In March, I faced a daunting dilemma.

I wondered whether or not I should lend my early copy of “Super Smash Bros. Brawl” to a nine year-old for his birthday party.

Now I face another tough choice: Should I go to an early screening of the Iron Man movie tonight or should I stay home and play “GTA IV”?

Last month, an analyst claimed that the release of “GTA IV” on April 29 may affect the ticket sales for the Iron Man movie, which is out in theaters on May 2. At first I scoffed at the idea, but now I’m not so sure.

For some, it might be a no-brainer: “GTA IV” is the most anticipated game release of the year. Duh. But I’ve heard so much hype and read so many previews, impressions, reviews and whathaveyou, that maybe I should take a step back and see the blockbuster flick first. After all, the window for getting “GTA IV” early and playing it before everyone else has passed now. But there’s still time to see the Iron Man movie before wide release and brag about it… if it doesn’t suck.

Also, the movie is about two hours long, and obviously “GTA IV” is much longer than that. It’s possible I could try to do both. But is Iron Man worth the two hours playtime I’ll miss from “GTA IV”?

Dear readers, make up my mind for me and tell me what I should do by 2pm EST. My social life and nerd cred rests in your comments…

[UPDATE 4/29, 11:04am - Two things just came for me in the mail. "GTA IV" and the two passes to see Iron Man tonight. Why are they taunting me?]

[UPDATE 4/29, 3:05pm - My decision... Thanks to everyone who commented. After careful consideration, I decided to go home and play "GTA IV." As much as I'd love to see Iron Man, I'd be thinking about the game the whole time anyway. In fact, I am going to fake being sick right now so I can go home and play. But shhh! Don't tell Totilo.]

Two weeks ago, a storm hit this blog.

We interviewed Newsweek reporter N’Gai Croal for a series about black professionals involved with video games, and we selected his comments on the “Resident Evil 5″ trailer for a standalone post.

We knew the post would be contentious. Last summer I had written about my own uneasiness with the trailer and the response to that piece had been spirited.

Croal talked to our writer Tracey John about racial imagery in the trailer. He made a cogent if not airtight argument. The line that drew the most reaction was the one that suggested his gut reflex to first seeing the trailer: “Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game.”

In response, some agreed. Some called him a racist. Some said he was ignoring the legitimate conventions of zombie horror. One person encouraged him to shut up, go to Africa and start overthrowing dictators. And some people produced an old chestnut: “It’s just a video game.”

“It’s just a video game.”

Really?

I don’t think that’s a valid response in 2008.

Not if you care about video games.

Read more…

At long last I’ve transcribed my GDC interview with Peter Molyneux, head of Lionhead Studios and chief architect of the Xbox 360 fall exclusive “Fable 2.”

I teased a video excerpt earlier this week. Now you can read my conversation with him about:

• What people ask him about at GDC.
• What the most ambitious element of “Fable 2″ is.
• How you can steal his wife in his game.
• How to punish your “Fable 2″ family with an apple pie.
• Why you might want to live in a town called Bloodstone.
• What lessoned he learned not to repeat from “BioShock.“
• How he left me completely perplexed at the end of our interview.

And more! Read on. It’s Molyneux, so, you will be both informed and entertained…

Read more…

We don’t normally review games here at Multiplayer, but this time we made an exception.

On Friday, I dealt with a moral dilemma: should I lend my early copy of “Super Smash Bros. Brawl” to a co-worker, whose nine year-old was having a Saturday night birthday/slumber party? Or should I take it home for myself and finally enjoy the game we’ve all been waiting years for?

While there were many comments arguing for both options (as well as a few inventive ones, like replacing the “Brawl” disc with the “Melee” one), I decided to lend the game to my co-worker for his kid. The only condition? I wanted photographic proof (see above) that they played the game, as well as a brief review from said birthday boy.

Here it is…

The review:

“This game is awesome because you get to play as cool characters and the arenas rock. My favorite part has so far been fighting the hand. I love the graphics and the fact that you can pause, zoom and take photos of the screens. There are a lot of characters, it’s great fun. You can play for a long time without getting bored.”

From my co-worker:

“Thank you so much. I am officially the coolest dad. They all called their friends to tell them that they were playing the game a day earlier.”

You might have noticed that we got “Super Smash Bros. Brawl” a little bit early.

But I honestly haven’t been able to play it much, because resident fanatic Jason Cipriano has been playing it. For research, of course.

Now that it’s Friday, I will finally have a chance to take it home and enjoy it over the weekend. Cip will be dutifully waiting in line with all the other fans Saturday night until the midnight release at his local GameStop.

However, there’s just one problem, which came up only moments ago…

An older co-worker of mine came into our office and asked if he could borrow the game. His nine year-old son is celebrating his birthday on Saturday night with a sleepover with several of his friends, and they’d love to play the multiplayer fighting game together.

B-b-b-but I want to play it.

What should I do? Should I be selfish and tell him “no”? Or should I let the kids enjoy it first? Maybe I should just give in and buy another copy?

Let me know what you think before 5pm EST, which is when I’ll decide what to do.

[UPDATE March 7, 5:15pm]

Thanks to everyone that commented with their thoughts. After careful consideration, I decided to let my co-worker borrow the game over the weekend. I haven’t decided if I should buy the game again or not; I may just play something else, like “Lost Odyssey.” Either way, at least I’ll know that I’ve made one nine year-old and his friends very happy…

[UPDATE March 10, 12:45pm] 

After spending the weekend with it, the nine year-old gave us his review.

Move over “BioShock.” The 2007 video game that has moral quandaries that are twisting my gut is “Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn.”

[Warning: SPOILERS ABOUT "Radiant Dawn" THROUGHOUT THIS POST]

If you’ve got a Wii and at least 20 hours of life to spare, I recommend playing “Radiant Dawn” yourself. You too may experience a series of ethical dilemmas that make killing Little Sisters — or frying companion cubes — seem no more tortured than a coin flip.

“Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn,” like previous games in the series, is basically glorified chess — if only chess pieces had little lives as fantasy characters and got stronger every time you played a new game with the same pieces. Oh, and if the pieces transformed into cooler pieces if you used them a lot. In the old “Fire Emblem” games, the pieces/units/characters would die and stay dead for the rest of the game if you put them in a bad spot. In October I both praised that death feature and expressed my concern that the removal of it from the Wii sequel’s default play mode would undermine the emotional impact of the new game.

So I was coasting through the new “Fire Emblem” on Wii using the game’s new save system, keeping all of my characters alive, lamenting the loss of the old death feature. This new game was a no-consequence breeze.

Then something happened that shocked me. And I realized that the “Fire Emblem” designers are still pros at emotionally manipulating their customers.

Let’s put it this way:

Has any game ever required you to fight to the death against the very characters you just spent several hours leveling up?

Spoilers ensue, but, really, I highly recommend you read on, experience the game yourself, or both.

Read more…

You may have read a lot of “Manhunt 2” headlines over the last couple of weeks and months.

You, like the guys at Penny Arcade, may be quite over the whole spectacle.

But stay with me. This piece is for you.

Because unless you carefully read one particular story that I wrote 10 days ago, then you, like everyone else following the drama, missed what I believe is the most significant cut Rockstar made in the formerly Adults-Only game.

Why that cut was overlooked says a lot about how people both in and out of gaming talk about violent games. It says something about how the “But you can shoot hookers!” complaint about “Grand Theft Auto” consistently misses a key point. Without a firmer handle on all this, we might as well just be talking about a controversial movie, and that may be the foolhardy approach.

The cut I’m referring to isn’t the removal of a scene of genital mutilation to get the game its M-rating. Nor is it the oft-cited blurring of the game’s execution scenes.

It’s the scoring system.

It’s the system that notified me, when I finished the AO version of the game’s “Awakening” level last June, that I had killed 12 hunters over the last 24 minutes and 27 seconds, executed five of them, scored no environmental executions and earned one of five style points.

It’s the system that tallied a better number for me if I had behaved more brutally, displaying the figures on a screen that appeared between each level of the game.

It’s a system that was in the first M-rated “Manhunt” but is absent from the M-rated version of the sequel.

Let’s be clear: it’s the system that incentivized increased virtual brutality and was cut from the version that was too hot for retail.

How can this cut have been overlooked? Why is almost no one talking about it? I have some ideas… Read more…

This week sees the release of “Manhunt 2” for the Wii, PS2, and PSP. Rockstar sent me the games on Friday and put me on the phone with v.p. of product development, Jeronimo Barrera.

I beat the game on Sunday and will have stuff to say about it later this week.

But for now, let me point you to my interview with Barrera over at MTVNews.com. I can tell you here that Barrera was choosing his words carefully. Clearly the “Manhunt 2″ ratings controversy has made Rockstar extra-careful about how anyone from the company will be (mis)interpreted.

At one point, he struggled to deal with a question about the game’s content, saying to me: “I’m so not used to talking about the game, just the controversy,” he said. “It’s really weird.”

In the story he talks about

• What Rockstar changed in the game and why — including the little discussed removal of a scoring system
• What the ideal player experience of “Manhunt 2″ is
• Whether the “Manhunt” series should go multi-player
• Whether Rockstar will release the “unrated” version of the game on PC

An excerpt from my piece:

The release of “Manhunt 2″ may well be a bigger deal than it would have been without the ratings controversy. But Barrera hopes people will talk about the game’s content too. “There are conversations to be had about this game — intelligent conversations,” he said. “That’s what we want to do: get people interested in those [things], rather than ban this game because of X, Y and Z.”

Read the rest at MTVNews.com. And if you hunger for more, read the rest of my year’s-worth of “Manhunt 2″ coverage, including a Vs. Mode with N’Gai Croal about our play-through of the first six levels of the AO-rated version of the game.

About a year and a half ago I helped bring four of the world’s top game developers — Cliff Bleszinski, David Jaffe, Harvey Smith and Will Wright — together for a roundtable discussion.

We aired it online and later on MTV2. Harvey joked to me in advance that the conversation would resemble the kind of “nerd chat” game developers have all the time. And, I suspect it did.

But it also got more serious than I expected it to, especially when Harvey talked about the meaning of death in video games. Spinning out of a talk about creative freedom, he said:

I would like to make a game that explores our relationship with death, culturally and intimately. I would like to make a game with one player character that is in different phases of his life. So in the early mission he’s the five year old boy who… finds his dog dead in the back yard. And he’s trying to understand what has happened. Later he’s the teenager who’s grandfather died. Later he’s the middle-aged man whose wife died. Eventually he’s the old doddering man whose son died. And all of these things are about the different ways in which we experience death

The average video game has a thousand deaths in them and yet none of them are deep or real or intimate at all. And death has influenced my life a great deal. My mom died when I as six. My dad killed himself. And so I’ve got all this death in my background that I’ve had to overcome. And that as an artist is the sort of thing I would like to work on and no one will pay for it.

That’s the statement that I recall most often from the ”nerd chat.” It revealed how personal and how powerful games could be. It also suggested games’ limits. Watching the clip you’ll see David Jaffe raise legitimate concerns about whether Harvey’s idea could work as a game. I go back and forth on that.

The statement also struck me as an extraordinary indictment of games, a one-star review for a medium that has managed to convey little of the potency – little of the emotional heft – of one of the concepts it most commonly presents.

Video games, I believe Harvey was right to suggest, don’t convey the impact of death very well. I’ve come across few games that do. In fact, I’ve only come across one that makes gameplay-driven death hit hard. Of all things, it’s a Nintendo strategy game series. It’s “Fire Emblem.”

So I was alarmed when I learned at the Nintendo media summit earlier this month that one small change being made to the American version of the next “Fire Emblem” might undermine the very thing I praise in this series.

Read more…

In July, several gaming outlets reported on a demo of BioWare and Microsoft’s epic sci-fi role-playing-game “Mass Effect” that left onlookers stunned.

It was an interactive story sequence featuring a major supporting character and the game’s hero. IGN wrote:

Wrex is a Krogan, a powerful race on the verge of extinction. A few hours after joining up with your party, Wrex and our hero, Commander Shepard, have a disagreement. The potential results of this conflict left everyone in the room stunned. If we ever had doubt about Mass Effect, it was wiped away at E3.

To illustrate a piece I just did for MTV News.com about how BioWare gave such scenes their cinematic punch — which basically involves the Canadian studio’s clever decision to hire some of the world’s best machinima-makers — Microsoft is allowing me to be the first to air that scene.

Watched it once? Good. Now read on to sea how BioWare lead cinematic director Ken Thain explain his thinking behind the scene’s key shots. Read more…

In yesterday’s third round of Vs Mode, Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal trashed the idea of 3D, first-person “Metroid.” Such games shouldn’t exist, he told me.

It was a strong opinion, one I already knew he held. My first temptation was to issue a strong reply.

I reject the idea that any game shouldn’t exist and that any idea shouldn’t at least be tried. But while I offered my own stern words about why I think “Metroid” has been successful in 3D, I thought it was also a good time to talk about the whole break between 2D and 3D gaming, how that affected those of us gamers who didn’t leave the hobby but learned (or consented) to shift our tastes.

N’Gai and I talk about a lot of things in our Final Round today, but if there’s anything I hope gets people speaking, it’s these words that I wrote:

What’s it like to watch a great 2D game series go to 3D, have the masses praise it, and yet see it abandon key aspects in the process? I’m trying to put myself in your shoes which don’t feel altogether unfamiliar. Do we praise this situation or shake our heads? Did no one notice what happened to the “Mario” platforming series? Should anyone mind? None of the three 3D “Mario” games I’ve played (”64,” Sunshine,” or preview versions of “Galaxy“) feels as combative as the old 2D games. This has bugged me. In the “Mario” side-scrollers I was always wading in enemies. I could jump from the top of one enemy to the next, knock down rows of them with Koopa shells, and blitz through a whole bunch while invincible with star power. “Mario” 3D games are desolate by comparison. There are barely any Goombas and Koopas to fight. How many do you get on the screen at once? How many do you see in the average game minute? Very few.
…
There’s a very real argument to be made that something was lost in the transition from 2D to 3D, which is what the Wii’s backers have been happy to talk about. While it’s worth exploring why the transition ruined things for some gamers, I think little has been discussed about why other gamers didn’t lose touch and what kind of tastes may have developed in those of us who stayed hardcore on both sides of the break. What do such gamers have to add to a discussion that so often deals only with the lapsed 2D gamers and the children of the 3D era, to say nothing of the outsider casuals?

The rest of our exchange is posted below, as it is on N’Gai’s “Level Up” blog. He and I will be back at it next month, in our first Vs. Mode dedicated to a handheld game. Read more…

“Halo 3” comes out next week, and maybe more than a million (or two) gamers will consider it the biggest first-person game of the year.

That may be.

But what if you wanted a first-person game set underwater and inspired by 20th-century philosophy?

What if you wanted your first-person game to be controlled with the wave of your hand and to force you to occasionally roll into a ball?

Those are the games we’re talking about this week.

Having tackled “God of War II,” the “Halo 3″ beta, “Manhunt 2,” and short session games, Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal and I are setting our newest Vs Mode on “BioShock” for the Xbox 360 and “Metroid Prime 3” for the Wii. Spoilers abound, and while they are clearly noted in today’s first round, by tomorrow’s second installment, you will want to have finished “BioShock” before reading.

So what did we think of the year’s best-reviewed game? Why did I go into “BioShock” convinced I wasn’t going to like it? And what did N’Gai do this time to infuriate me? It’s all revealed this week.

As always, these exchanges are co-published at N’Gai’s “Level Up” blog.

Read more…