container — then you should know that the perfect 21st century gaming collection, no matter what, will fit 27 inches x 12 inches.

Because of this, I undertake a fierce review of my personal collection every few months. I force myself to chuck old favorites because of a bizarre credence I put in the wisdom of some furniture maker who probably designed my shelf to hold Judy Blume or Tolstoy volumes instead.

For the last four years, I've stashed my personal collection of games on a single wooden shelf, telling myself all the while that only the games I consider true keepers should and will be able to fit. Until recently, the collection ran just across the back of the shelf, nice and neat, lined up like posts in a fence. I kept some PS2 favorites like "Rez" and "Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal"; the Xbox's "Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic"; and the GameCube's "Zelda"s, "Metroid"s and "Pikmin 2."

Things were going nicely and games were fitting well. I even had room for games I thought were more important than fun. For example, I held onto the GameCube's "Killer 7," which I beat, didn't overly enjoy but thought had an art style worth giving another look someday. I held onto the Xbox's "Yourself Fitness" so I'd always have a point of reference for unconventional fitness programs designed for game consoles. I even kept a Japanese GameCube game I've since purchased — and shelved — because I think it has the best box art of all time. (Don't believe me? See the artwork right here.)

All was going well — and the decisions of which games to boot weren't that hard — until about two years ago, when the DS came out and started clogging up the right side of the shelf. The Xbox 360 forced me to go two rows deep. The PSP, the Wii and the PS3 pushed things more. Today I have 22 American GameCube games, 21 PS2 games, three Xbox games, eight 360 games, 37 DS games, three PS3 games, eight Wii games and 14 PSP titles bursting on the shelf. (My few Nintendo 64 and older games are boxed up elsewhere.) The DS stack is in store for some serious pruning, as it's stuffed with curiosities that I've barely tried yet.

During my latest review of my collection I decided to say goodbye to "Yakuza," a PS2 title that received mixed reviews but high compliments from some folks whose opinions I trust. I played it a bunch and shelved it for a later return. But now the rules of shelf dictate that with no room left for any future games, I must can an older one. Out the game goes. I've decided to jettison "Just Cause," which I wrote about earlier this week as well.

Every time I try to thin my collection, I run the risk of losing a game I will someday want again. This would have been a bigger fear back in my college days, when I didn't have the money to make up for such mistakes. I traded in my Super Nintendo and most of my games for that system to get the N64. These days I could probably get "Just Cause" back if I really, really need to play it. So I can afford to be heartlessly discriminating. And I can chase the dream: one shelf. One row of games. One set of classics. No room for half-favorites. Everything else must go.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Which Piñata Should Die?
Despite appearances, 'Viva Piñata' is much more than a cutesy kids' game.

02.01.07

I think I'm one of the people who gets it. I'm one of those, mocked by many, who likes the Xbox 360's main kid-friendly game, "Viva Piñata." And I'm one of the people struggling to explain it to others. My attempt: "Pokémon" meets "Sophie's Choice" meets "The Sims."

Serious, hard-core gamers aren't supposed to care about "Piñata." Microsoft told me so. Last fall the company brought a two-tent, two-day promotional circus to town. Not until I got to my appointment did I discover that I'd opted only for the "naughty" day, when games such as "Gears of War," "Call of Duty 3" and "Crackdown" were being showcased. Apparently there was a whole other event for the "nice" games, of which "Viva Piñata" was one. So thanks to the cleverness of Microsoft's PR team, I missed the game. I also missed a shot at playing it at E3 when I had to cancel an afternoon of Xbox 360 appointments because of crushing computer problems (see "Multiplayer: The Year's Darkest Moments Of Video Game Reporting").

That left "Viva Piñata" as one of the very few games I never even saw being played until it was released and I popped it into my 360. Even then, I didn't get to the November-released game until last week.
But it's a good thing I didn't let this game slip through the cracks. First of all, it's one of the naughtiest nice games I've played. Sure, it's basically a gardening simulator: You clear a plot of land and plant grass and fruit trees, piñata-style animals buzz and scamper in, you build houses for the animals and then keep tweaking everything to get new piñata to show up. All of this happens in a world ruthlessly ordered by the game's food chain. Resign yourself to the fact that your Mousemallows will get eaten by your Syrupents. And your Syrupents are going to get pounced by any Macaraccoons.

See, some games do cute. "Viva Piñata" does cute eating cute. Because you are the gardener, you could prevent the viciousness of the natural order. You could fence your Mousemallows to safety. You could shoo the Syrupents away. But you do want the Macaraccoons to show up, don't you? You do want to be a good gamer and collect them all.

Who will live and who will die — it's not a question that hits hard in many video games, and certainly not one that I judged by its cover simply to be a bright, colorful, graphically impressive kids' game. But I've been taken in. And I'm not the only one. Even the paragon of Xbox 360 machismo, the chainsaw-gun game designer Cliff Bleszinski himself — who was stationed with his game "Gears of War" at that "naughty" event, naturally — has confessed a weakness for the game. On his CliffyB.com blog he recently wrote about the peer pressure he's under to give up this so-called cutesy game: "I can't deal with the judgement at work," he wrote. "Co-workers who are busy coding exploding heads walk by in the hall and go, 'So how's Pinata treating you there buddy?' If only they knew how upsetting this day-glow world is they'd understand how hardcore I think I am."

I think he should keep at it. "Viva Piñata" isn't really a nice game. It's just misunderstood.

— Stephen Totilo

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:

The Stock Report:
» Number of games at MTV HQ: 239
» Last three games to arrive: "Lunar Knights" (Nintendo DS), "Diddy Kong Racing DS" (Nintendo DS), "MVP 07: NCAA Baseball" (PS2)
» Last system to arrive: PS3
» Last swag to arrive: Pack of Big Red gum, bag of Cheetos and a half-gallon "Gorilla Gulp" plastic cup (apparently all to support a junk-food-at-the-racetrack theme for Nintendo's "Diddy Kong Racing DS")

Multiplayer: Who Do You Want To Be?
In the gaming world, our expert typically opts to be himself.

01.31.07

In the video game worlds where I can theoretically be anyone I want to be and do anything I could ever dream of doing, I usually decide to just be me. Who's with me?

I'm sure it says something about me that, when a game gives me the option, I make my character a brown-haired white guy, kind of short, skinny — like I am in real life. I did that when I made a Stephen Mii on the Nintendo Wii. I could have created just about any alter ego for myself. People have sent me Miis with upside-down heads. People sent me the Ramones and Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz. But I wanted my Mii to look like me.

My "Second Life" avatar looks more or less like me. When I create a character in "Fight Night" boxing, he fits my profile (with a better physique, of course). During the few hours I've played "World of Warcraft," I've opted to play as a male character — albeit a bull-like Tauren druid. I could have played as a woman. A couple of years ago I even found out from "WoW" demographics expert Nick Yee that more than half of the female characters in that game were played by guys (see "Gender-Bending Online Gamers Bending Rules In 'Warcraft' "). But I was never tempted to experiment.

There's a whole genre devoted to role-playing games. Taking those words at face value, those games would seem to be inviting players to put on some new clothes, try some new tasks. I can meet those games halfway. I'll gladly take a try at role-playing as a dragon hunter or a Star Wars Jedi. I've just never taken the option to be a girl. I know some guys will play a game as a hot female character because they prefer to look at (dare I also say control?) an attractive woman for 25 hours. They'd rather be stuck with her than some beefy guy. That hasn't compelled me either.

I've also never chosen to be black. It's not that I wasn't happy to play through "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" or spend the last few days messing with the new "Crackdown," whose heroes are both men of color. I'm just always playing as close to me as I can. When I played "Fable" on the Xbox, I don't remember taking advantage of the option to interrupt my mass-marrying of townswomen to hook up with a guy.

If ever there's been a safe forum to try being someone else, it's video games. So what makes me so conservative? I'm not sure. In offline gaming worlds, it never seemed like the consequences of being someone other than me would be very interesting. It's not like being black or Latino in a game that offers a choice of skin tones would have led me to experience different game-life experiences — discrimination or different friendships, for example. It's not like hooking up with a guy in "Fable" changes the adventure of that game. So maybe the lack of consequences is what keeps me uncompelled.

In online worlds I could be somebody else and maybe even trick people into thinking I am what my character appears to be. I've just never been moved to try it. Maybe I enjoy being more like myself because it helps ground the game. It provides a dose of something I can relate to in otherwise otherworldly experiences.

Maybe I should dabble. What could it hurt? When you play, who do you want to be?

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: The Big Tease
Some carrots are worth chasing — but others just aren't.

01.30.07

I like to be led on. I like chasing the carrot at the end of the stick.

I pride myself on being the guy who actually finishes games (see "Multiplayer: How Many Games Did You Finish This Year?"). But as for the games I've embarked on lately, I mostly don't expect to finish them. I've started "Lost Planet," "Ninety-Nine Nights," "Just Cause" and a handful of others, not expecting to get hooked. I just wanted to sample them — fight aliens in the snow, sword-slash 50 enemies at once or parachute onto a helicopter, as those games allowed me to do — and didn't think they would win me over for a long-term commitment. And they didn't, though it's not like they couldn't have. Any game, with the proper tease, can keep me going.

So what do those games lack? Allow me to describe an early moment of the 2003 Ubisoft game "Beyond Good & Evil." The player is shown early on that the lead character, Jade, is a photographer. She'll have to fight aliens to progress in the game, but at heart, she likes snapping pictures. When you first survey the fantastic future city Jade inhabits, you notice that little onscreen overlays label every little thing — particularly all the animals scurrying around. You might also look up at the stars and notice that they get labels too. I initially found that to be a bit odd. Who cares which stars are up there? Then Jade gets a hovercraft and her first stop winds up being at a parts shop.

The shop has several rooms, each with a couple of display cases housing hovercraft upgrades. While at first you don't have the money to buy most of the upgrades, it's clear that you'll eventually have the funds. And you just know that these upgrades will help Jade save the city. That's how video games work. Here's the hook: As you explore the hovercraft equipment store, you may notice a room all the way in the back. It has a really big display case and a really big, expensive item on it: a booster jet for travel into outer space. That's when you realize the reason they labeled those stars: Once you near the end of the game, you'll go to them. Now that is the kind of tease that will make me play to the end.

Another compelling early-game tease: At the end of the first chapter of "Gears of War," a beastly enemy leader does something so heinous to one of hero Marcus Fenix's friends that I just needed to play to what I knew would be Fenix's game-concluding revenge. The "Metroid Prime" games both gave me cool-enough abilities right at the start, then took them away, then brought me to places I knew I'd have a great time exploring if and when I recovered my lost techniques. That kept me going.

Some games don't offer a game-opening tease. Some provide a weak one. "Just Cause" started me in a South American jungle with a mission to overthrow the local government but didn't give me a morsel that made me want to finish the meal and enjoy a just dessert. There's fun in the game, but I don't feel like I've got to get to the end. "Lost Planet" offered a tease: A lumbering monster in the prologue seemingly kills the player/hero's dad, an event that clearly points toward game-concluding revenge. I just didn't think that big monster who crushed Dad would be fun to fight later. Plus I didn't really think the dad was dead. So I don't plan to play to the game's conclusion.

Like game endings, early-game teases don't get talked about much in game reviews and on message boards. I'm not sure why. It's an age-old acting question: What's my motivation? As gamers, we're players. We're actors following a script full of action. Shouldn't we be asking the same?

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Hawaii Could Use More People
Our gaming expert finally finds a racing game he likes — but can he compete?

01.29.2007

Virtual Hawaii needs more people, though I'd prefer they not be the kind of people who drive Lamborghinis.

Over the weekend, I tried "Test Drive: Unlimited" on my Xbox 360. The game was released in September from developer Eden Studios and publisher Atari. One racing game blurs into another, but "Test Drive" stands out with two novel features. Instead of race tracks, the game's driving surface is the full road map of the island of Oahu. Anyone playing the game on an Xbox Live-connected 360 will see other players' cars driving the roads, open to challenges, as if the game were a "World of Warcraft"-style massively multiplayer game.

I'd first heard about these ideas about a year ago. I was curious but skeptical. Atari hasn't been a reliably high-quality publisher in a while. More importantly, I'm not much of a racing-game fan, never having become obsessed with the several versions of the very popular "Super Mario Kart," "Gran Turismo," "Project Gotham Racing" or "Need for Speed" series. The short list of racing games that hooked me consists entirely of "F-Zero 64," "F-Zero GX," "Burnout 3: Takedown," "Wave Race 64," "Excitebike 64" and — if they even count — "1080 Snowboarding" and "SSX 3." Note that only one of the games I liked even involves normal cars. "Test Drive" wasn't a likely favorite.

What doesn't hook me about a racing game, clearly, is realism. The trend these days is toward licensed cars and an obsessive attention to car customization: Pick the shocks, the spoiler, the tread of the tire, and — I'm making an educated guess here — whether fuzzy dice will dangle from the rear-view mirror. So when I started "Test Drive" on Sunday, I figured I'd drive around this MapQuest-accurate virtual Oahu, appreciate the technical feat and log right back out. My stay turned out to be short, but not because of that.

What I discovered is that I like a racing game set on real roads. I've been to Oahu twice, once as a kid and once for an overnight stay before visiting my brother on an aircraft carrier. I didn't drive either time. Nevertheless, when I steered through them with a game controller, the roads of the island felt familiar. They're laid out like normal roads, with plenty of intersections and highways, stop signs and stoplights. The suburban side roads and the city avenues all rang bells. The road out of the rental lot near the airport feels like every other road out of a rental lot that I've been on. The only difference was that in "Test Drive" I could scream down these roads at top speed with a Hawaii horizon outside my windshield. That's a kind of near-fantasy I can relate to. The roads matter to me, not the cars.

For all my joy of driving, I didn't play "Test Drive" for long. The "Test Drive" online gimmick let me drive past other players and race anyone else using the game at the same time I was. It's a great concept, only at a moment when lots of people are playing. But the prime moment for "Test Drive" may have come and gone. On Sunday, there weren't many other players driving around virtual Oahu. I tried competing against one of the few, and he smoked me with his top-line Lamborghini. I found another race and got dusted by five other players who I think were speaking German. I futilely tried finding other cars in my class, other players of my skill. No one else was on the road. I wanted to stick around; I wanted to get better. I liked the whole concept, but I knew lingering would result in continued humiliation. For my sake I logged out.

Better late than never? I discovered a game on Sunday I should have played three months ago. Now I know the kind of racing game I could like, but I don't have a Lamborghini. I can't hang. So I give up. Maybe there'll be a sequel and I'll catch on then.

— 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.

Multiplayer: Which Console Should I Buy?
How does our gaming expert answer his most frequently asked question? By dodging it.

01.26.07

Before you read the rest of today's entry, please take another look at the photo of the man to the right. Do you know him? As detailed yesterday, the mysterious Satoshi is part of a worldwide puzzle that gamers are trying to solve. See the Thursday entry for more details.

Earlier this week, I wrote about some of the gaming questions people ask me the most. Of all the common queries, the most popular is "Which console is the best?" Translation: "Which console is the best?" or "Did I screw up and buy the wrong machine?" I take people's few hundred dollars seriously, and I certainly don't want to talk someone into spending money on a possible dust-collector.

In October I was interviewed for Spike TV's "Game Head" show, and the host wanted me to say which console I recommend to people torn between the high-end Xbox 360 and PS3. I said what I've told many people asking that question: Get a PS2. This did not fly. I was not cooperating.

I wouldn't name the PS3 or 360 to Spike because neither system is a guaranteed wise long-term investment. Right now, any of the three new consoles could soar or sputter, end up hosting the best game of the next four years or end up not. It's cliché because it is true that games, not systems, are what ultimately matter. "Grand Theft Auto III," "Final Fantasy X" and, later, "Guitar Hero" made the PS2. "Halo" was the main reason to own an Xbox. The adventures of Mario, Zelda and whatever else Nintendo's designers dreamed up justified having a GameCube. With the exception of "Halo" none of the major must-owns for those consoles came out in their machine's first year. That's why I don't feel comfortable telling people to risk the cost of any $250-$600 device if they're not confident about them on their own.

I also don't feel comfortable making a suggestion for fear of leaving a better machine out. Each console-maker has a talented roster of developers committed exclusively to their machine. Nintendo has their legendary Japanese teams along with relatively recent additions of their "Metroid Prime" studio Retro. Sony spent the last several years buying or allying with enough studios that they now boast the exclusive services of teams behind "Gran Turismo," "SOCOM," "Killzone," "Shadow of the Colossus," "God of War," plus a full run of sports games. Microsoft owns studios responsible for "Halo" and "Perfect Dark" and last year purchased the group run by hall of fame designer Peter Molyneux. These are just the studios these companies own, to say nothing of the many studios they work with on exclusives year after year. So could I rightly recommend any of these machines not to buy? There's so much a gamer could miss.

During the previous generation of consoles, it was at least safe to dismiss GameCube for those gamers interested in online play or a wide variety of sports and racing games. It also didn't have "Grand Theft Auto." This time around, Nintendo's machine once again is an odd one out. It lacks the graphical power of the other two devices and isn't likely to get as many of the grittier games made for the high-end consoles that are marketed to older gamers. But this time what makes Nintendo the odd one out — the motion-control remote; the family-friendly stuff like Miis and approachable mini-game compilations — are actually winning widespread praise.

So in lieu of knowing how to tell people to spend their money, I fall back to the PS2. It's half the price of the cheapest new console and has hundreds of modern classics at around $20 a pop. The PS3 can play all the PS2 games, for sure, but I just don't want to bet on any of these new horses in the race just yet — not with someone else's money.

So how do I answer the most frequently asked question people throw at me? I admit it: I dodge.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Have You Seen This Man?
Surprise call from top 'Perplex City' gamer gets Multiplayer in on the action.

01.25.07

Someday the world's best "Halo" gamer will call me out of the blue. Someday I'll get a surprise call from the best "Pokemon" player on the planet. Well, this morning, at around 10 a.m. New York time, I got a call from Marc McKinley.

I didn't know it was Marc McKinley at first because he didn't say his name. Even if he did, I wouldn't have understood the significance because I didn't know how important Marc McKinley is. All I heard at the start of this call was a man with a British accent asking me — imploring me — to tell him where a photo attached to a gaming story we published nine months ago was taken.

Who was this guy? What was so urgent about an old picture? The article he was asking about was published in April. I had written about Alternate Reality Games, an "Amazing Race"-style of puzzle and scavenger hunt activity that usually sends its players scurrying after clues embedded in Web sites, mysterious phone calls or even skywriting (see "Want To Live With Neo? Alternate Reality Games Might Be Your White Rabbit"). My article focused on "Perplex City," a game that launches many of its puzzles through a series of trading cards published by a company called Mind Candy. The story line of the game involves a city from another dimension and a cube buried in our real world. The first players to unearth the cube will win $200,000. I'd spoken to Mind Candy CEO Michael Smith about it last winter for my story. When we ran the story, we included a photo of Smith.

McKinley was trying to crack a new clue, possibly involving a statue and a mysterious passage about "a quadruped" and "its middle leg held proudly forward." How could I help? Smith's photo was taken in front of a statue. McKinley thought that statue might be the clue.

Around this time, I finally got McKinley to tell me his name and explain what in the world was going on. He was calling over the Internet phone service Skype from London. Was he a "Perplex City" player? Yes. The players are ranked at PerplexCity.com based on how many puzzles they solve correctly. Was he a particularly skilled player? He chuckled, "I'm the top guy."

At that moment I realized that I might be part of the game, and in the next moment I decided that was awesome. Michael Smith had picked the location for our shoot (which we also filmed for MTV broadcast). He had suggested Central Park, and he had specified the "Alice in Wonderland" statue. Smith told me the cube had already been buried. Had we been standing on it? I told McKinley all this, but added that I couldn't remember any middle-legged quadrupeds.

McKinley took all this in. I was worried I'd disappointed him, though by now I suspect he has already found someone to start digging up the park. He asked if we could talk about one more thing. Sure. He told me to go to the Web site FindSatoshi.com. The site was devoted to another "Perplex City" mystery: the identity of a Japanese man pictured on one of the game's trading cards. (The picture appears at the top right of this page, in case you think you know him.)

McKinley told me that, through theory of "six degrees of separation," the players of "Perplex City" were supposed to track this very real but anonymous guy down. He didn't have the cube, but he was said to have a clue. Players were supposed to find him and ask him — nicely. "We're not allowed to kidnap him or anything," McKinley said. Some of the game's players, many of whom team up on puzzles in person and over message boards, had identified the place the photo was shot: Kayserberg, France. Now they just needed to know who this guy is. If you know, McKinley and the gamers at Perplexorum.com will surely be grateful. You can find McKinley there under the username Mac Monkey.

To do my part to help someone else win $200,000, I've written this entry and posted Satoshi's photo. Never before has a top gamer called me for help with his game. Thank you, Marc McKinley. Now someone go help this guy. He sounds eager. And maybe desperate. He ended the call with, "We're getting fairly close to the end of the game. If you find anything, can you let me know?"

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Please Trim The Fat
Do games have to go 50-plus hours? Multiplayer says no.

01.24.07

I'm sick of treasure chests and eight-headed snakes. But then again, sometimes I worry I've lost perspective.

Because I cover them for a living, I get all my video games for free. And because I get my games for free, I play a lot of them — or at least try to. A stack of games builds up in my office and in my home. These are the games I need to get to. All that stands between me and them is the Game I'm Playing Now. Often, even if I'm having fun, I want that Game to be over so I can get to the next one.

I believe in finishing a good single-player game. I root for the day when more games will compel their players to get to the end. But when you play games the way I do and are fortunate enough to have access to so much, you discover how padded most of these things really are. Case in point: "Okami." This PS2 title made many Game of the Year 2006 shortlists and kept me engaged for the 52 hours it took to reach the end. But we're talking 52 hours. With "Gears of War," "Final Fantasy XII" and a pile of other promising games in my queue, I could have stood for, maybe, a 42-hour version of "Okami."

I think the designers could have hacked 10 hours out of the game easily without making the game worse. I even think the game could have been better. For instance, there's a character named Orochi who the player must fight. Orochi is an eight-headed dragon. Killing each head requires a couple of carefully, patiently timed strikes, then all the heads come back to life and have to be slain again. That kills Orochi ... for a little while. Later in the game you fight Orochi a second time. And then a third. That's three fights against eight heads that need to each be knocked out twice each time. Overkill?

The "Okami" designers also littered their game with treasure chests. These chests hold the opposite of treasure. Each contains one of a few dozen unessential items that you can't do anything with except sell to merchants for yen. You then use that yen to buy weapons or power-ups that you don't actually need to get through the game. The non-gamer might suggest not wasting time opening the hundreds of chests. If you're a gamer, however, you've been trained to leave no door unopened, no townsperson unspoken to and no treasure chest sealed shut. The designers compel you to do it, and you do, even though you know you're wasting your time.

Why don't designers jettison these time-fillers? That's something I'll have to investigate. For now, let's appreciate some svelte games.

In 2005, I played and greatly enjoyed the PS2 game "Shadow of the Colossus." There were only 16 enemies to fight in that game and barely a treasure chest or door to waste the player's time. The game was about climbing and slaying giants. Other than having to spend time finding them, that's all you had to do. Perfect. Now that I've gone back to "Gears of War," I'm reminded how the designers made every moment count. Every firefight is well-staged and distinct from the one before it. There were no treasure chests, no recycled boss battles (not yet — will I eat my words?). From what I hear, I'll wrap up the game's campaign in a handful more hours. I couldn't be happier.

On Monday I received a PS2 RPG called "Rogue Galaxy" in the mail. I like the developer and will try the game. I checked a review on GameSpy.com that gave "Rogue Galaxy's greatest triumph, the brightest gleam in its eye, is that at 60 hours of play I've got another 60 I could easily pour in." That triumph might spell my defeat. Some may consider it giving gamers their money's worth. I consider it something else.

I've played hundreds of video games. In my opinion, there's not one that exceeded 10 hours that couldn't have been shorter. Trim the fat, please.

— Stephen Totilo

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:

The Stock Report:
» Number of games at MTV HQ: 230
» Last three games to arrive: "World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade" (PC, collector's edition), "Hotel Dusk: Room 215" (Nintendo DS), "Rogue Galaxy" (PS2)
» Last system to arrive: PS3
» Last swag to arrive: NVIDIA e-GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card (part of the press kit for Microsoft's New York Windows Vista gaming showcase. Amazon price of graphics card: $649.99)

Multiplayer: Frequently Answered Questions
Our gaming expert has the dirt on 'Grand Theft Auto,' Mario and more.

01.23.07

I'd be happy to speculate about the future of "Phoenix Wright" and happy to argue that "Jam With the Band" is the best rhythm game you've never heard of. But when most people want to talk to me about games, they don't ask to hear about the even halfway-obscure stuff.

So instead, I'll address the stuff that most people ask me about: the Frequently Answered Questions.

When's the next "Grand Theft Auto" coming out?

I get this a lot. People hear that I cover games for a living, and sure enough, this comes up. Since May of last year, the date that's been penciled in has been October 17 for Xbox 360 and PS3. The game is code-named "Grand Theft Auto IV," a clear sign that despite the two PS2 games and two PSP games since "GTA III," the next game is the true next step up. The developers at Rockstar are great at keeping secrets, so there's been no peep about whether "GTA IV" will expand geographically from the city-based approach of the first two PS2 games to the two-state adventure of "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas." Nor are they hinting at who the main character might be, though I'm hoping they'll surprise and go with a woman. What has been announced — and what MTV News revealed last year — is that "GTA IV" will use the graphics engine first seen in "Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis" (see "The First Rule Of Ping-Pong Club: Talk About Rockstar's Table Tennis Game"). Microsoft has confused some consumers by announcing that the Xbox 360 version will support exclusive downloadable missions. That doesn't mean "GTA IV" is shipping just for the 360; it's coming out for the PS3 at the same time.

Isn't the new Mario game coming out soon?

People finally get their hands on Nintendo Wiis, and then they turn around and ask me this. Nintendo first showed the codenamed "Super Mario Galaxy" at E3 in May. I played it for 10 minutes. It's still the most enjoyable game I've tried on the system. But just because it was playable back then doesn't mean it's going to be playable in people's houses any time soon. Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime told me in November the next big titles for the Wii this year will be "Metroid Prime 3: Corruption" with "Super Mario Galaxy" following any time before the 2007 year-end holidays (see "Nintendo Exec Predicts Wii Future, Chances Of 'GoldenEye' On Console"). I've told Wii owners and Mario fans to wait.

But there's a catch: Last year, Nintendo announced a GameCube game called "Super Paper Mario." The screenshots depicted a Mario world that could be played as an old-school side-scroller, with bricks to head-butt and turtle shells to kick. Or, if swiveled 90 degrees, the game could be played behind Mario's back. The graphics looked like pop-up-book cutouts, as they did in earlier "Paper Mario" games, but with even more eccentricities, like Mario-themed math problems written throughout the sky. The game hasn't been playable at press events and, while still listed as a GameCube title, has been rumored to be moved to the Wii. Yesterday, the Nintendo fan site CodeNameRevolution.com reported that the next issue of Nintendo Power magazine lists "Super Paper Mario" as an April release for the Wii. The magazine will hit newsstands soon enough, so we can soon see if that report is true.

Which system should I get?

This is the big one. Everyone wants tips on which console to buy. I can spend a whole Multiplayer entry on this, and I will ... later this week.

If you have gaming questions of your own, let me know through our You Tell Us feature below this article.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: The Xbox 360 Rubber-Band Trick
Rigging controller can help you rack up Achievements.

01.22.07

Sometimes I stalk my friends on Xbox Live. It's nothing bad — not really. I just need to be prepared for the sordid things I'm going to find, like one friend's questionable use of a rubber band.

The Xbox 360 allows me to track the gaming habits of my friends: to see when they were last using their online-connected console, what games they last played and which games they've scored Achievements in. I've discovered that one friend who I consider a pretty mellow guy has used his 360 solely to play about a dozen war games. I know one guy hasn't logged on to his 360 in over a month, which is weird since he works in the Xbox division at Microsoft. Last weekend I noticed that my colleague Jason Cipriano at MTV Games was at it again with Electronic Arts' "Superman Returns."

I'd noticed Jason playing "Superman" a week earlier and assumed he was just dabbling. I haven't played it yet, but I hear it's not a very good game, so I was surprised he was back in virtual Metropolis for more. Monday morning (January 22) I shot him an IM to see what was going on. Why was he playing "Superman" on Sunday? Was the game better than the reviews had indicated?

"No," he wrote back. "I wasn't exactly 'playing.' That was a rubber band wrapped around my controller to see how long it would take to get the Fly 10,000 Miles Achievement."

Jason loves Xbox Achievements. Like many of the obsessed Xbox gamers whose progress you can track on sites like Top360Tag.com, he'll play a game just to score the 1,000 Achievement points embedded in it and every other 360 game sold in game stores. He'd been nearing the end of his "Superman Returns" run. He'd rescued all the game's kittens, defeated Metallo and most everything else required. He'd already flown Superman for about 3,000 miles. On Sunday he wanted to get the last 7,000.

He turned on his 360, booted up "Superman," flew the Man of Steel high above Metropolis — clear of any random combat — and wrapped a rubber band around his controller, securing the R-bumper speed-boost button. Then he set the controller down. Superman flew on his own. Jason had plugged the Xbox into his computer monitor, leaving him free to do other things: "Watching TV, making dinner, playing 'Wario Ware.' " But occasionally he'd have to turn his attention back to the fight for truth, justice and the American way. "I had to jiggle the thumb stick every 10-15 minutes to make sure my controller didn't shut off."

Jason was gaming the system, of course. It's unlikely that the definition of "achieve" permits letting a rubber band do something for you. But some might argue that finding a shortcut is the true spirit of being a gamer. Developers surely sanction some of them. How could taking shortcuts be wrong if the developers of "Super Mario Bros." included warp pipes that let players skip levels and Konami let players gun through "Contra" with unlimited ammo?

So when is the spirit of the game truly being violated? When an MMO player uses a credit card to shop for items they don't have time to win within the game? When a player uses a guide to solve a maze in an adventure game? What if they leave on "Sim City" overnight to make extra tax money? One can argue that the puzzles and problems in games were not meant to be overcome this way. But then there's a Japanese man who wins the Coney Island hotdog-eating contest every year but eats the buns separate from the dogs. The officials of that "sport" don't seem to mind.

Five or six hours into this endeavor on Sunday, Jason checked the game and found that he'd made it. Superman had flown the full 10,000 miles — even a few hundred extra. That leaves Jason with just one more Achievement in the game: "Next is lifting 10,000 tons — which is going to be a pain in the ass." He'll do that if his controller can take it. He hasn't checked yet.

And I'm going to keep snooping on Xbox Live. Strange things keep turning up.

— 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.

Multiplayer: A Nintendo Wii Plot Twist
Electronic Arts' titles for Wii are far more impressive than expected.

01.19.07

When Nintendo released the DS in late 2004, Electronic Arts was among the game publishers that pledged support. But the company struggled to produce quality games and released some of the worst-reviewed titles on the system. How could EA do any better with the Wii's wild motion controls?

On Thursday night I went to a loft in midtown-Manhattan, New York, to play some near-final versions of upcoming Electronic Arts games that are scheduled for release by the end of March. What I played on Thursday didn't explain how EA got better when it came to the Wii — it just proved that they did.

I ran out of time and didn't play "Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07" on the Wii, but I tried two others. Say what you will about the nearly year-old open-world "The Godfather: The Game" for PS2 and its subsequent touch-ups for Xbox 360 and PSP, but the Wii version delivers some very clever touches.

To grab someone by the lapels, I had to take the Wii's nunchuck and remote, grab the controllers' triggers, and lunge my hands toward the screen. To slap an opposing mobster (or some poor pork-store owner) I just swatted my hand through the air. To head-butt him, I jerked my hands toward my face. To shove him, I thrust my hands away, releasing the triggers to let him fly. To open a door, I had to twist the remote, like twisting a doorknob. This might all win the Wii an award for Console Next Likely to Be Critiqued for Teaching Violence, but it also proves that Wii controls can be intuitive in a "Godfather" — or a "Grand Theft Auto" — type of setting.

"SSX Blur" for the Wii was even more impressive. The game's designer told me that 2003's "SSX 3" was his favorite game in the snowboarding series, which is fortunate, since it's mine as well. Stripped from "Blur" is the thrash-metal edge of 2005's "SSX on Tour." In its place is a return of the older SSX's techno, blue-and-white-snow, pink-sky vibe. In "Blur," the over-the-top Monster tricks of "On Tour" have been dubbed with their old moniker, Uber. The Wii game's characters are shorter, more cartoonish. They wear headphones that steam musical notes into the sky as the riders rush down the slopes, the soundtrack incorporating more of the score's five layers the better the run gets.

Back to the ideals of "SSX 3," the game lays its 12 courses on one big mountain, offers races, half-pipes, trick challenges, some new snowball-throwing techniques and also maps almost all of its boarders' moves to motion control. My left hand, holding the nunchuck, controlled body movement. Rolling my hand left and right turned the rider in those directions, a lean of the nunchuk's thumbstick adding extra degrees to a turn. To jump the character I flicked the nunchuck, then shot the remote sideways for mid-air spins, and nodded it to do flips. Had I been a quick enough study to max out the Uber meter, I would have been able to pull off the top tricks with zigzags of the remote or even a two-handed move in the shape of a heart.

I hadn't expected EA Wii games to play this well. Curious to hear about even more progress, I asked "SSX" producer Eric Chartrand if his ambitious Wii game might even include support for the Wii system's Mii avatars. If EA is going to go all out with Nintendo's system, then why not? He said Nintendo hasn't even released the tools for third-party developers to put Miis into their games (readers of Tuesday's Multiplayer learned how Nintendo used the technique themselves in "Wario War"). We talked about how the Miis might not fit the graphical style of some games. I suggested that a realistic-looking "Need for Speed" could get around that by fashioning a player's Mii as an ornament hanging from a rearview mirror. He smiled a smile I inferred meant I should retain my day job.

Who am I to push for more? EA has done a lot more than I expected for Nintendo's off-the-wall system. Let's leave it at that for now.

— Stephen Totilo

Once a week (except when we skip one, like last week — sorry!), 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:

The Stock Report:
» Number of games at MTV HQ: 229
» Last three games to arrive: "Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney: Justice for All" (Nintendo DS), "World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade" (PC, collector's edition), "Hotel Dusk: Room 215" (Nintendo DS)
» Last system to arrive: PS3
» Last swag to arrive: First page of "script" for "Hotel Dusk"

Multiplayer: You Get What You Don't Ask For
Gamers might not have been clamoring for game inspired by A-Ha video, but here it is.

01.18.07

As a child, I watched many countdown shows featuring the greatest music videos of all time.

You got your "Thriller." You got that Dire Straits one with the crudely computer-animated repairman. And you had a video for the song "Take on Me" in which members of the Norwegian band A-Ha help woo a woman from our flesh-and-blood world to a land where everyone looks like they were sketched with a pen on white placemats.

I don't remember ever hoping the art style of that video would be used in a video game, and about 20 years have passed without it happening. But next week, Nintendo and developer Cing will finally do it. They've come up with "Hotel Dusk: Room 215," a mystery game for the DS that is billed as an "interactive novel" with lead characters sketched in black-and-white with what appear to be heavy scratchings of a pen. It ships to game stores next week.

I've only given the game a couple of subway rides worth of play time. I'm in the game's first chapter, at a point where I'm still waiting to see who does what rather than solving whodunit. I was interested in "Hotel Dusk" for a while. I'd played developer Cing's previous DS game, "Trace Memory," which was a pleasant enough mystery game that kept me talking to characters and solving little touch-screen-based puzzles for a few hours but failed to unfold a story worth remembering. I heard this new game would sport more of a crime noir approach. Given that January is often a slow month for games, that was enough to get it on my radar. I had mild expectations.

So far, "Hotel Dusk" has been a welcome surprise. It didn't just satisfy an unknown desire for an A-Ha-inspired game, it presents a few other things I didn't realize I wanted. To the best of my knowledge, it becomes just the second game — following Nintendo's successful "Brain Age" — to require the player to hold their clamshell DS sideways. With stylus in hand, you hold this "interactive novel" like you're holding a book. During dialogue scenes, the speakers appear on separate scenes. But when you're just walking around, the touch screen shows a map and the other screen shows a first-person view. You move around by dragging the stylus across the map. This effect allows "Hotel Dusk" another odd classification: sideways first-person-shooter-without-the-shooting.

More interesting things I didn't ask for: When cut-scenes play in "Hotel Dusk," they play out across two screens. Remember that the DS is being held sideways. So the scenes play in widescreen — also known as the aspect ratio of every PSP game. So here's a chance to sort of see what Nintendo might do on a PSP, given the screen space.

"Hotel Dusk" is the first DS game I'm aware of that enables the player to hand-write notes about what they're doing directly into the game. When you see something weird, you tap a notebook icon, the DS becomes a virtual spiral-bound, and you can jot stuff down.

The game's characters are in black-and-white. How many gamers ever asked for that? In one midgame area of "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker" everything and everyone but Link is stripped of color. And a level of "Kingdom Hearts 2" based on the earliest of Mickey Mouse cartoons, "Steamboat Willy," is played in black-and-white. But otherwise, few games have experimented with dropping color. So far, Cing's game is using that technique to graphically compelling effect.

The game is set in the late '70s but seems designed to evoke the kind of film noir, then-she-walked-in drunk detective fiction usually set in the 1950s. I'm not sure why they went with the '70s. In my limited play time, I've already seen one reference to a "dame" and attempts at snappy male-female dialogue like the following:

Attractive dame: "You're not much of a conversationalist, are you?"

Weary ex-cop hero: "No, but I can carry a tune."

Is this what gamers needed? I'm not sure. But we just got the "Zelda" game most "Zelda" fans seemed to want. We just got a faithful expansion to "World of Warcraft." We just got what everyone was asking for. Next week, something less expected gets its shot.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Watching Mii Arm-Wrestle 'Joey Ramone,' 'Condoleezza Rice'
Mario hasn't been star of Nintendo Wii at MTV News offices.

01.17.07

There was a time when Super Mario was Nintendo's biggest star, a time when you could hardly play a game on a GameCube or Game Boy without controlling Mario driving a go-kart, playing tennis, throwing a party or rescuing Princess Peach yet again. But Mario hasn't been the star of the Nintendo Wii at the MTV News offices. No, that star has been me.

On the first day we got a Wii, I created a virtual version of myself, a Mii, and saved it to the system. Since then, co-workers and gaming industry folks alike have added Miis to the system, creating them in the newsroom or sending them over Nintendo's Internet service. I've written about some of the surprise appearances, like the once-mysterious Big Poppa Mii whose creator has since explained how he sent it to me (see "Multiplayer: We Found Big Poppa, And Other Updates").

The Miis have also taken center stage in some games. The launch game "Wii Sports" allows players to use their own Miis as their playable athletes. It's my Mii that has bowled a 66-pin strike, struck several aces in tennis and won a championship boxing belt. Before the Wii was released, Nintendo had already shown off another game full of short games, "Wii Play." It will be released next month, and it also lets players import their Miis into the game. In November, when I asked Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime if some non-Nintendo games would also start using the characters, he said he hadn't seen any examples of it yet (see "Nintendo Exec Predicts Wii Future, Chances Of 'GoldenEye' On Console"). Nevertheless, Nintendo has promised more starring opportunities for Mii are en route.

None of this prepared me for what happened when I started playing the new Wii game "WarioWare: Smooth Moves" last weekend. The game asked me to type in my name and identify my Mii character. I assumed that meant my Mii would show up in some of the games. I did. In one short "Wario" game, I zoomed the Wii remote toward the screen to focus a picture, and the blurry image onscreen came to focus as my Mii face. In another short game, my Mii head appeared on the end of a spring. I had to rock the remote to the side to avoid stuff that was being thrown at Mii. Then came the genuine surprise: As a typical barrage of "Wario Ware" games streamed across the screen, each lasting five seconds at a time, an arm-wrestling competition popped up. One of the arm-wrestlers had his back mostly to the screen. I recognized him. It was me. My opponent looked familiar as well. It was my co-worker Michelle. I stumbled across the game again, and this time I was arm-wrestling Joey Ramone. Both my opponents had been created as Miis on my system: Michelle by Michelle, the punk pioneer by my friend Jason. Later I'd arm-wrestle a slew of other celebrities and pseudo-celebrities.

(Watch Stephen Totilo arm-wrestle Condoleezza Rice, U2's the Edge and others right here.)

I thought when I got this new Nintendo system that I was ready for another round of Mario, Kirby and Samus adventures. Now I'm not so sure. Nintendo, you can keep your stars. I'm enjoying games that star me — and a few of my famous "friends." We can be the game heroes ourselves, thank you.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Digesting The Game Intestine
Online guide details moment-by-moment reactions to games.

01.16.07

Every so often, one's own private world orbits into real life. You say aloud a word you've read hundreds of times to yourself, but the word sounds strange because you've never spoken it before. Or you may have been thinking things about someone but never quite had those thoughts settle with the proper gravity until you spoke them aloud. Or you spend 20 years sinking into video game worlds, caring about obtaining magic swords, tracking rare artifacts, overcoming giant beasts — and not until a moment like I had last weekend do you realize how quietly private those experiences really are.

I was playing "Okami" on the PS2. The Capcom game was made well enough to near the top of 2006 best-of charts but sold poorly enough that shortly after the game was released, word came out that its development team was dissolved. There are lots of things to like about an adventure that pits you as a wolf in a game world animated like an ancient Japanese painting and empowers you with special moves triggered by brushstrokes you wipe across your TV screen. But a point of debatable appeal is that the game lasts more than 40 hours. I've got other games to play, and so I would have been happy for the game to end in half that time, by which point I'd already rescued canine warriors, used magic vines to catch a runaway log, defeated a many-headed monster, helped a potter plant lots of flowers, fed many roosters and tigers, literally drawn the sun into the sky, painted the leaves on dozens of trees and helped a witless swordsman think he's great — among other things.

I knew I had about 20 hours left thanks to a Web site called Game Intestine (GameIntestine.com). I didn't realize I owed them my thanks at first. I'd gone to GameFAQs, as I often do, to see how far I was in the game. There were a few "Okami" guides. The one I picked was authored by the Game Intestine people and claimed the game would take me 44 hours. It didn't just mark off the names of each of the game's chapters — it also indicated how many hours it should take me to finish each one. And there was more: The person writing the guide created a graph indicating, on a scale of one to 10 stars, how fun each of the game's 44 hours is.

I started reading some of the guide. I discovered it was provided by people at Game Intestine. And it was funny, pointed and even thought-provoking regarding details that would otherwise be easy to forget. A monster I would otherwise have forgotten amid the menagerie of beasts I encountered in the "Okami" epic was called out in the guide for its bizarre combination of Christmas and Hannukah-theme designs. An area the game described as a sea garden was critiqued as being more like an undersea garage. The Game Intestine picked on one impressive part that I enjoyed, remarking that it should have been shown to the players as a noninteractive cut scene. I thought the part was good as a playable section.

I've kept up with the guide since then, even backtracking to read descriptions of things I already did in "Okami." The experience is refreshing. I'm able to read the moment-by-moment reactions someone else had to the game. The site's homepage explains the author's intent: "Rather than giving you the basic steps to reach the end of the game, a Game Intestine guide describes what is happening in the plot, who the characters are and what the game looks like. In the same way that the small intestine uses its micro-cilia to extract nuggets of nutrition from that piece of steak you ate, our guides pull out the interesting tidbits you may have missed."

That's one way of putting it. There's more detail in the guide than any one or five-page review could encompass. There's better recall for specifics than any days-later phone conversation with other "Okami" players could drum up. What had been a private virtual world for me is now something I feel like I'm sharing — with a Web site called "Game Intestine," of all things. It makes me wonder how much all of us gamers experience that we never talk about to anyone. What would gaming look like if we all discussed the details, instead of keeping so much in our own private world?

— 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.

Multiplayer: The Life Of A Bad Guy
Our reporter takes time to relax thanks to 'Portable Ops' bad guys.

01.12.07

Throughout the week I've written about some of the odd parts of the PSP's "Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops" that make the game a standout on Sony's system. There's one element that I think sets it apart from other games on any system: You can play most of the game as the bad guys.

As mentioned in this week's other entries, "Portable Ops" allows you to recruit enemy soldiers to aid game hero Snake's mission in a South American military base. Captured soldiers sit idle on your PSP for a few turns and then become eligible to play as controllable characters. While preparing this weeklong series on "Metal Gear," I called a friend who had strongly encouraged me to play weeks ago. I asked him how his recruiting was going. Pretty well, he said. He'd collected about 80 characters to fight on his side. How did he like controlling those various characters? He couldn't say. He'd been playing the game as Snake.

Maybe my friend feels some great loyalty to the grizzled hero of the "Metal Gear" world. Maybe I don't. Since I started recruiting soldiers in "Portable Ops," I've barely played as Snake. I've been playing as the recruits — the newly reformed bad guys. At first I just wanted to see what the other characters could do. One character could tiptoe faster (this is important in a stealth game, mind you). Another could drag unconscious bodies double-time. Some recruited soldiers had special weapons such as shotguns and freeze grenades.

Better than any of that, though, is the fact that most of the remaining enemies in the game won't mess with my recruited bad guys. If you enter a mission full of soldiers dressed in the same uniform as the soldier you choose to control, then you might as well be walking a mailman through a neighborhood with no dogs. No one will bother you. You can't change clothes in the game, so there can still be problems if a lab-coat-wearing technician eyeballs your gruff commando, but these encounters prove to be an exception to the rule — at least in the first half of the game that I've played through.

This system radically distinguishes this "Metal Gear" from the many that have gone before. You don't need to play this game in the shadows, avoiding tripwires, fleeing alarms, and wrestling with or shooting every enemy in arm's or rifle's reach. You can walk in the daylight right next to characters who'd normally try to take you out.

That's not just a radical concept for "Metal Gear." Since the day I first played "Pac-Man" I had to accept a fundamental gaming law: Being a hero brings trouble. I couldn't leave Pac-Man idle, since the ghosts would wipe him out. I couldn't run Mario through the Mushroom Kingdom without getting attacked by Goombas and Koopas. These days I can't swing a vine, explore a temple or walk through a space station without attracting an attack.

And now "Portable Ops" has made me realize how good the bad guys have it. I know what it's like to be one of them now. I guess if you're a Goomba you don't need to worry about other Goombas. They never did attack each other, did they? If you're a "Tomb Raider" jungle cat, your life was fine, except when Ms. Croft showed up. Some game worlds didn't work that way. Playing both sides of the conflict in "Halo 2," for example, confirmed that life as Allied or Covenant in Master Chief's war was a harried existence.

But generally, life as a video game bad guy is good. Those bad guys who mistake me for a friend only to have me knock them out would probably protest. So maybe it's not perfect. But "Portable Ops" presents a rare gaming experience: terrain not fraught with peril. Played the way I'm playing, it's an adventure in which danger finally isn't lurking around every corner, when wits need not constantly be at an end, when it's OK to take your finger off the trigger. Disguised as a bad guy, I still can't afford to act strange. I don't want my soldier getting spotted breaking into locked rooms or stealing secret documents.

My friend who is playing as Snake may be fighting his way through the game one step at a time. But I'm taking it easy. And now I'm eager for something similar: "Goomba: The Game"? There would only be one real enemy in that game. And he can't be everywhere, jumping on all of our heads at once.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Recruiting Soldiers From Thin Air
Using Wi-Fi, our gamer enlists Ant, Sea Anemone and Megamouth Shark for his 'Portable Ops' squad.

01.11.07

On the side of a short building in the middle of New York's Times Square, there's an American flag illuminated in a wall of lights. It's a military recruiting station. On Thursday (January 11), I went there and tried to recruit a virtual soldier.

As I've described over the past couple of Multiplayer entries, the PSP's "Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops" allows players to recruit enemy soldiers to fight alongside the game's hero, Solid Snake. The player can recruit the soldiers by kidnapping them in the actual game, but the PSP's Wi-Fi abilities have been harnessed so gamers can also snatch soldiers out of the real thin air. All you have to do is turn the game on, select "recruit," pick the "access point scan" option, and Sony's little gaming machine will scan for nearby Wi-Fi signals.

Those signals broadcast unique sets of numbers from which the PSP conjures unique, multifaceted "Metal Gear" soldiers. Thanks to the wonders of smart programming, you don't need to be able to log on to a Wi-Fi signal; you just have to be near one. And in most crowded places — and even, as I recently discovered on the streets of suburban Georgia.

I turned the feature on in the MTV News offices last week and wound up pulling down a sergeant named Snail. (For some reason, all of the soldiers I captured except Jonathan have been named after animals for some reason. I've recruited Gorilla. A man named Jaguar fights for me. So do Ant, Sea Anemone and Megamouth Shark.)

The character creation and recruitment is all processed by the PSP. Players need not worry about the numbers the system is crunching. Nevertheless, the "Metal Gear" designers have made a minor game out of the whole affair by requiring the player to repeatedly tap the circle button to "boost" a recruitment beacon while the Wi-Fi data is being reconfigured. Sometimes you get someone. Sometimes all the tapping in the world won't do the trick and the recruitment fails.

When I was outside the Times Square recruitment station, the beacon signal was faint. I tapped furiously. There are security cameras all around that station, which is within pitching distance from the tower where the New Year's ball drops. I trust my behavior was filmed and will be categorized as suspicious. Worse, I was having trouble recruiting anyone. I walked north, and a half-block up from the station I snagged Armadillo. According to his in-game dossier, he's an arms dealer and a gambler.

Recruiting characters with the "Metal Gear" Wi-Fi system has become a minor hobby, to be honest. Between Christmas and New Year's, I traveled to Georgia to visit my girlfriend's family. I managed to make that trip even more useful: I recruited soldiers. In the Atlanta airport, I obtained Deer, an arms dealer and politician. My girlfriend was driving us — slowly — away from her father's house, and from the car I recruited Tasmanian Devil, a physician of exceptional skill.

Back home in New York, I got an elite engineer named Bison. Waiting in the lobby of "Grand Theft Auto" maker Rockstar Games, I landed a captain and spy named Seagull who is defined as a spy and a deliveryman.

I can't say the soldiers I've recruited have been helpful in combat, because I haven't actually used them yet. I haven't played the action part of "Metal Gear" in over a week. I've just been too busy. But I'll keep on recruiting. It's an easy way to play even when I'm not playing, and another compelling example of how "Portable Ops" plays to the PSP's strengths.

Now who can I recruit over by Sway's office?

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Remembering Team Charlie
Can four dead video-game soldiers make a player feel real loss?

01.10.07

Four virtual men fought for me. I dubbed them Team Charlie. They did well. And then they were wiped out, and I can't even remember their names. I feel guilty. Credit the PSP's new "Metal Gear" game.

One of the key features advertised for "Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops" is the ability for the player to recruit enemy soldiers. In most games, the player just shoots the enemy or knocks them out — or in a particularly popular, vicious series of games, has a fat plumber jump on their heads and crush them.

But in "Portable Ops" you can win people to your side. Naturally, this is not done through reasoned debate but with a chokehold delivered by game hero Solid Snake to unsuspecting grunts. Then you drag them back to Snake's truck. According to the game's instruction manual, they are then held as "enemy combatants," a provocative term that the game hasn't done anything with (not in the 14 hours of it that I've played so far). After you play a few more missions and about a half hour has passed, captured soldiers become available to fight on your side.

That's how I captured enough soldiers to assemble Team Charlie. Once you capture soldiers, you assign them tasks like developing new weapons or assembling into squads of four ready for combat. Snake's team is Team Alpha. I put some other guys in teams Alpha and Bravo and then created a quartet I called Team Charlie.

A few days after Christmas, I was browsing through the options list in "Portable Ops" and found a mode called Cyber Survival. I entered it and found my PSP flicking on its WiFi to bring the system online. I discovered I could bring any four guys in my squad with me. I chose Team Charlie. Cyber Survival turned out to be an unusual online combat mode. It didn't involve actually playing anything. According to the rules, I could upload Charlie to a real-life server and my four guys — each characterized by a series of stats specifying strength, stamina, etc. — would battle foursomes uploaded to the server by other players. I couldn't control the battles. I couldn't see them. All I could do was send my team, establish a condition for retreat and then hope for the best.

On Saturday, December 30, I dispatched Team Charlie into Cyber Survival action. I sent them out in the morning, asking them to retreat only if other teams got the better of them three times. In the evening I logged back on to see how they had done. They had not retreated. So I called them back for a report. They had won two battles and captured a trio of enemy soldiers. Mind you, the three captured weren't imaginary characters. They were characters other PSP owners had sent into battle. This was a landmark moment. My game had played itself without me and made progress. The last time that happened is when I left the original "Sim City" on overnight so I could earn enough taxes to build some skyscrapers in the morning.

Proud of Charlie, I sent them online again. I called them back on New Year's Day. They had won five more times and lost just one battle. I was beaming. Now, maybe a smart general would have let them rest. Not I. They were back on the field in no time. Two days later I checked back in. They hadn't retreated. I tried calling them back. That's when I got the report: Team Charlie hadn't retreated, because Team Charlie had been entirely wiped out.

The report of Team Charlie's defeat didn't include their names. I don't remember them myself, and, yes, that bothered me. Sound silly? It's not like I wept. But usually video games don't even hint at the impact of death. Players aren't expected to mourn the enemies they blast. And their own heroes are usually only dead until you select "restart." Only Nintendo's "Fire Emblem" games, which make it nearly impossible to revive fallen allies, have challenged that convention in any way similar to "Portable Ops." I felt responsible for my guys. And I'm the one who should have known better.

The fact that smart use of the PSP's WiFi made four video-game characters feel just a little more like independent actors to me — and therefore more alive — is an achievement. The fact that that made their deaths actually matter to me is a breakthrough. "Portable Ops" did good, even if, as a general, I did not.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: How The PSP Copes With One Less Stick
Many gamers take issue with hand-held device's controls; here's why they don't matter.

01.09.07

When I told a friend that I played several hours of "Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops" on the PSP, he was surprised. "You could deal with those controls?" he asked.

The latest military spy game starring hero Solid Snake has earned stellar reviews. But some people knocked the controls. The problem has been that the PSP's lack of a second analog stick prevents gamers from moving the game's lead character with a left thumb and keeping the camera view of the action behind Snake with the right. That's how the last "Metal Gear Solid" game on the PS2 worked when controlled with a conventional system controller. That's how most action-adventure games worked on that console. But the PSP doesn't have a second stick to compete.

And therein lies the kind of concern the PSP has been knocked with for the better part of a year: Its games don't — can't — do things that its PS2 forebears did. That's been an issue with games brought from console to hand-held. If it's going to look like a PS2 game, shouldn't it play like one? Or if it plays like one, shouldn't it look like one?

Sony just sent me an early copy of the new "Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters" for the PSP. There's a lot to like in that game. It plays and looks like a PS2 version of "Ratchet." But at every turn, I can't help but compare it to what it might look like on the PS2. Wouldn't a PS2 version of this game have more stuff in this spot? Would a PS2 version have this many enemies? Wouldn't the PS2 version play smoother because I could use a second controller analog stick to look?

Here's how I answered my friend: "The controls don't matter." I agreed that the controls for "Metal Gear" on PSP wouldn't work too well in a PS2 game like, say, "Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence." That game had the player sneaking through jungles and swamps, marching forward while looking around for hidden attackers with a constant swivel. But on Monday I cited Sony gaming chief Phil Harrison's promise that more PSP games, "Metal Gear" among them, will play to the system's strengths. And part of that means not playing to a machine's weaknesses.

In "Portable Ops" you don't need that second stick, because if you play it the way I did, you don't need to look over your shoulder. And why's that? Because in the half-dozen "Metal Gear" games before this PSP one, the gamer had to cautiously sneak around, hiding in the shadows. In the PSP game, the gamer can play as any character they meet (and knock unconscious) in the game and stroll around as them without raising the alarm of any other enemy troops. In the PSP game, the player is essentially hiding in plain sight. There's no reason to look around.

That's just one way "Portable Ops" seems tailored to the PSP. And it's subtle. Maybe that wasn't even why the designers chose to let players control enemy characters. But if they stumbled onto it, they made a good fall. It prevents a traditional PSP hang-up from spoiling the game.

The PSP game also tweaks the PS2 "Metal Gear" formula in other smart ways. It doles out its adventure into missions that last just a few minutes, short enough for a quick bus ride or the delay before a movie begins. And then there's how it uses the PSP's portability and Wi-Fi settings. In fact, these bright design ideas sent me driving through the streets of suburban Atlanta last weekend and prowling through New York's Times Square. They made me newly excited every time I stepped in a new state, city or even new room with my PSP in hand. Sound strange? I'll explain this most novel of PSP gaming features on Wednesday.

— Stephen Totilo

Will This Game Save The PSP?
Welcome to PlayStation Portable 'Metal Gear' Misadventures.

01.08.06

Not too long ago, the PlayStation Portable was the hot handheld gaming machine and the Nintendo DS was the one people weren't too sure about. Sometime last year, that line flipped. The Nintendo DS Lite outsold the PSP by the millions in Japan in 2006 and spent the last half of the year beating Sony's portable gaming machine in the U.S. as well.

So last month, when I interviewed Phil Harrison, the head of Worldwide Studios in Sony's PlayStation division, I asked him what was going on with the machine (see "PlayStation Exec Talks Shaky '06, Reveals Plans For New Gaming Feature").

Specifically, I wanted him to address the belief that the kind of portable-gaming experience people want has done a 180 in the last couple of years — or maybe a full 360, which seemed to be Sony's problem. Handheld gaming back in the Game Boy era, during the 1990s and early 2000s, primarily involved quick, short, graphically simple games. The PSP showed up in 2004, offering richer, deeper PlayStation and PlayStation 2 affairs — fleshed-out "Madden" games and eventually a pair of "Grand Theft Auto"s almost as grand as those on the consoles. But then finishing the circle were the DS's bite-size "Nintendogs," "Brain Age" and the first Super Mario game in more than a decade to not even be in 3-D.

Sony pushed 3-D and epic. Nintendo brought back short, flat and simple.

Had Sony built the wrong machine? Did people not really want a portable PlayStation?

Now some people — that would be gaming bloggers, message-board posters and the like — charge Harrison and the rest of the PlayStation executive team with arrogance. Maybe it's because Harrison speaks with a British accent and is taller than just about anyone else in gaming. Also, he and the other team members often talk with exceeding confidence, noting how they've been beating their console competitors for about a decade straight. I've talked to Harrison a few times, and though I am not that tall, I've found him charming and perfectly willing to admit weaknesses where weaknesses exist. So sure, he mentioned that "the business of PSP is very healthy indeed" and said it had plenty to offer (and a better games-to-hardware sales ratio than the DS). But can you call a man arrogant who — despite the existence of two portable "GTA"s and about a dozen Sony-made PSP games like the critically acclaimed "LocoRoco" and "Daxter" made under his watch — replied with the following?

"Our achievement has been to deliver console-quality gaming in the palm of your hand. But that could also be considered a missed opportunity — that we have yet to really deliver PSP games that speak with their own voice and stand for what the machine can do on its own. There are, however, some great indications of that coming through. Have you seen the latest 'Metal Gear Solid' game?"

Thankfully, I was recording my conversation with Harrison, because I couldn't believe he said that. And it sounded so ... humble. That said, my answer to his question was, "Not yet." I'd heard good things about how "Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops" utilized the PSP in new and unusual ways but had yet to try it. Harrison's comments were the nudge. I plunged into "Portable Ops" later last month.

To what extent it proved Harrison right and to what extent it hints that handheld gaming may yet pull a 540 will be the topic of Multiplayer all week. Consider this entry the kickoff to my "Metal Gear" Misadventures on the PSP.

— 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.

Multiplayer: A Call For Lemons — And A Pair Of 'Mortal Kombat's
Gaming's retro greats are popping up on download services — but what about history's lesser-regarded titles?

E.T., come home. Superman, you are needed.

Legend has it that an atrocious 1982 "E.T." video game helped bring down the mighty Atari 2600. Many gamers consider 1999's "Superman" for the Nintendo 64 to be one of the worst games ever made. Just how bad are these games? Wouldn't you like to know?

Maybe you don't care. Or maybe you do, but can't be bothered to get them on eBay or to find an online emulator. Now did you ever hear about the first "Mortal Kombat" that rocked the arcades and was ported to the Sega Genesis in all its gory glory, and then showed up on SNES looking better than it did on the Genesis but with the most extreme content censored? Any interest in comparing those two games?

Imagine a world where you could download old games for just a few dollars and see what the fuss is all about. Now look down. You're already in it. The Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360, in addition to the computer service GameTap, allow gamers to download and play the oldies. Those services as well as the last several years' worth of retro gaming collections (the "Namco Museum"s and "Midway Arcade Treasures" of the world) have given gamers some of the luxury enjoyed by film buffs and music lovers and anyone else who assumes there should be easy access to the great movies and songs — and now games — of old.

But there's a difference. You can buy a DVD of the movie "Showgirls" and enjoy the unintentional humor. You can easily obtain Michael Jackson's very worst and very weirdest albums without much trouble. Whether older works were famous for the right, wrong or just downright odd reasons, you can still see or hear them (for the most part: Notorious comedy flop "Ishtar" is still not out on DVD).

Games aren't like this. Maybe it's unrealistic to expect "E.T." to show up on Xbox Live Arcade or "Superman 64" to appear on the Wii's Virtual Console. Both feature characters whose owners might now want the games back in the spotlight.

And some bean counters might rightly question how big the audience is for gaming's historical oddities. What would someone even pay for "E.T." on Xbox Live Arcade? A dollar? Two? Would it help if the game supported live chat and a spectator mode so one gamer could play it but have his or her performance beamed to other systems, all supported by a voice-chat line so all could engage in some live "Mystery Science Theater"-style mockery?

But that's all putting the game cart before the horse. The first issue here is that gaming as an industry doesn't present many of its historically important games — even its beloved ones — in a context that emphasizes their historical importance. Here's how Nintendo's Virtual Console service describes "Sonic the Hedgehog," a game that helped the Sega Genesis wrestle the SNES to a draw and launched the argument that Mario wasn't cool: "Rocket Sonic, the fastest blue hedgehog on Earth, through hair-raising loop-de-loops and into dizzying dives past bubbling lava, waterfalls and onward, as you gather up Rings to stop Dr. Eggman's (a.k.a. Dr. Robotnik) schemes for world domination!" Is that any reason to download the game?

"Sonic" is famous enough that it doesn't need help, but how about Tecmo's "Solomon's Key," which is also on the Virtual Console? Why doesn't GameTap mention that "Beyond Good & Evil" fans think it's one of the best-made low-sellers of all time and that Peter Jackson liked it so much he asked the game's designer to make a "King Kong"?

When Nintendo announced that Virtual Console would support downloads of the SNES and Genesis games, I assumed a "Mortal Kombat" dual-download would be a no-brainer. Instead it's nowhere in sight.

Right now the gaming download services are just for gaming's greats, almost all of them presented and marketed as they were the day of their release. For many, and maybe for most, that's enough. But they could be good for so much more.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: When Video Games Actually Are Funny
What aspect of 'Rayman Raving Rabbids' made our correspondent chuckle?

1.04.07

If you Google my name — not that I've ever done that or anything — the first thing that comes up is an article I wrote for the online magazine Slate, back when it was owned by Microsoft and I still worked a day job making celebrity documentaries at VH1. The piece is titled, "Why Aren't Video Games Funny?"

Many game makers who I meet try to prove that they know my work by casually mentioning that two-year-old piece (which can be found here). So it gets discussed a lot. And that guarantees that even if I didn't care about the lack of humor in games, I'd have to stay on top of the topic just to keep up the small talk.

The gist of the piece is that comedy is underrepresented in games. Jokes are stuck in the background as sight gags and lame one-liners. Developers know how to make gamers commit violence and kick field goals but no one seems to know how to make joke-telling fun. And outside of a few intentionally comedic games like "Conker's Bad Fur Day," there aren't even many games designed to be funny. (I didn't mention "Monkey Island" back then and got slammed for it, so please officially consider it lumped in with "Conker.")

All this makes it press-stopping news when a game makes me laugh. It also signals a time to wheel out the gurney and cutting tools to figure out what was in the game that sparked the chuckle. The patient is "Rayman Raving Rabbids," a Ubisoft title initially launched for the Wii in November. Limbless gaming hero Rayman plays a supporting role in a series of short games that feature crazy white teddy-bear-like rabbits running around in and out of outhouses, toward a player-directed spray of carrot juice, across a disco dance floor and elsewhere. I've already written about how the rabbits are used to throw players off their game, which is a good touch (see "Multiplayer: The Little Things"). The rabbits act zany, and that alone might make some people laugh. Not I, at least not outwardly.

But here's what worked: One of the brief games is called "Bunnies Like Surprises." A long raving Rabbid, blindfolded with a plunger, stands atop an island floating in the sky. Players shake the Wii remote and nunchuck to create sounds that signal the rabbit to walk left or right. Collisions with bear traps and cacti earn points. Before starting, the player is told he needs to score 75,000 points. But each impact only rakes tens or hundreds of points, and with the timer ticking down and maybe 25,000 points earned, I assumed the game had just served an impossible mission. Then, in the last seconds, a sound came from above. A giant weight the size of the whole island crashed down: 50,000 more points earned. The high score was cleared.

That made me laugh. Why? Maybe because I briefly had visions of playing that abbreviated game hundreds of times before getting the seemingly sky-high score? My quickly increasing concern begat looming anger begat a sudden surprise relief from a crushing weight, and that brought a laugh. It was a high-score joke. Worked like a charm, but why haven't I seen one before? The closest thing I can relate it to is a credits joke in the old "Donkey Kong Country," during which the credits roll early and all the listed developers are the bad guys in the game. Then the credits stop and the game continues.

Another game I'm playing now, "God Hand," has a lot of slapstick and many knowing pokes at games' silly excesses: over-the-top violence in the form of groin kicks and Looney-Tunes-speed speed-punches; mocking sexuality with a fully gratuitous series of images of cheesecake companion Olivia that appear whenever the game is paused. These are a few examples of games with jokes based on the actual makeup of games. I laughed at that one too.

So maybe games are getting funnier. I laughed at them twice in less than two months. Have they ever made you laugh? Intentionally? Without it involving blowing someone to bits during "Halo"?

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: A Lapsed Gamer Tries The Wii
Writer gets a new lease on an old obsession thanks to Nintendo's latest console.

1.03.2007

On December 21, I was reborn as a gamer.

Early gifted a Nintendo Wii by my equally marvelous and intrepid fiancee, who braved the black-market world of CraigsList.com and paid lord-knows-how-much for the sleek little white box, I re-entered a world I had all but abandoned long ago, back when 64 bits was considered a buttload and "Grand Theft Auto" was just a lame overhead computer game.

See, up until I clutched the Wii's pearly white nunchuck in my hand, I fully considered myself to be a firmly "lapsed" video-game nut, one whose interest was piqued by Mario, Zelda and Kid Icarus, reached a manic peak with "Tecmo Super Bowl," then slowly waned with countless games of "Mario Kart" and "GoldenEye."

I owned a DreamCast, then a GameCube, yet neither really caught my fancy (though, to be fair, I didn't exactly give the DC a fair shake, as it met its demise when I chucked a controller and smashed it during a particularly heated contest of "Virtua Tennis" during college). I had no interest in PlayStation 2 or 3 and never played a game of "Halo." Games today seemed too complex, requiring almost an apostle-level of dedication. And there were too many buttons on the controllers. (I am becoming my father.)

And yet, all that changed on December 21. The Wii was everything I was looking for in a system — smart, sleek, easy to use. The wireless controllers were dead-on and intuitive, the games shied away from the guts-on-the-floor graphic realism and were just plain fun (smacking 600-foot homers on "Wii Sports" is truly a sublime and epic time-waster; if I had a Wii in college, it's debatable if I would've ever left the house), and making Miis became a sort of obsession. Not to mention the ability to download classic games from, like, five systems and the soothing qualities of the Wii's Forecast Channel. And even when I did chuck the controller — something I managed to do while playing here at MTV in late November (see "Multiplayer: We Chucked The Wii"), there was no serious damage done, since the Wii remote and nunchuck weigh next to nothing. It was official. I was truly, totally hooked.

And I wasn't the only one. In fact, I'd wager one of the most amazing things about the Wii is its ability to grab the attention of both gamers and non-gamers alike. I took it down to Orlando, Florida, for Christmas, where my brother (typical "Tiger Woods Golf" dude) and I spent eight hours screwing around with Wii Sports. The following week, a buddy of mine from Wisconsin — who owns a PS2 that could best be described as "dust-covered" — and I bowled for about three hours, his eyes widening, several "This is so f---ing cool"s burbling from his lips. Even my fiancee, whose gaming experience basically began and ended with "Super Mario Bros.," got in on the act, downloading the original and playing to her heart's content.

We've since added "Trauma Center: Second Opinion" to the arsenal and plan on picking up the new "Zelda" game this weekend. For myself — and I suspect plenty of lapsed gamers like me — the Wii offers a new lease on life. A portal to the halcyon days of old, when games didn't require advanced paramilitary training — or a degree in physics — just to operate. It's like the (good) old days are here again.

Now if Nintendo would only find a way to make "Tecmo Super Bowl" available for download; I'd like to try my hand at bringing down Bo Jackson wirelessly. Then, I'd say, my life would truly be complete.

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:

The Stock Report:
» Number of games at MTV HQ: 224
» Last three games arrived: "Blazing Angels" (PS3), "Yu-Gi-Oh! GX Spirit Caller" (Nintendo DS), "Karaoke Revolution Presents: American Idol" (PS2)
» Last system arrived: PS3
» Last swag: Brown American Apparel T-shirt (Christmas present from game publisher Aspyr)

— James Montgomery

Multiplayer: The Games Of The Holidays
Finishing as many games as possible — and encountering some surprises along the way.

1.02.2007

A 3-year-old I know decided that Kirby had to pee. I delivered my first video-game noogie. And my father asked the most unusual of questions. That was my gaming holiday break.

I try to play as much as possible during year-end breaks, not just to have fun but to stay afloat. The whole point of MTV Multiplayer is to describe the unusual lives of people who have nearly every game on the market at their disposal every day. That scenario produces an annual overflow of games for a completist like me. I strive to finish the games I enjoy, and the majority of the most enjoyable games get released between Labor Day and mid-December. It all backs up.

In early December, I counted 21 games that I completed in 2006, one fewer than I finished in 2005 (see "Multiplayer: How Many Games Did You Finish This Year?"). I predicted the impending completion of "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess" and "Gears of War." I was right about the former, which fell at the 41-hour mark in the middle of the month. But I never finished the latter because I'm trying to get a friend to commit to playing through the game with me from start to finish.

While much of the rest of the country was finishing Christmas shopping during the December 23-24 weekend that started my holiday break, I was busy wrapping up a few more games. I graduated from "Bully" that Saturday, having done nothing in the game more scandalous than kissing a few girls (I never found the boys hero Jimmy can also kiss), applying a noogie to some degenerate classmates and busting an alcoholic teacher out of a mental institution. "Resistance: Fall of Man" fell next, making it my first finished PS3 experience. I also finished "Yoshi's Island DS" that weekend, a game with a difficulty level that ramps steeper than any other game I played this year. The first levels cut like butter, but the final ones cut like some old, old steak. And that's not even counting the bonus levels.

I needed to travel for most of the Christmas/ New Year's week, so I opted to only bring the portables. This got me the surprise question from my 60-something father, who has never owned a gaming console in his life. Turns out he liked his Thanksgiving session of "Wii Sports" bowling even more than I'd realized. "Did you bring the Wii so I can bowl?" he asked. Sorry, dad. But does this mean that my father could turn into a gamer yet? That's what Nintendo has been suggesting all along.

I packed "Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops" for the PSP and was intrigued enough with the game that I'll write a separate entry on that title. It may be the wildest game of 2006 and deserves a spotlight of its own. Also along for my travels was "Kirby: Squeak Squad" for the Nintendo DS. The Kirby side-scrollers have been around for ages, but I've never played one, just the experimental "Kirby: Canvas Curse." Turns out the traditional Kirby games are the tricycles of side-scrollers. To keep the butter metaphor going, this game's levels cut like a melted stick. I zipped right through the game, enjoying it enough and ticking off another gaming staple now better understood.

I also learned that easy games can still be tough for some. "Kirby" is rated E for Everyone by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, but the rating's fine print indicates that "everyone" means ages 6 and up. So to my surprise, my 3-year-old niece Kate couldn't play it. Just don't tell her. She saw my DS (not well-hidden enough), figured out it was a game machine and became obsessed.

On day one of her obsession she mastered the clamshell DS's sleep function (shut it to put it to sleep; open it to resume). By day two she could make Kirby run to the left, a marginally useful tactic for a side-scroller that emphasizes rightward motion. ("Kirby has to pee," she'd tell me as she got him stuck at the left part of the screen). On day three, she figured out that the B button made Kirby attack. And sometimes she knew the A button made him jump. On day four she could make Kirby move slightly to the right and jump at the same time. She was much better with some shorter games using the stylus, which is something Nintendo has also been saying would work well for non-gamers.

During the break, I knocked off four games. Add in "Zelda" and my completion total for 2006 is 26. And I'm still not caught up just yet.

— 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.

Multiplayer: Speed-Runs, A Referee, NES Collectors — The Year In Gaming
Underground French McDonald's employees, 'Okami' also make list of Multiplayer's favorite stories of 2006.

12.22.2006

Over the past year, I interviewed captains of the gaming industry and the creator of a Columbine video game. I tracked the rise, fall and possible resurrection of a Bob Ross video game, worked with a team of producers around the world to provide MTV viewers interviews with Chinese "World of Warcraft" gold farmers and did the obligatory E3, PS3 and Wii coverage.

Some of my favorite stories were those that were most under the radar. Here are 10 of the best from 2006:

· In February, I found the grandson of a Ghanaian king and a 19-year-old game maker in Atlanta who both made bold claims about creating the world's first MMO set in Africa. They promised a sophisticated game, launching in December. And the teen designer Adam Ghetti scoffed at naysayers, "They say it's impossible. Maybe if we were doing it in the archaic way everyone else tries to do it." The game is still pending. "How Do You Teach People About Africa? Make A Video Game"

· Later that month, I wrote and MTV aired the results of an evening with Brooklyn-based video-game referee Robert Mruczek, who pays people money to pull off amazing gaming feats and then verifies them by watching videotaped recordings. Mruczek explained to us where joy meets tedium: somewhere along the path to watching a 27-hour run of "Asteroids." Twice.
"Gaming's Top Ref Pays Big Bucks For Record-Breaking Scores"

· In April, I explored the controversial art of tool-assisted speed-runs, a practice of harnessing a computer to help a gamer run through a video game in the most freakishly perfect way. We posted a video portion of an amazing "Super Mario 64" run dashed through by an American gamer who would give me an interview, but not his name. He said his piece. And voicing the skeptic's perspective, "Zelda" speed-runner Mike Damiani told me, "It's like tasting a bit of the dark side. Can you really go back to making legit runs after you've had this much power over a game you thought you mastered?" "Gamers Divided Over Freakish Feats Achieved With Tool-Assisted Speed Runs"

· In May, I attended a Manhattan loft party for "Rockstar Games Presents: Table Tennis." Throughout the year, I attended many PR-driven events and often struggled to get a good story out of them. This one is my favorite because of how a trash-talking, Diddy-smooth gamer calling himself Hollywood brightened the scene and mopped the floor with everyone else who tried the game that night. "I'm the Achilles of Ping-Pong," he boasted at the time. Others would recall this as the article that broke the news that the "Table Tennis" engine would power the next "Grand Theft Auto," but I remember it more as the piece that provoked Hollywood's aunt to track me down the next day to tell me the whole family was so proud of its son. "The First Rule Of Ping-Pong Club: Talk About Rockstar's Table Tennis Game"

· Did you know there's a secret underground resistance of French McDonalds employees who try to sabotage their employer? I didn't either, but found these guys while trying to get to the bottom of a McDonalds-hoax video-game story that was making the rounds. The more I dug, the crazier the story got. "Video Game Chastising McDonald's Business Practices Too Good To Be True"

· In June, we considered doing a list of the 10 most influential games of all time. But everyone does that. So we decided instead to make a list of the 10 most influential gamers of all time. No one had tried that. It was debatable if such a thing should even exist. Games may be interactive, but do gamers really have influence? "Playa Rater: The 10 Most Influential Video Gamers Of All Time"

· Also in June, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed. I am a video-game reporter, so as soon as I heard the news, I wondered what Kuma Reality Games would be doing about it. These guys make first-person shooter games out of daily news items. I called them up and they let me hang out in their New York studio for the next two weeks as they tried to make an FPS out of al-Zarqawi's death. "Take Al-Zarqawi Alive — In A Video Game Coming To Your PC This Week"

· In August, I decided to celebrate the just-about-one-year anniversary of the "GTA" "Hot Coffee" hidden-sex-scene scandal with a story about its effects on game development. "We've seen signs that creativity in our industry is being chilled as a result of last year's political and media attention," game developer Denis Dyack told me. Other developers, named and anonymous, gave differing views on just how much censorship and self-censorship has set in. "A Year After 'Hot Coffee,' Game Developers Are Watching Their Steps"

· Throughout the year, I wrote a Tuesday column called GameFile full of odds and ends related to the industry. My favorite was one I did in early October about "Okami," a game that suggested to me a whole new way of putting social messages in gamers' hands. "GameFile: 'Okami' Goes Green; Official Wii Word; 'Idol' Launch And More"

· In December, I discovered the tribe of hardcore NES collectors. Anyone who sells wood struck by lightning to help fund their gaming habit and lets me know about it can just about guarantee themselves a story on MTV News. It doesn't hurt if you bought a PS3 with the proceeds from selling a single NES cartridge either. These guys are serious gamers. "The Madness Of Nintendo Collectors: Will Sell PS3, Wood To Fund Habits"

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: The Year's Darkest Moments Of Video Game Reporting
Facing down three of 2006's biggest challenges, from busted Mac to ailments.

12.21.06

I do not just play video games all day. Some people think that, when I tell them that I cover the video-game beat full time for MTV News. My job isn't exactly like covering Iraq, which a good friend of mine has been doing day in and day out for more than a year. That's a job of skill and bravery. But there are some challenges that come with this gig. Here are three of my most trying moments of 2006:

The Darkness of the Game Developers Conference

The 2006 Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California, was winding down on Thursday, March 23. I'd written a few stories from the event and needed to file just one more, about a speech and my interview with Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata. I wrote the piece from the conference site that evening. It was scheduled to run the next day. Other than filing it online back at my hotel, I was done. Before that, I'd go to some parties. Around midnight I finally drove toward my hotel to zap my story to the home office.

When I arrived, however, they were handing out flashlights at my hotel. There was a blackout there and everywhere else in walking distance. No power meant no WiFi and no way to file my story. Someone suggested that Denny's had 24-hour WiFi. I went to one. They had waffles, not WiFi. I drove more. I found a DoubleTree hotel. A nice lady there let me stand at the vacant bellhop desk, log on to the hotel's computer and transfer my file to the home office. It was 2 a.m. One guest thought I actually was a bellhop and asked where he could get bottled water. I shrugged. I filed. I logged out. The woman at the DoubleTree front desk gave me a free cookie. This is the story worth that trouble:
"Nintendo Revolution Kicks It Old School For Sega Genesis Fans."

More Darkness, Now at E3

On Tuesday, May 9, just after noon, Bill Gates took the stage at a Microsoft Xbox E3 presentation at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Gates is a Windows guy, of course, and the minute he showed up, the Macintosh laptop I was using from the front row — which was full of E3 notes — died. I took notes by hand and then left. I skipped the rest of the day's presentations.

An MTV colleague with a car and more calm helped me figure out that my computer wasn't exactly departed. It still made sounds. We drove around the city, attempting repairs. At the MTV offices in Santa Monica, California, a technician figured out that my laptop's screen lightbulbs just weren't turning on. He fixed it and I went back to work.

The next day, I trucked my tale of woe back to E3. Kotaku's Brian Crecente nodded and smiled. He told me that on the Gates day, he left a pen on his laptop keyboard, then slammed his computer shut. His screen cracked and he had to buy a new machine. I stopped telling people my story. He won.

The Pain of Sitting

Big gaming conferences clearly bring me troubles. So maybe I shouldn't have accepted Nintendo's invitation to attend a Wii pre-launch event at New York's Chelsea Piers on the morning of Thursday, September 13, and an Electronic Arts gaming event that afternoon.

I woke up a day earlier in pain. To be specific, the pain was in my tailbone, some sort of strange bump. I could hardly sleep that night and could hardly sit down that Nintendo morning. Here's a message for any colleague who was wondering why I was on the edge of my seat as Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime unveiled key Wii details: It had nothing to do with Wii. It was pain and worse, but I'm censoring some details here. Standing was better, so I didn't need to grimace when I talked to Fils-Aime after the event, or when I played a demo of "Metroid Prime 3." I filed a report from Chelsea Piers and called my doctor for an emergency visit.

The doctor's diagnosis was brisk: pilonidal cyst. (Look it up when you're not eating.) Surgery would be required. I was still in the examining room when a gaming PR person called, very upset with something I had recently written. I told her that now was not a good time. By the time I was walking crosstown to the EA event, I was taking baby steps. I couldn't have taken a cab. That would have required sitting.

I arrived at the EA showcase eager to be done so I could use my prescription for Vicodin. Nintendo had required people to stand while playing games at its event. But helpful EA PR reps wanted me to get up and sit down at each game. Thankfully, I recorded what people were saying about "Def Jam: Icon" and "Superman Returns" and the rest, because the pain blocked most of my hearing.

The Vicodin kicked in Thursday night, and preliminary surgery was scheduled for the next afternoon. But before that, I had to attend a secret Friday morning meeting with Rockstar Games, so they could tell me about Phil Collins' surprise appearance in the then-unreleased "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories." There are big leather couches in the Rockstar demo rooms. I looked at them in horror. I turned to the Rockstar guys and just laid it out. If they were telling me their secret, I would tell them mine. They understood. And a surgeon took care of the rest later that day.

The Stock Report:
» Number of games at MTV HQ: 218 (several games have been given to charity, co-workers)
» Last three games to arrive: "Far Cry Vengeance" (Wii), "World Series of Poker: Tournament of Champions" (Wii), "Super Swing Golf" (Wii)
» Last system to arrive: PS3
» Last swag to arrive: PS3 umbrella

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Best Of The Rest, 2006 — Attempting 'Sonic Body Pong'
Running around dressed like a giant paddle at September's Come Out & Play Festival.

12.20.06

I covered a lot of gaming stories for MTV News this year and traveled far and wide. But still some of what we shot never made it to air. There comes a time to rectify that, and that time is now.

I am unafraid to dress up as video-game characters. I hopped around as Super Mario just this past summer (see "Gamers Drop Controllers, Strap On Bungee Cords To Re-Create 'Mario,' 'Tekken' "). But I sooner thought I'd be wearing Lara Croft's short-shorts than I'd be dressed up as a paddle from "Pong." In September I did just that. Why?

I spent one weekend late that month exploring the Come Out & Play Festival. Gamers and game designers from around the world gathered in New York to play special games designed for the great outdoors of Manhattan. On a Friday night, I watched two guys project a playable variation of "Space Invaders" onto the side of a seven-story building. On Saturday, I ran around Broadway trying to follow Ian Bogost and Jane McGonigal's Cruel 2 B Kind, a take on the tag-inspired game Assassin, but in this case allowing people to only "kill" and be "killed" with acts of kindness. Later in the day, I watched some folks play a miniature-golf course informally set on New York streets.

The only game I actually played myself, however, was "Sonic Body Pong." The game played like old-school "Pong," except the paddles were real and attached to the players' heads. And the playing field was real space, not a screen. And the ball was only represented by sounds coming into each player's headphones, urging them to move a little to the left or right to bounce it back to their opponent. You couldn't see the ball. Other than that, it was just like "Pong." We filmed it and you can briefly see me in action after I whiffed another volley.

For some reason, I couldn't let my failure linger on the cutting-room floor. So it's now part of this half-week celebration of MTV News' 2006 game coverage leftovers. Plus I wanted to shed light on the creative folks at Come Out & Play. They did some interesting work and found some peculiar new ways to have fun.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Best Of The Rest, 2006 — Controlling 'Halo 2' By Foot
We visit Rooster Teeth — and get to the bottom of the 'foot thing.'

12.19.06

In late October, Sway Calloway and I brought a five-person team to Austin, Texas, to explore that city's vibrant gaming scene (see "My Gaming Block Austin, Part 1: MMOs, Pimped-Out Studios — And Pigs"). We aired a lot of material: interviews with the "Metroid"-makers of Retro studios, a chat with a woman who wrote dialog for "Gears of War," a nearly-disastrous tour of Midway's Texas development studio and some other fun stuff.

Until now, though, we had to leave footage from our visit with a group of gamers called Rooster Teeth on the shelf (see "Machinima Pros Make A Living Playing 'Halo' — With Their Feet"). For the past three years, these guys have entertained millions of fans with movies — machinima — made from their recorded multiplayer sessions of "Halo." They're based in Buda, Texas, just outside of Austin, and record their sessions in the back of a railroad apartment (which is literally next to the railroad tracks). They record voiceovers for their films in their apartment's closet, tie the whole thing together in the cramped back room and release each resulting episode of their "Red vs. Blue" first-person shooter comedy online and eventually in stores on DVD.

On a rain-soaked Wednesday afternoon we drove south from Austin to Buda and got a look at the Rooster Teeth digs. One of the guys, the heavily tattooed Geoff Fink, sat Sway down at a bank of Xbox 360s and recording equipment to explain how the "Halo" machinima gets made. Sway got the details, but we couldn't wrap the interview without asking Fink about a detail we highlighted in our old Rooster Teeth story — the foot thing.

Sway noticed that Fink had nine Xbox 360 controllers at the recording station and enough systems to allow them to be used at the same time — but Rooster Teeth doesn't have nine gamer/actors to wield them. They solve this problem by wielding multiple controllers at once, some with their hands and some with their feet. We needed a demonstration and got one, captured on film.

No, Geoff Fink isn't exactly veering through a "Halo 2" death-match in the clip, but he is revealing a little bit of "Halo" movie magic.

— Stephen Totilo

Multiplayer: Best Of The Rest, 2006 — The Kenta Cho Interview
Japanese game designer answers questions about Xbox games, his own creations.

12.18.06

Now I'd like to bring you back to April, when MTV News producer Matt Sunbulli and I traveled to Tokyo to cover the local gaming scene (see
"Where Does A Game Called 'Mother' Outsell 'Halo'? Check Out Tokyo's Coolest Street"). We booked interviews with local game-design heavyweights like Tomonobu Itagaki and Hideo Kojima (see " 'Metal Gear' Mastermind Imagines Games That Use Smell, Touch"). We tried to secure a tour of PlayStation HQ and hit the Sega arcades.

I also really wanted to talk to Kenta Cho.

If you don't know the name and you like games, then you need to check out the Web site for Cho's one-man games company ABA Games. Cho creates some of the most exotic shoot-'em-up computer games you'll ever play, with a colorful, abstract visual style not dissimilar to what you see when you close your eyes and rub your eyelids.

I'd read e-mail interviews with Cho, some of them in English, with fans located as far away as the Czech Republic. But I'd never seen his photo, and I didn't realize one afternoon in the Harajuku district in Tokyo that the unassuming man handing me a Toshiba business card was Cho himself. With Sunbulli and camera in tow, we went looking for an interview location. Our colleague from MTV Japan helped us stumble around a few blocks. Eventually we came upon the MTV Tokyo café, which you'll see in the background of our first Best of the Rest 2006 Multiplayer video shorts.

Cho set up his laptop, powered on a copy of his amazing shooter "Gunroar" and then gave what he told me is his first on-camera interview in English. We talked about how he makes his games (programs them on the weekends), whether he'd like to make an RPG or sports game (no and no), and why he doesn't like "Grand Theft Auto" (takes too long to play through).

But more to the point: We talked about the then-popular Cho-style Xbox 360 game "Geometry Wars," why he distributes his games for free and what the chances are of major gaming companies putting his work on consoles. His answers can only be seen 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.