This is how I spent my last weekend in Seattle: taking a ferry to Bainbridge Island. Walking around I got the impression I'd stumbled onto the village belonging to The Others from Lost. I later discovered that the actor who plays Juliet actually lives there, so…there you go.

Can you believe it? A third post in a single week. You’d almost get the impression that we like writing about games.

There’s no tongue-in-cheek theme this week. Just…c’mon. Have you looked outside? It’s supposed to be sunny and almost 70 degrees. This probably isn’t gonna happen again until July, so put down that controller, call off that Icecrown Citadel raid, and grab your iPhone so you can experience the great outdoors…with a bit of an insurance policy in tow, of course.

This is where Doug goes to learn at the School of Hard Knocks. The subject is Scrabble. The teacher is me. There are no substitutes.

Doug

Hell hath no fury like a grad school scorned, I guess. The hardest term of the program bit me in the ass this week and last – two presentations, a mid term, and trying to keep up with the readings meant almost no free time this past week.

However, thank god for the iPhone. Words with Friends is the only thing keeping me sane; despite routinely getting my ass kicked, I’m absolutely hooked. And I’m not even cheating anymore!

I also got and put a little time into Broken Sword, too. I love the art style and the audio quality; I really should have bought it when I was in Asia and spending tons of time in airplanes. However, the adventure game genre’s quirks – namely the Byzantine puzzle design – means I’m leaning on the hint system. Thank god for that.

Lastly, I’ve gotten through my first full season in PES 2010. I won a European trophy, and my AS Roma side took the Italian league title to the last game – a head-to-head battle on the last day against Inter Milan. I had to win to take the league title; I could only squeek out a dramatic 3-3 tie, finishing second. Time to reload for next year.

A steady diet of processed meat and oversize servings of cheesecake may not make you a super-spy, but they'll sure help you sound like Michael Ironside after a few years

Aaron

Hi. I like Splinter Cell. Do you? Oh my god what a coincidence! Let’s gab.

Now that I’ve finished Conviction and put an adequate amount of time into the co-op element, I feel qualified to discuss the game. The latest Sam Fisher adventure is perhaps his greatest. Chaos Theory is a popular choice (with good reason) whenever someone asks which Splinter Cell title is the best, but without going back and trying Chaos Theory again I’m skeptical of its continued impact after having experienced the petrifying blast of lightning that is a pissed-off Sam Fisher. Conviction breaks barriers in its handling of Splinter Cell’s traditional gameplay; it, to a larger extent, impacts the stealth action genre as a whole. Just like in Metal Gear Solid 4 when I noticed how fast combat had become, and how running and gunning was a legitimate course of action for the first time, Splinter Cell: Conviction removes the overwhelming feeling of stealthy hesitancy present in the other games. By hesitancy, I mean that Sam was always worrying about a light meter, his ammo, instant-fail missions and hiding bodies. That was all fun, nine years ago. Times and tastes both change, and Ubisoft Montreal knew exactly what to change to keep the franchise fresh.

The campaign is small, but fulfilling. Kind of like a single slice of cheesecake. Do you like cheesecake? No. Way. Then allow me to continue with the metaphor.

If you’ve ever been to The Cheesecake Factory, you’ll know that their namesake menu item isn’t exactly anything to rave about. Well, maybe you like it. I…not so much. But let’s disregard taste and simply think about their brand of cake-plus-cheese: Like any successful chain restaurant, The Cheesecake Factory provides its customer base with that same slice of dessert-y goodness at each of the company’s 146 establishments. It’s mass-market cheesecake. A recipe that likely started out as new, fresh and satisfying is now mass-produced for consumption by Americans everywhere. So you being a person that might like this cheesecake, you’re happy with it. Day in and day out (hopefully you don’t really eat that much dessert) you eat this cake; your tastes have become scared of trying something new. It’s comforting, really — to know you can get that sweetness whenever you want. But what if one day The Cheesecake Factory threw out its entire menu? What if they said: “You know what? People are eating this same tired recipe all across this great nation, and we need to give them something new. ‘I have a dream,’ and all that. How about, for once, we just go apeshit and try a whole new recipe for cheesecake? Madness, I tells ya. Madness.” So they introduce a brand new product, and it’s actually the best cheesecake you’ve ever had. It doesn’t taste like the old stuff; wow, it doesn’t even look like it used to. But your taste buds don’t lie, and the chefs’ decision to push themselves in a risky way paid off. Now we have a wonderful new type of food to get fat from. The end.

Ubisoft was bored of making the same Splinter Cell games year after year. It’s not that their stealth concept was broken or unprofitable — the gods of gaming know I’d have continued buying another iteration of Chaos Theory over and over and over again. But the developers had a vision, and saw an opportunity to reinvigorate the stealth action genre. I’m glad they did, because Splinter Cell Conviction is easily one of the best Xbox 360 exclusives I’ve purchased. Fortunately for us as players and the videogame industry as providers, change happens all the time in sequels, remakes prequels and downloadable side stories. Change and adaptation are actually encouraged, even when we complain about Halo 23 and God of War 12 being “more of the same.” I don’t believe that we’ve ever really played the same game twice; it’s just our own personal — and lofty — expectations that get in the way of accepting any sort of new advancements in a series. Point is, be thankful that Ubisoft riskily tinkers with its tested formula. Sometimes these leaps of faith fail, but other times they succeed.

Oh, and never expect a successful chain of restaurants to change its menu on a whim due to some “artistic vision” held by the executive chefs.

Bite-size Ratchet and Clank, suitable for impulse buyers? Yeah, I'll take some of that.

Nick

I’m a pretty avid gamer — there’s no getting around that. But I’ve got two seriously debilitating personality flaws that tend to get in the way:

1. I tend to dislike big-name, triple-A games, even if they deserve their praise and attention
2. As a result, I’ll often spend my money on lesser-known, crappier titles than games I know I’m guaranteed to enjoy

It’s for those two reasons that I’ve avoided the Ratchet and Clank games on PlayStation 3. Based on the little I’d seen and played, I knew they were excellent: with a fine-tuned fluidity in motion and rich, expressive art direction, the series has clearly never been in finer form than on Sony’s latest platform. But for whatever reason I’d always put off purchasing the games for myself. As a relative mainstay franchise, I knew I’d be able to walk into a game store years down the road and pick up a copy on the cheap eventually.

After about fifteen minutes with the currently half-off downloadable episode, Quest for Booty, I realized I had been kind of an idiot. My $7.50 bought me a few hours of that well-designed Ratchet and Clank platformer/shooter hybrid that I’d loved so many years ago, and now I can’t wait to check out the other two games. If you’ve got a PS3 and you’re looking for a good game to play through over the weekend, you can’t go wrong with this one.

Time for a mea culpa, guys. I was hoping to broadcast this backlog at its regularly scheduled time (“whenever on Friday, I guess”) but unfortunately ran into a snag where I was unable to use my computer. Something to do with driving through planned communities in Wilsonville in the middle of the night; I don’t know, let’s not dredge that episode up. Anyway, the short version is I invented a time-traveling DeLorean and traveled to the past to get the backlog posted on time.

Everything was going just fine — I survived an adventure in the wild west and I made Biff look like a total dweeb — but unfortunately, I ended up getting totally distracted by the same exact scenario and wound up just where I’d started. Except it was now Sunday.

Oh well. I guess I should be grateful; for a while there, I was kinda worried I’d end up creating a time paradox.

There's an inexplicable, potent comfort to be found in always having Plants vs. Zombies within arm's reach.

Doug

I hate to be The Guy Who Brings In Real Life all the time…but this week has been finals week, and all I’ve really had time to do is play a little bit of stress-relief NCAA Football 10 at night once, and then burning my iPhone battery a bit continuing on with Plants vs. Zombies.

I know that it’s always a discussion amongst certain core gamers, but seriously: PopCap makes some great games, period. Not great casual games; not great iPhone games, or baby games, or whatever other pejorative you want to tack on. PvZ, Peggle, and Bejeweled are all some of the best examples of quick-fix gaming available; the steady stream of hits that PopCap has managed makes them one of the developers and publishers with the best track record out there right now, too. It’s rather amazing when you stand back and think about it.

The other part of real life I wanted to throw out there is more related to the site: I’m going to be traveling with my graduate program in Japan, South Korea and China for the next month. If you have any ideas or topics you want me to cover, please send comments or e-mails and I’ll take them under suggestion. I’m going to have a whole week to myself in Tokyo to do some exploring, and I definitely plan on hitting up nerd mecca at least once.

If you're capable of playing a game with this much happening on-screen, I think I owe you a dollar.

Aaron

I’m going to drop some knowledge on you, dear reader. I lost five hours of my day to a haze of space-faring political machinations and plasma-cannon combat.

That’s right: I ordered a used copy of an Xbox 360 launch title that I previously had zero interest in (and zero knowledge of). Why? Well, I was linked to a video from Giant Bomb. This nearly hour-long look at Amped 3′s numerous cutscenes has shown me the brilliance of the game’s insane humor, especially after the 20 minute mark. The video’s claim of Tim and Eric-like influence was at the back of my mind before it was even said. And that, friends, is why I’m excited for Amped 3. I smell a Retrospective in the air.

Broken Sword is clever, intuitive and gorgeous. So naturally, it's the perfect complement to any iPhone.

Nick

I began playing Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars Director’s Cut on my iPhone earlier this week. Without a doubt, it’s the most accessible traditional adventure game I’ve tried for my phone. While The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition and Beneath a Steel Sky were both good games, their interfaces left a lot to be desired. Broken Sword is built upon the same adaptations that were in Beneath a Steel Sky, but the control scheme is a lot more polished and intuitive this time around. The sound quality, voice acting and visuals are all top-notch, and the experience has been very engrossing. It’s currently available for five bucks on the App Store — why don’t you give it a shot?

Being the fiscally irresponsible person I apparently have become, I picked up Heavy Rain this Tuesday. I have some serious reservations about the game and its creators (other than Guitar Hero 3, I really can’t think of a more disappointing game in recent years than Fahrenheit) but after about four hours immersed in the experience, I’m utterly amazed at what Heavy Rain shaped up to be. I’ve long been a proponent of interactive fiction — involved, intricate stories that mold to your actions — which is a fledgling genre if ever there was one. Most people who go out to buy a game probably expect the gameplay to be the main attraction with the story functioning as window dressing. Heavy Rain delivers just the opposite. It’s a compelling experience with a surprisingly elaborate amount of nuance and variation based on your actions, and while the controls are sometimes frustrating, they’re more than adequate to suck the player in to the experience. If you’re at all interested in how interactive storytelling works, Heavy Rain is perhaps the boldest experiment yet.

And of course, I’m still tromping through BioShock 2 in my Big Daddy suit. (No, not that suit.) What began as a modest successor to a groundbreaking commentary on games has taken form over the past few hours into something much more substantial: a brilliant game in its own right, and a significant improvement over its forebear. And despite the widespread criticism surrounding the multiplayer component, I’ve been getting my kicks blasting splicers apart for the last couple weeks. I think it’s a pretty inspired take on class-based multiplayer, and it’s sure a lot more interesting than Modern Warfare 2′s modest (at best) improvements over Call of Duty 4′s fiendishly addictive online scene.