Welcome to the Japanese countryside! There are video games here, you just have to squint really hard to find them.

Whenever I’ve moved, one of the last things to get packed up has been my gaming console. Of course, my console has also often been the first thing unpacked once I’ve gotten moved in. Funny how that works. But this time, after moving to Japan in early August, all I’ve played since are iPhone games – until last weekend, I hadn’t picked up a real controller since arriving in the land of Nintendo and Sony.

What the hell happened? Well, a perfect storm of things for me, at least.

First: I didn’t want to bring my Xbox 360 with me to Japan. It’s old, is bound to break (again), and is region-locked. Most importantly, though, I would either have to pack it into my slim luggage allowance or ship it over separately, and neither are worth the trouble. Sometimes you have to be an adult and bring clothing, especially when there’s little chance to buy new threads. Okay, I did bring my Nintendo DS, but it’s now gathering Japanese dust instead of gathering American dust. I’ve got the itch to play games; what to do?

But I can wait. Maybe. I’ve gone two months without playing a game – and longer without playing anything new, frankly – and can afford to wait because real life and the gaming release schedule have allowed me to. I’m too busy getting out of the house and visiting my new friends to spend too much time playing games at the moment, which is good, because there haven’t been a ton of AAA titles coming out this summer. I bemoaned the lack of a year-round release schedule earlier in the year, but I’m quite glad for the break at the moment.

Soon the weather will turn nasty and, as a friend here in Japan said, people will begin to “hide under their kotatsu.” Unlike the U.S., most places in Japan aren’t centrally heated and have very poor insulation, which means you wear lots of sweaters indoors and a kotatsu, a table with a heated blanket. In short, people don’t want to head out and be social; perfect time to catch up on video games, then!

Postscript to the story? Last weekend was my birthday. With enough money and free time on the weekend to go buy a PS3, I broke down and picked one up — a 320 gb model, which now sits happily next to my TV and wireless router. It’s now set up to stream media from my computer, access my U.S. Netflix account, and make use of the Silicon Sasquatch staff PSN share. And I bought a pretty kick-ass game to go along with the system, too, one that I’m excited to write about soon.

After the long break, it’s good to be back.

But one question that has never faced gamers before will be an issue when looking at upgrading from one console to the next this go-around: What is going to happen to all the content I have on my current system?

This is the digital era. I have 85 gb of content stored to my Xbox 360′s hard drive and, while much of that is game installs, the rest is made up of the “arcade” games available on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN, downloadable add-on content for games, and digital downloads of full retail games. Some of the downloaded games also have their own DLC, which strikes me as a real through-the-looking-glass sort of moment.

Full copies of games you'd otherwise purchase at retail are available both on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. What happens with the next generation of systems, though?

These are games I’ve bought and, in the case of the digital versions of games also sold at retail, are indistinguishable from hard copies. Yet I’m worried. I’m worried that these games could be completely worthless or, at the least, feature-handicapped in the future should Microsoft (or Sony for PSN) decide to flip a switch and shut off some servers. In the case of the Xbox 360, though the detachable hard drive means it’s possible to take your content on the go, you can only make use of DLC and full versions of games if they’re authenticated by Xbox Live; if I want to take my hard drive to a friend’s and make use of my Rock Band library, their 360 must be plugged in.

The authentication and access to games isn’t just a worry in cases like that, but for more practical reasons as well. The 360 has proven itself to be a bit fragile; my current 360 is my fifth, and I’m hardly an edge case. If you suffer a Red Ring of Death or any other kind of 360-killing malady, you have to migrate your account from the old console to the new one’s serial number. While it’s an annoyance during the 360′s life span, what happens in another five years? If your old NES or Genesis or even PlayStation 2 died, you just buy a new one; the games were kept within a physical medium and plug right in without a problem. But what happens in five or 10 years when my 360 inevitably dies again and I have to track down a replacement? Will Xbox Live still allow me to do what it does now in 2011?

While content on the current console is a question, what about taking content on to the next generation? Though few games had DLC on the original Xbox, you could previously download it on the 360; now, though, since the original Xbox’s Xbox Live servers have gone offline, it’s left you high and dry. While I doubt people will want to buy new content, even for Xbox 360 games in the far-flung future, what about retrieving what you’ve already purchased? Plus, as established, content delivery digitally is a much bigger deal this generation; that will be important to keep in mind, but it’s still Microsoft or Sony’s ball to take and go home with.

I’ll admit it’s all speculation and worry at this point, but admit it: a best-case scenario where everything still works, like in PC gaming, is probably a pipe dream. This is the point where I shake my fists at PC gamers sitting up in the cloud on Steam at this moment. But this is an issue that will be wider than gaming within the next 10 years; seeing the gaming industry’s reaction is going to be fascinating and, potentially, vital to digital rights beyond our favorite little corner of the entertainment world.

When I started the Retrospective Overdrive program, it was to break up tedium and see how things have changed. I wanted to go a good period of time without just doing what I’ve done the past few years — nothing but playing Pro Evo Soccer.

But, why? It’s just a game; hell, it’s just a sports game, and I’m sure many who read the site look down on us who kick and throw balls virtually as if we’re some sort of cro-magnon anomaly, cavemen who have miraculously found fire and Xbox Live. It keeps coming back to style, though, for me. Very few other games have allowed me to express creativity as well as Konami’s Pro Evo/Winning Eleven series and, in particular, Pro Evo Soccer 2010.

Freshman year of college I picked up a PlayStation 2 after seeing how white-hot Gran Turismo 4 looked. Of course, I’d also heard about how good Konami’s soccer games were and since that wasn’t great on the Xbox, I bought it. I wasn’t a newcomer to soccer games — strong addictions to FIFA 2004 and 2005 prove otherwise — but Winning Eleven 8 was a good replacement, if a bit ugly at times.

This is where the addiction started in earnest: Winning Eleven 9 ('05-'06 season).

Winning Eleven 9, though, damn near killed me. I had to put my PS2 in the closet during finals because of that nonsense. And a couple years later, well after its sell-by date, WE9 kept me company when my first Xbox 360 succumbed to the inevitable, shuffled off this mortal coil and was sent to Texas to get fixed. WE9 doesn’t have a time-played tracker but I’d guess I put at least 150 hours into that damn thing, probably more. A few up-and-down years later, PES 2010 promised to be good, and FIFA was underwhelming, so the decision was simple. I’ve since put over 200 hours into PES 2010 in 15 months.

This again begs the question, “Why?”

The ball is round, the game is simple, but provides a clean canvas for you to express yourself — so long as you don’t use your hands. What both WE9 and PES 2010 allowed me to do is play a sport with the sort of creativity you see in real life but that is not found in any other sports video games. Basketball and soccer are a bit unique in that creativity, freedom and expression are viable offensive strategies. Football is all about execution, baseball is just one gigantic fucking spreadsheet by now, and hockey is too chaotic and compact with few moments of zen. But basketball and soccer both can be moments of sports art — and its particularly effective in the latter. Soccer inspires effusiveness and poetry, as seen both in the brilliant blog The Run of Play and even in match recaps. American sports are often quantitative, discussing who did how much of what; soccer is entirely qualitative.

Until I became a PES junkie, what I didn’t realize is that FIFA lacked that spark. Playing FIFA is like playing foosball, there’s one good route to take and you can spin the handles around to good effect. PES is more like chess. Attacking and creating a goal in PES is a multiple-choice question with no wrong answer, so long as the ball goes in the back of the net; the “right” way may vary by situation, but it’s in your hands. Want to fire in crosses from the wing? Go ahead. Want to have intricate passing through the middle, leading to a shot? Have at it. Fast or slow, wide or narrow, the choice is yours. The biggest cliche in sports gaming is that “it looks like the real thing,” and while FIFA may look like it in still screenshots, it’s a different story in motion.

This is all the biggest factor behind why I keep playing the game: most every match feels like a new challenge, and when you’re playing other teams that are good, you really have to account for the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses to capitalize on your own. For me, it’s methodical yet utterly addictive. I think I have about 20 goal highlights from PES 2010 saved, and no two are alike. It’s the journey, not the destination, that matters.

Add in other sports game and video game tropes, like players waxing and waning in skills as the years go on and new stars rising, and the variables multiply. As those factors change, so too does your lineup; as somebody who follows soccer I can attest that, in this way, art imitates life. Now that I’ve put so much time into this series of games, I’m not worried about the physics or controls; I understand those implicitly. When I play sports with my friends, I learn what they like to do and where they like to go; in the same way that playing sports with friends presents certain stable factors, playing PES for me is comfort and freedom within a ruleset. I know how the ball bounces, but it’s up to me to capitalize.

In that way, PES is like playing sports in real life — rewarding practice, persistence, and presenting subtle twists with every game.

Video game ads on television are often terrible. Being the sole member of the Silicon Sasquatch executive triumvirate who watches sports on TV on a regular basis, I’m also the one who gets exposed to a lot of the big-budget video game advertising campaigns. As a gamer with an interest in the business side of the industry, it’s always interesting to see which games are trying to push for mainstream attention — and by what means.

That made the new Dead Space 2 advertisement currently getting national air time all that much worse. Go ahead and watch the ad – it’s right there at the top of the post. I can wait a minute for you.

Without sounding too flippant, let me just say: Thank you, Electronic Arts, for dragging videogames back 10 years in the public’s eye.

There are a few significant things wrong with that ad:

• The campaign implies that all gamers want is a healthy serving of the old ultraviolence, topped with extra violence with a serving of some blood and guts on the side. “It’s everything you love in a game” is one of the more misguided and alienating quotes I’ve heard in a while.
• It’s trying to sell the game as a deplorable, hyper-violent “game your mom will hate” — to the degree that the website teased on the final title card is YourMomHatesThis.com.

I’ve seen the ad on TV and YouTube over and over, and I just can’t get past how ill-advised the entire campaign appears to be. Let’s start with the most egregious complaint: The thesis of the entire ad campaign is, essentially, “this game is awesome because it’s all the things your mom will hate.” That doesn’t exactly seem like the strongest point of recommendation for the game. Not only is it a flimsy claim to make, but it’s aimed at a specific target demographic — teenagers who listen to angsty music and say “no, fuck YOU, Dad!” — who happen to (generally) be younger than the game’s listed Mature rating.

That is a real delicate point: I can’t think of many adult gamers who are going to think the campaign is funny, let alone persuasive. Frankly, the “Your mom is going to HATE this” tactic really only resonates with teenagers. It looks like EA is trying to market directly at teenagers by taking this stance, and it’s worrying; there’s definitely an ethical issue in advertising an M-rated game to a demographic under the age of 18. And with the videogame industry already fighting to protect its freedom of speech, marketing a violent videogame to underage consumers isn’t exactly the sort of press needed at this moment.

This ad campaign reeks of desperation. Dead Space was born in a period where Electronic Arts was trying to live up to its name, putting out risky games like Mirror’s Edge and attempting to cater to critics as much as the mass audience. Clearly it hasn’t been as successful as anticipated, so out come the gimmicks. It reeks of the shenanigans EA’s marketing teams pulled trying to draw attention to Dante’s Inferno last year, including splashing for a Super Bowl ad. They must be desperate for attention, seeing as how the Halo and Gears of War series have gone the subdued route in the past in advertising equally violent, equally M-rated games. And never mind the thought of what Fox News could do with these ads.

Subtlety suggests confidence in the product, but gimmicky, flashy, trashy advertising? Not so much. EA should show more confidence in Dead Space 2.

When was the last time you played an older console game? If it’s been a while, you may have forgotten about some of the headaches brought on by old game designs or technology. While there’s a certain charm to the gameplay and graphics of many older games, there are also definite problems. It’s here that we catalog those changes and remind you why progress is often for the best.

Recently, I fired up the good ol’ Sega Dreamcast. I wanted to throw down with Nick on some Virtua Tennis, but before we could get our serve and backhand action on, I had to do some searching. Yep — I had to find which memory card my Virtua Tennis save was on.

With the implementation of hard drives first on the original Xbox and now on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the need for memory cards is reduced. And now that Xbox 360 consoles can move files on USB thumb-drives (a capability PS3s already had), there’s zero need for proprietary memory cards — and we are all the better for it.

Having to search through a small stack of memory cards to find the right file is just a pain in the ass. Moreover, in the PlayStation era, memory was an incredibly limited resource; some games would take up entire memory cards with save data. Other games would only allow you to have one save on a memory card, necessitating having multiple cards and swapping them around. Plus, they’re a tiny nightmare: easy to lose, never right where you left them, prone to losing saves and (in the case of Dreamcast VMUs) always whining for batteries. Back when I still gamed on my Dreamcast most often, I would have three or four VMUs plugged in at one time; of course all the batteries were dead (because the VMU batteries lasted about five minutes and were expensive) so I’d be greeted to a chorus of beeps whenever I powered the system on.

A chorus of beeps is almost as annoying as trying to find where the save data is, for those wondering.

Having larger-capacity options built in provides greater options. With even as little as 20 gigabytes of storage, there’s never a need to worry about making space for game saves or patches; plus, with more space available all the time, there’s the possibility of downloading extra content to add on to games or demos to try games. With a hard drive in each PS3 and most Xbox 360s, this means developers have more room to play with — and whether that’s more songs for Rock Band, extra levels in games, or saving photos or other user-created in-game content, we benefit. And with USB thumb drive-based storage capability now in 360s along with PS3s, it’s a large enough chunk of memory to take those saves portably.

Sure, if your hard drive craps out you’re toast. Having more memory means more to lose. But the same has happened with memory cards over the years, and at least hard drives are a damn sight more useful.

Naturally, I would place most first- and third-person shooters, most sports games, racing games, and fighting games into the “skill” category, while RPGs and adventure games dominate the “story” zone. Sure, a game like Mass Effect 2 may have wonderful shooting mechanics, but the game’s focus isn’t on a combat engine that’s balanced for multiplayer, where time investment and development of skill is rewarded. Instead, it focuses on advancing a captivating story with action scenes designed to make the player feel empowered. While it may help engage the player in the conflict, it’s not the same as the combat in a balanced, multiplayer-focused shooter like Halo or Call of Duty. Even the incredibly tight combat engine in a modern Zelda title is focused on a single-player experience, as its traditional “get this new tool and make use of it in the dungeon” gameplay is designed to act as a ramp to climb throughout the duration of Link’s quest.

Conversely, your classic Street Fighter, Soul Calibur, or other fighting game may have a story mode, but it’s secondary fluff on top of the fighting engine, learning characters’ move sets, and how to become a better fighter. Racing games are the same way; simulation games like Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo are about the feeling of driving, improving yourself as a driver and mastering the physics engine at the heart of the game, not a narrative. And, of course, shooters like Halo and Call of Duty have engines that lend themselves to a level playing field for truly competitive multiplayer.

Using these different lenses, then, it’s interesting to view the changes Blizzard is making within Starcraft II to play to each of these strengths. While the multiplayer modes (as previewed during the beta period and available now with the retail release of Wings of Liberty) seemed like a graphical and game-engine evolution of the original Starcraft, the company has taken a different tack with single player. Of course multiplayer has been updated in many ways, but single player no longer contains all of the same details as multi. Some units are only available in the campaign, as is the ability to make customization choices through a branching path in the single-player mode.

While these sort of branching changes would inevitably break multiplayer — having to balance all the possibilities could be impossible, even for a company with resources like Blizzard — they help make the single-player experience a more robust and individualized process. I’ve heard on different podcasts a variety of laments for taking one upgrade choice over another: in the same way that the branching paths in the game open up unique experiences, so does having that permanent branching upgrade tree. Blizzard introduced more Terran options into the single player campaign, and once you make a decision, you have to live with it.

It may not be an analogous situation, but the new Medal of Honor game from EA is following a slightly similar tack — at the very least, the single-player and multi-player modes are being handled by two different companies within the EA hivemind; EA’s Danger Close Games in Los Angeles is crafting the single-player mode, while Battlefield series developer DICE is handling the multiplayer. This outsourced style of development may be the future of AAA games: the first Bioshock famously had segments of the game outsourced throughout the 2K studios worldwide.

However, separating the development of single-player components from multiplayer — and the admission that they take different approaches to make work — is a fascinating evolution in the history of creating video games. It’s an admission that there are different goals regarding crafting a single-player experience and a finely tuned multiplayer game that allows for competitive play. Moreover, for super-large AAA-quality games in the future where gamers demand both an engaging single-player campaign and competitive multiplayer, dividing the creation duties could become the standard development strategy.

In the wake of E3 coverage laced with “it’s not for us,” the rise of games on social media sites and iPhones, and Microsoft and Sony showcasing their motion-control interfaces more thoroughly, this question is coming up more often. An unscientific analysis of quote-unquote hardcore gamers would suggest they’re focused more and more on what appears to be a shrinking market. Nintendo’s press conference at E3 this year, in which it showed off new Zelda, Donkey Kong, and Kid Icarus titles, was held up as a breath of relief; the reaction within core gamers was along the lines of, “Finally, Nintendo is making games for us again!”

A truism about business that I’ve learned in graduate school is that expanding markets begin to fragment and form niches. The disenfranchisement that gamers feel and lack of games “for us” that hardcore gamers squawk about isn’t because that market is getting smaller, but that the video games market, in general, is widening and getting larger. Once upon a time, AAA-level games were so few and similar that the hardcore audience could enjoy them all; now, though, incredibly good games of diverse genres are overwhelming people who are used to playing everything. Gamers want the market to grow and for video games to become more popular and widely accepted, but the reality is it’s not happening by having “hardcore” games become more popular; gaming as a medium is becoming more popular, but it’s not through having five Modern Warfare 2s instead of just one.

In reality, what we’re seeing is the market and segmentation within video games begin to mature. Movie fans don’t complain that every movie is exactly like a movie that was popular before, or that not every new film is a graphics-laden blockbuster. Films are made for and targeted toward kids, teenagers, housewives and intellectuals; games are beginning to be made and target to audiences that aren’t just 13-year-old boys (or others who share the same tastes). Cable TV services offer hundreds of channels; this doesn’t mean you’re not a passionate TV fan if you don’t watch all of them. The splintering doesn’t mean that definitive, massively popular, medium-defining events can’t happen, either; TV still has shows like “Lost” that attract huge numbers, and box offices still have films that cross over a wide swath of audiences.

I feel that if you are a person who is passionate about a game and spend time playing it, you’re a gamer. Putting hours into a game and sharing the experience with friends is what this medium is all about. It doesn’t matter whether that’s in Modern Warfare, World of Warcraft, Madden, Words with Friends or Farmville. The genre and method by which you play games should be the catalyst for fun; just as entertainment comes in a variety of forms for TV and films, so it will in games.

Hype is a strange thing. It causes all sorts of people to vehemently defend a product they’ve never even touched. And despite my best efforts to remain neutral about the release of certain new videogames — in a laughable effort to sustain my school-bred journalistic ethics — I’m as susceptible to flashy advertisements and smart marketing as any modern consumer.

Red Dead Redemption, which is out today, coerced me to put my money down based on its trailers and previews alone. My fistful of (60) dollars is purchasing an untested game that I’ve barely seen or read about, and no matter how capable Rockstar is as a developer, every company makes mistakes (i.e., Capcom’s unsuccessful attempts at building western-focused franchises). This horse-riding, cattle-rustling and outlaw-shooting game could be a flop, but for more than a few reasons I don’t believe that’s the truth.

Instead, I’m going to tell you exactly why I’ve saddled up to ride into the hype-laden sunset.

The Details

Broncos buck as Marston lassos

Two words: horse physics.

Rockstar San Diego has taken the NaturalMotion Euphoria physics engine used in Grand Theft Auto IV and significantly tweaked its capabilities, which are best seen in the first introductory gameplay trailer. What looked exaggerated and comical in GTA — the stupor of walking around Liberty City drunk, for example — now looks more natural in Red Dead Redemption. Watching the horses run in slow-motion reminds me of Eadweard J. Muybridge’s experiments with photography and animal physiology, which proved that the hooves of a horse leave the ground during its stride. Sure, Red Dead is primarily concerned with shooting banditos in the head, but the level of care taken by the development team to make its world look as alive as possible is greatly appreciated. Every little bit helps the player’s suspension of disbelief.

The Developer

If only this was a screenshot for Back to the Future: The Game

If there’s one thing Rockstar Games’ studios are good at, it’s their capability to make nefarious activities enjoyable. From Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ drug running to Bully’s truancy, Rockstar titles drip a thick glaze of style and atmosphere onto the worlds in which they take place. I, for one, laughed at the idea of going to school as a focus of the gameplay in Bully, but later discovered how original and solid the concept was.

Red Dead Redemption is a modern take on the classic pulp fiction of the Wild West, although it seems closer to Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven than Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. On the surface, this is a clichéd tale of revenge, in which protagonist John Marston is on a manhunt for the remaining members of his traitorous, disbanded gang. He’s out for blood, and he’ll get it. The plot may not be original, but the approach is. Where Red Dead Revolver fell a bit flat in 2004, its sequel will likely succeed by the virtue of its gritty realism, historical accuracy and adrenaline-fueled action. I don’t expect this to be a Western simulator, but I do expect it to carry on a Rockstar tradition of weaving complex virtual tapestries of drama, violence, cinematic flair and innovation. Some might berate the developers for creating one more open-world sandbox title, but when did a more appropriate period of history exist to set a free-roaming videogame than the Wild West?

By using a professional narrator and structuring the trailers in a documentary format, Rockstar’s latest game comes off as a more impressive — and legitimate – idea. Very rarely do advertisement campaigns take the time to establish historical accuracy for the period they’re set in. So it’s refreshing then to discover that Red Dead looks more like an homage to the West than a parody of it. I’m not as familiar with the true history of the West as I am the evolution of urban life at the turn of the 20th century; even so, the trailers’ words about the encroaching effects of a technologically advanced United States on the lawless deserts and canyons of the Wild West are accurate and fascinating. Whether or not the game will make a point of highlighting this dynamic change in American society and culture remains to be seen, but it’s good that Rockstar San Diego appears to have wrote in at least one additional narrative theme outside of the core focus on revenge. I still expect there to be numerous other subplots and themes that intertwine with the main story, as is customary in other Rockstar games.

The Exploration

Not so much riding into the sunset as riding beside it

In Red Dead Redemption I will ride to the highest cliff to gaze at a breaking sunrise, while tumbleweeds roll hundreds of feet below, buzzards screech in the sky above and a camp fire smolders into the ashy ground behind me. I will hunt wildlife, and sell the grizzly pelts I’ve skinned to the general store so I can buy a rare six-shooter. I will use that gun to take back a gold mine from the bandits who have overrun it. I will then use that gun and a horse I took from the dead bandits to hijack a train. And in all of this, I will be playing one game the way I want to without feeling pressured to continue its plot.

Some gamers prefer linear stories. They want to be told what to do, but also hope to have a shred of leeway to do things as they see fit. Instead of limiting ingenuity and creativity within the game’s environment, Red Dead Redemption provides its players with three spacious regions to find hidden treasures, landmarks and random NPC encounters. There are also over 30 individual species of wildlife to hunt. Hunting requires players to bring bait, binoculars and a skinning knife; animals can be tracked, and they will fight back. Now I’m not a hunter by any stretch of the imagination, but games can help us enact fantasies about activities we’d never do ourselves. The hunting minigame, which appears to blend itself into the exploration element by introducing animals at random intervals, has kindled my imagination. Perhaps it’s the fact that hunting is more realistic than finding hidden packages or shooting pigeons.

The Multiplayer

What a drag. LOL!!1

Free-roam multiplayer is where, in my semi-educated opinion, the bulk of the online action will be. Here’s another great trailer all about it. Go on and watch it, I’ll wait.

The game’s free-roam mode injects all of the goal-oriented tasks, like team deathmatch and hunting, into the expansive single-player world. Instead of having to select these modes from a menu separately, my friends and I can accomplish our goals when and how we want to. Posses can be formed with up to eight players in an MMO-like fashion. Too many games tread the line between MMO and single-mode repetition, and they usually get it wrong (read: Borderlands). But maybe this time, one game will get it right.

Red Dead’s multiplayer has me eager to ride alongside my friends while we level up and unlock new avatars and horses. This particular free-roam idea was last seen in GTA IV, where it was a novel, albeit a boring, idea. Liberty City was sizable, but it still wasn’t “big” enough to hold my interest online. Ironically, a less-populated outdoor playground seems like it will have more to do than GTA’s urban metropolis.

The Conclusion

Marston's outtie 5000

So now I wait here at my desk, watching the clock tick by in an unusually indolent fashion. I’m anticipating Red Dead Redemption, a game I have a lot of reasons to like, but I’m without any solid evidence to trust my feelings. I could look at Metacritic, but a 94 or a 74 won’t change my mind either way: I’m ready for something new, and a cowboy game is new enough to me.

Amazon says my package was “out for delivery” in Portland, Oregon at 6:12 am. Only a few hours to go, then. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

And if you need to join a posse, just look me up on Xbox Live. You can call me by my cowboy name: Theodore “Doc Dynamite” Perkins.

Aaron

After five minutes of a capture-the-flag match in the Halo: Reach beta, I thought to myself: “I know what this is. This is Halo 2 — and 3. Ugh.” Yes, I really did “ugh” in my mind.

Halo multiplayer is meant for split-screen or system link parties held among banter-prone friends who throw out a mixture of taunts and encouragement. The online version of Halo doesn’t appeal to me — it wasn’t made for my tastes. But as I was downloading the latest Halo beta I told myself I must like Reach’s online component. For once I wanted to understand the zealous admiration Halo fans have for the series’ online portion. I also wanted to know why some people won’t let Halo 2 die.

My plan was to approach Reach without any negative preconceptions. I thought it would be easy thanks to excellent video documentaries like “Once More Unto the Breach,” which demonstrate Bungie’s passion for the numerous changes, tweaks and upgrades to the core single-player experience. I was quick to assume that those changes would carry over to the multiplayer. Unfortunately they don’t, and nothing much has changed as a result. For an overwhelming majority of gamers both part-time and hardcore that’s fantastic news. For me it’s disappointing.

However, the Reach beta does have two things going for it. The class powers add a layer of fun to the experience that the bubble shield and other Halo 3 equipment never fully achieved. Secondly, Bungie’s social filter options are genius. A player can choose different match tags to find “chatty” or “polite” players, and the browser will find games with your similar preferences. I could even search for others at my same skill level. Options like this are brilliant, and they need to become the status quo for other blockbuster console titles.

So maybe I’ll ease up on my hype for awhile. I’ll still browse the news sites and click on the links with “Reach” in the headline, but I’ll be apprehensive. I’ll bide my time until the game is out, and the consensus is clear for the more important parts: the single-player and co-op campaigns.

Nick

I’m a weekender when it comes to Halo. Although I was participating in 16-player fragfests on a weekly basis nearly a decade ago, my love for Halo waned once college — and Halo 2′s online-focused multiplayer — arrived. Like Smash Bros. and Goldeneye before it, I always associated Halo with getting a group of friends crammed together on a couch, blowing each other to pieces and having a grand old time.

But then Xbox Live was born, and Microsoft saw an opportunity for its flagship franchise to lay the foundation for the first significant console-based gaming network. Maybe it had just as much to do with all my friends heading off in different directions at that point in life, but the massive LANs at friends’ houses had long since come to an end and the only way to play Halo together was over a 10Mbps connection with the aid of a wonky, uncomfortable headset. Finally: All the thrills of the Halo experience coupled with the creature comforts of working in a call center.

So yeah, I approached Halo: Reach expecting to be disappointed. And it wasn’t until I had been needled, stuck with a sticky grenade, circle-strafed and bashed with a flag — which only took about two minutes, given my skill level — that the old, familiar Halo rage began to percolate within me. I avoid online shooters on Xbox Live because I don’t want to be forced to share any space, real or virtual, with someone who identifies as XxJUGGALOLZxX.

But at the same time, I felt a tingle of nostalgia coming on. I remembered all the fun I used to have with Halo. And then it dawned on me: the game hadn’t changed — I had.

Fortunately, like Aaron mentioned, Bungie has taken some intelligent steps toward shaping your online play experience to suit your interests. Want to play Oddball with casual, polite, quiet folks who might be just as willing to sit down with a cup of coffee and discuss Proust? Knock yourself out, man.

But ultimately, the only thing you need to know is that Halo: Reach is Halo. It’s Halo 1, 2, 3 and ODST, minus a few significant tweaks in the matchmaking formula and some interesting new game modes thrown into the mix. If you love Halo multiplayer, and your friends love Halo multiplayer, I have no doubt you’re gonna have a blast with Reach. But as a game critic, I’m disappointed that the beta doesn’t indicate a greater willingness on Bungie’s part to develop the Halo formula and to push it forward.

Ducking bullets and returning fire in Modern Warfare 2 has become big business online — but with tons of online players, bugs inevitably crop up.

For all the positives that your yearly Xbox Live gold subscription buys, it comes with one major downfall: the generic Xbox Live asshole. This is not a new phenomenon — Penny Arcade codified the “G.I.F.T.” system more than five years ago — but on two recent major Xbox 360 titles, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Forza Motorsport 3, it appears that the Live team is finally taking a strong stance on cheaters.

But is what’s happening in these titles really cheating, and is the tough-guy stance really the appropriate response?

The Wild West

Xbox Live has always been seen by gamers as a walled garden of sorts. From the early days when the service launched on the original Xbox, there were worries from users that any sort of modifications or hacks to a system would get you kicked off the service — for good. Fears of a permanent ban may have diminished (at least they had prior to Microsoft cleaning house earlier in the fall), but for all intents and purposes, Xbox Live has been a digital Wild West. It’s a land of opportunity with plenty of wonderful features to make use of and mine (not the least of which being playing games online, of course), but you have to deal with cheaters, players taking advantage of glitches in games, people meta-gaming the system and all variety of foul language. In short, it’s got its drawbacks.

Forza Motorsport 3 can be a cruel game, and Turn 10 would argue that cheaters manipulating the game makes it even more difficult.

It’s fascinating, then, to see that Microsoft finally appears to be leaning on some of its biggest development teams to actually do something about the mess gamers make online. Both Modern Warfare 2 and Forza 3 have had glitches almost ruin the online experience recently, and — surprisingly — the developers have responded by pushing back against the cheaters.

Modern Warfare 2′s multiplayer is huge business — it’s number one on Xbox Live activity according to Major Nelson (note that even the two previous CoD titles — World at War and CoD4 — are still in the top 10!). It makes sense that, with that many people actively engaged in their game’s multiplayer component, Infinity Ward and Activision would want to rein in any cheaters.

It appears that Infinity Ward is being proactive against Xbox Live cheating — the recent “javelin” glitch already has a fix, and other issues (like an infinite ammo glitch that spreads like a virus, and issues relating to accidentally being sent to private matches via the public matchmaking) are being addressed soon.

While Forza 3 has only had one major glitch issue to deal with, it was a big one. Players could manipulate the game to create cars that could be re-sold in the game for hundreds of millions — if not billions — of in-game credits. Those credits, while only good within Forza 3, allow players to buy cars, parts, and — crucially to the ecosystem of the in-game economy Turn 10 created in Forza 3 — items off of the in-game storefront. Not only did a glitched bank account mean access to an unlimited supply of designs and vinyl groups — it also meant the storefront’s auctions were easy to dominate.

A Leg to Stand On?

Along with both developers fixing the bugs and glitches and preventing users from accessing them again, users who exploited those glitches have also been banned from Xbox Live — either temporarily or, in some cases, permanently. Can Microsoft do this? Of course it can. As pointed out by Turn 10 Community Manager Che Chou, it’s in the Xbox Live Terms of Use:

“In using the Service, you may not exploit a bug, or make an unauthorized modification, to any software or data to gain unfair advantage in a game, contest, or promotion.”

So not only are modders, who have traditionally had to be wary of Xbox Live bans, on the run, but now glitchers are too.

While developers might have a legal leg to stand on in this case, do they have a moral one? Many gamers feel that the old EA Sports motto should apply here: If it’s in the game, it’s in the game. If there’s an exploit sitting in the finished game, well, the coders should have fixed it in the QA process and it’s their fault. That’s the stance some gamers took in regard to MW2; however, the problem is that it changes the game. In the case of MW2, it changes from a game where you shoot guns to a game where (in the case of the javelin glitch) you have to avoid the suicide bomber with a giant anti-aircraft missile.

In the case of the Forza credit glitch, gamers on forums have pointed out that the exact same glitch was in Forza 2; indeed, glitched Forza 2 cars were being passed out before Forza 3 came out. It’s a very laissez-faire way to approach glitching in games, and one that’s apparently made even more acceptable by the motto of “ship it and patch it later” in development that goes hand-in-hand with the current console generation.

Does the Punishment Fit the Crime?

Of course there have been accidental bans as well. A comment on that Turn 10 blog post linked above was posted by a user who seemingly was wrongfully banned for glitching in Forza 3:

I just logged onto forza and see that my profile has been found to have violated the XBOX Live terms of agreement via a credit exploit.?!?

THIS IS RIDICULOUS! I have never glitched, I don’t even know how, I have about 900,000 credits and I am into season 4, I just race career mode. I haven’t purchased anything on the AH and the only cars I have purchased period are a 2003 350Z, and the GTR from the DLC. All of the cars in my garage are just the ones you get from leveling up.

This is my second game save because I purchased the MW2 elite and had to start over since I don’t have a transfer kit. I am running a triple screen setup, and have enough headaches trying to get that to run properly with my DLC and now this..

I am a 30 year old gamer with no desire to glitch, hack, cheat etc. This is getting out of hand as far as denying my online access when I have done absolutely nothing wrong. I have spent my money on 3plus xboxes, monitors, triple lcd stand, forza 3 LE playseat, and 3 copies of Forza and this happens. I am pretty pissed off right now.

Who do I need to contact about this?

Granted, just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s true, but if this guy’s being honest he has a right to be upset.

Interestingly enough, as part of the solution to the problem, Turn 10 ran an amnesty program in December regarding credit glitching:

Starting this evening (Dec. 12) and all through the weekend, we will be putting up Ford Focus RS for 10s and 100s of millions of credits as an amnesty program for glitchers. If you have gotten credits by cheating, we know all about it and have all the numbers. If you don’t want to get banned next week, I encourage you to go and get rid of your credits by purchasing one of these Ford Focus RS put up in the Auction House by Gamertag “TurnTenStudios”. Do not accept imitations or buy a Focus RS for millions of credits from any Gamertag other than “TurnTenStudios”. Purchase the Focus RS that is appropriate to the amount of credits you glitched and your name will be taken off the list for banning next week – but be sure to stay honest because we’re actually running another scan on Monday to see the outcome. Either way, it’s a chance for folks to come clean and start over.

“Come clean and start over.” That’s certainly an interesting choice of words to use for the situation. Turn 10 takes it seriously because it has tried to create an honest-to-god in-game economy for cars, designs, and auctions in Forza 3. They have released “unicorn cars” — race cars sprinkled into the auction house from time to time — but one of the cries they made against glitchers is that they cornered the market and drove up prices for those cars, creating an unequal economic situation. But how much should the developer intervene in a game’s economy? That’s a question that almost taps into one’s socio-economic stance as much as the debate over public healthcare in the United States does.

It can be hard to stay frosty when somebody's running straight at you with an anti-aircraft missile and a deathwish.

The question comes back to what defines a “glitch,” what defines “cheating,” and what defines just plain-old “cheap” tactics in a videogame. A glitch can enable anything between unbalanced play and flat-out cheating, depending on the circumstance. Cheap is something that you have to rein in on a social level; remember four-player deathmatch Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 back in the day? (Of course you do.) Was my group of friends the only one to ban the Oddjob character model from the game because he was so much shorter than everyone else and, therefore, harder to shoot? Doubtful. Was it cheating? Not really; Oddjob was in the game and designed that way. Did it present an unfair advantage? God yes, which is why he was banned by house rules.

My thought is that the Forza 3 credit deal is a glitch that falls under “cheating,” whereas some of the MW2 ones are glitches that fall into being “cheap” — though the infinite ammo virus skirts into cheating, and the lobby one is plain-old wackiness. However, bringing Xbox Live bans into the equation makes you re-think some of these issues and try to think how developers and the Live team are going to defend their slippery slope.

If you start banning Xbox Live users for something that’s in a gray area — like the javelin glitch — then what in other games becomes a ban-able offense? I’m all for anything that can help clean up Xbox Live — I currently play games only with friends for this very reason — but some glitching and buggy cheapness is something that I think falls on the developers, and they can’t ban away their troubles.

Will there be cries to fix things that straddle the line between glitch and cheap in the name of game balance? Of course — that’s the developers’ jobs. With online play, a rising number of increasingly complicated games and so many people playing games like MW2 online with an almost religious devotion, it’s going to stress even the toughest multiplayer game engine. The most rigorous online testing teams can’t playtest a game enough to uncover every possible bug before release. But glitches and bug still need to be found and eradicated — especially ones as egregious as the javelin glitch in MW2, or the money glitch in Forza — or else everybody loses out.