Warning: This review is for parents with small kids or adults unhealthily obsessed with Alvin & The Chipmunks.  The latest Alvin & The Chipmunks game is a vast improvement over the last two, even if I still feel they all should have been Guitar Hero/Rock Band type games.  Chipwrecked, coinciding with the third movie, is a dance game set to Chipmunk versions of some classic tunes.  I was a huge fan of the Chipmunks as a kid, so I’m happy to give all of their recent stuff a shot with my daughter, who can’t get enough of this game.  There’s 30 ‘munked versions of classic songs to choose from, however none of the popular dance songs from the movie’s soundtrack are present.  On the other hand, you haven’t had a ‘holy cow I’m old’ moment until you’ve danced with your kid to Alvin and The  Chipmunks singing The Clash’s ‘I Fought The Law’.  You can choose to dance along with the boys or the Chipettes, who are customizable with different outfits and bling as you progress through the game in several different locations from the film.  This is pretty much a no-brainer if your kids are into the dance games and the Chipmunks, so have Santa put one under the tree.

Prank Packs are fake gift boxes featuring ridiculous, yet plausible items on the packaging, which conceal the real gift inside.  I used the Dream Griddle box you see here for a birthday gift recently and it completely worked.  In fact, with a couple of little white lies, it worked even better on someone who saw it later on who was amazed by it and was thinking about buying one for her boyfriend.  The Prank Pack became a topic of conversation for the rest of the day, not to mention a now go-to joke for who knows how long into the future.  Check out the full line of boxes at PrankPack.com for some more gems like the iDrive and iArm, to mount your iPad on your steering wheel or forearm, Snuggies for multiple people, automatic Pet Petters and motorized rolling pins.  The photos and descriptions are awesomely realistic and at the same time completely ludicrous.  You can easily convince someone they saw these on a late night infomercial.  The Dream Griddle’s fine print includes a recipe for Raspberry Pancakes in Bed that tells you to set the Dream Griddle to the ‘Pancakes/Keilbasa’ setting and also boasts an included sleep mask and plug for its sister product, the Dream Fryer, a bedside alarm clock/deep fryer.  Definitely recommended to get some laughs at your next holiday or birthday party, and especially great for those awful office Secret Santas.  The only catch is you may want to get the box back after the fun is over, as the Prank Packs will set you back $8 each or 3 for $20 on the website. Prank Packs are also available at Bed, Bath & Beyond stores.

Saints Row: The Third is a messed up video game! It is messed up in a good way. Looking at this game and watching a few trailers I thought to myself that this was another GTA type game. Yes it does have the same idea as GTA (Grand Theft Auto for the non-gamers), but it takes that idea to new heights…or lows depending on how you look at it. I totally enjoyed playing this game.  I have never played any game from the Saints Row series before and it looks like I was missing out on all the fun.

Right off the bat you start out babysitting a tiger and dismember wrestlers with a chainsaw. This game is not looking for you to have a follow any serious missions. It is just about kicking ass and never looking back.  If you are a fan of the Saints Row series, the next few lines you will already know, but for others like myself who is new to the game series here is a brief overview of the plot. As a member of the Saints you start off in the city of Stillwater where you and your family ran things and now you travel to Steelport where you are looking to take over the city from three other gangs. You try to recruit new members in your gang and start taking out the competition one by one.

Talking with the staff that created this game, they said that they wanted every mission to have a “Holy S***” moment and for the most part the game’s missions lived up to that statement. The gameplay is great since it has the “open” concept to where you can go anywhere in the city. Even after I completed the main storyline I could go back and finish the side missions and just create havoc. Saints Row has a great online community set up to create your own character and play with friends online.  There are some great cameos in the game like Burt Reynolds and Hulk Hogan. Just like other games, when you complete certain missions you unlock weapons, gadgets, and cool rides like a tank with graphics that are from the Atari 2600 days. The ending was a bit off with how it closed the story, but with a game like this the ending is not a deal breaker on whether I would play this game.

If you are looking to play a game to just blow things up, run a gang, shoot an octopus at people, hang with zombies, beat people up with sex toys, and customize your ride, then pick up this game. It is available for the XBOX 360, PS3, and PC on November 15th. To find out more on Saints Row: The Third and to pre-order click here and check out the trailer below.

Gather ’round, all you children of the Eighties. It’s time to cast your memories back and test your knowledge of that most wondrous of consoles, the Nintendo Entertainment System, in all its glory.

Impress us with your awesome eight-bit knowledge. Dazzle us with your up up down down left right left right B A B A Select Start skill. Send your IDs for each numbered pic to ro (dot) rosaka (at) gmail (dot) com for a chance to get a shout-out from Ro on an upcoming episode of Atomic Trivia War 9000! You can also get help from our fan community on Facebook.

The following post was written by Greg Spalding (a.k.a thebiglebowski on our forums and @Lebowski74 on Twitter)

I’d never owned a console before. There had never been a SNES, Master System or an Atari console of any kind under the TV in my room. I’d always just been a casual observer of friends playing the latest incarnation of Street Fighter, so getting a PlayStation was a big thing for me, despite it costing me more than a week’s wages at the time. Back in the heady days of 1995, I managed to cobble together sufficient funds to buy myself a original, day of release, Sony PlayStation.  It was that or a Sega Saturn, which when you think about it isn’t really a choice.

And so it went. This grey slab that sat next to the TV took over my life. Wipeout, Tekken and Tomb Raider were titles I kept coming back to, and with the release of Doom, my appetite was whet for the first-person shooter genre of games.

Things continued in this manner for the next 14 years or so, with the humble PlayStation coming with me from house to house, finally relinquishing it’s grip in 2001 when I got a PS2.

Someone mentioned something called a ExBox (sic), or some such nonsense, but I had no time for bit players in the console wars. Microsoft made PC software, right? What business did they have trying to usurp Sony from their throne of power. How I scoffed at friends who abandoned the Sony Console for this new, flash in the pan, big as a house X-Box (with it’s massive controllers).It didn’t fool me for a minute, my PS2 still held firm, and the games kept coming.

Moving on in years, and obviously not learning any lessons, Microsoft released an updated version of their machine, the X-Box 360. Yeah, right. Should have been called X-Box 180 for the about turn it would have to take when the PlayStation 3 came stomping all over the scene, what with its Blu-ray player and wireless connections.

Sheep that I am, I duly forked out for a PS3, safe in the knowledge that Sony could do no wrong. Ok, so the fan was a bit loud sometimes, but I’d also heard the 360 sounded like a 747 taking off.

I couldn’t wait for the chance to play games online, with real people. I didn’t even mind of they beat me soundly, it would still be fun. But within a short period of time, one of my 2 controllers had developed a fault, probably due to me launching it across the room after being spanked by some smack talking 12 year old playing Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare. And everyone I knew was playing online on X-Box LIVE, rather than the PlayStation Network, so I wasn’t even playing with friends or people I knew.

I put my misgivings aside, and played some Modern Warfare 2 split-screen with a friend on his 360. How on earth did people manage with these silly controllers? I really didn’t see any point in playing any further. That was until I played with people I knew, across the X-Box LIVE platform.

Something clicked. I don’t know what, but suddenly the controller felt natural in my hands, speaking to people I knew and being able to hear their reaction when I shot them in the head was, quite literally, a game changer.

Before I knew it, I was on the lookout for an X-Box 360. I pondered buying a brand new one, in the new ‘slim’ format, but in the end, one became available through the one and only Tristan O’Field, who parted with his 60GB 360 and a number of games for a very reasonable price.

As soon as I got my hands on it, I got an X-Box LIVE membership, and spent many evenings playing Modern Warfare 2 with the likes of Rich, Boz & Andrew, as well as many others.

I’d been converted. The X-Box is now my “go to” console. I still have the PS3, but it sits there, rarely used. I am about ready to part with it for good, and sell it along with the dozen or so games I have. I’ll put the proceeds toward a stand alone Blu-ray player, as I’ve built quite a selection of movies on that format since having the PS3. I had given thought to keeping both consoles, but to be honest, I’d only be keeping the PS3 for its exclusive titles, and there are not enough of them to warrant keeping the console.

It may have taken me a long time, but I finally grew to love the X-Box, the community of online players and the gaming experience it provides. These things are more than enough to prove that all those people who said “You should get an X Box” for the last 5 years were right all along.

Sugar Lake, Wright County, Minnesota

By Tony Pucci (host of the Pollyanna Cowgirl Records Podcast)

The air had ceased moving. It hung like a weight around the afternoon’s shoulders, a viscous syrup to be swum through. The sun brushed the ground with a transparent honey, and flies buzzed lazily, if they buzzed at all. The grass stank with a humid sweat as I raced across our cabin’s backyard. I was ecstatic; my grandmother had just given me two dollars to spend at “The Resort”!

My pace then slowed as I stepped onto the dirt road that roller-coasted behind the row of cabins. Typical of any kid during summer, I wasn’t wearing any shoes, and the road had many rocks anxious to become acquainted with the soles of my feet. I kept my stride between the edges of one of the two strips of smooth, worn-down tracks made by years of cars passing through. Filtered by a canopy of trees, rays of sunlight dappled the ground, seemingly dancing with the stream of dark, pungent motor oil spots which had dripped off the boats being charioted on trailers to and from the lakeshore. My excitement grew as I passed the familiar fish-shaped signs, each with a name on it marking another family’s driveway and cabin; they told me I was getting closer.

The road now veered left and entered the sunlight at the same time. A row of rusty mailboxes stood to my left while a white fence bordered me on the right. Up ahead I saw the Sugar Lake Resort, a peeling green shack that the locals called “The Resort”. I walked up its weathered concrete steps and opened the screen door. As I entered, to my left I saw an old jukebox in the corner of the dance floor; to my right was the bar along with a collection of tables. Next, I went over to the bar and bought a Slim Jim, getting my change in quarters. I knew these snacks had likely been sitting on the shelf for as long as I had been alive, but I didn’t care; I had a higher purpose. Turning my attention to the main reason I had come here, I now went into a small room to the right of the bar. Before me stood one of the most beautiful sights my ten-year-old eyes had ever seen: two ancient pinball machines, a pool table, and a foosball game.

Eagerly, I half-ran over to a pinball machine called “Solar City”, almost as if someone might get to it before me, even though I was the only person in the room. As usual, the machine was not turned on, but years of hanging out up here during the summer had taught me where the on/off switch was. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled underneath the game, running my fingers along its inside right edge until I found a small hole at the back of the machine. Reaching up inside the hole with my index finger, I felt a mixture of satisfaction and excitement as I heard the familiar bells, pops, and the spinning “click-click-click” of the counter resetting itself as I turned the machine on.
I crawled out from underneath the machine and fed it my first quarter. The game sang to me a percussive “duh-duh” in order to tell me that it too was ready to play. After the steel pinball had slid into the starting gate, I pulled back on the spring-tensioned pin and sent it shooting onto the field of play. As the ball struck the initial bumper and flashing lights and ringing bells announced my first points, I mentally shouted an intense “yes!” I was in heaven.

I spent the next hour working my way through my supply of quarters and taking tiny nibbles out of my Slim Jim, slowly savoring its flavor. It was a memorable if not a monumental afternoon. At a time when a child is supposed to be free from worry, it was exactly as it should be.

The road behind my parent's cabin...

What can I say? I’m a sucker for buildy-breaky games, especially ones packed with the promise of hidden treasure and weapons of power.

Call me a Diablo freak, a Minecraft fiend, a Castlevania junky.

So when Re-Logic launched a game that combined the best of them all — free-form structure building, crafting shadow swords, and even defeating skeleton dragons — of course I downloaded it. Especially at the $9.99 price point.

Omar and I have beaten Terraria in the past couple of weeks, hacking our way through sub-terranian dungeons, mixing magical potions, and mining nether rocks while imps blast away with fiery breath.

Of course, the biggest selling point of the game was its non-linear gameplay. It’s a sandbox game in a pretty open world, much like Grand Theft Auto — but instead of stealing cars and beating up hookers, your eight-bit Terraria character is set free to tunnel where he pleases, build his own castles (above or below ground), decorate to your taste with tables, chairs, windows, clocks, flowers, books, and more.

Build in the safety of daylight, but when it gets dark, fear the onslaught of zombies and killer eyeballs. The first couple of times the nasties emerge can be pretty creepy, but low-powered and repetitive mobs will bore you pretty quickly. That’s where the bosses come in. You’ll summon mile-long death worms and the giant “Eye of Cthulu,” and you’ll need some bitching gear to take them down.

There’s no Final Fantasy leveling system. You’ll get stronger by collecting reagents found in your travels and combining them into a new arsenal. It’s pretty Zelda-esque that way.

Overall, Omar and I really liked the way that low-res, simple gameplay can be recombined to outclass a lot of multi-million-dollar gaming productions.

But that doesn’t mean Terraria is perfect.

There are some big red flags: Let’s start with networking. The multiplayer option doesn’t just work; we had to use Hamachi to create a virtual private network, and even with that there were still hosting limitations for two people to play co-op.

This seems to be the biggest failing among indy developers these days. We’ve toyed with several “little” games lately, thanks to Valve’s startup-friendly distribution network, but they all have glitchy online experiences (anyone tried Magicka lately?).

Terraria also suffers from poor endgame execution. Omar and I had an awful lot of fun right up until we had the best armor and the best weapons… and then there was nothing to use them on. What fun is a flaming broadsword against beginner-level monsters? Why bother to collect ungodly amounts of gold to buy an awesome rifle if there are no more bosses to beat?

The only endgame temptation Terraria offers is a mysterious dungeon filled with “treasure” that is useless to you once you’re strong enough to enter the dungeon.

Finally, there need to be far more collectible dongles, gadgets, whatsits, thingies, and oojamaflips to hunt for. Diablo had this covered, as did Borderlands. In those games, the hunt was always on for a bigger, better, badder equipable item. In Terraria (even faster than in Minecraft), the well of objects you can collect and create runs dry pretty quickly.

It would also help to add unique items into the world — I have, for instance, Hermes boots that let me run faster when worn. I’d love to also make or find other pairs that have added bonuses such as flame resistance, added defense, or wall-climbing abilities.

In short, I want a +1 mace of dark energy, or some such nerdy shit.

I’m not going to give Terraria a rating out of 10, or five stars, or anything that simple. And I’m not going to bash it ad nauseum. I’ll just recommend it to people who want a casual gaming experience that’s also a bit of a puzzle platformer, and who can forgive a few bumps in the road. It’s a good little time-waster with more under the hood than you’d expect, but a lot of room for improvement. Hopefully, future patches from Re-Logic will make it a bit more robust.

This post was written by Jason, the host of Atomic Trivia War 9000, who is worse at action-RPG games than Omar. And pretty much everyone else. Except Andrew.

Brink was a game that I had followed with some interest. Its’ setting and surrounding story could have been almost written with me in mind. Set in a dystopic future where a utopian floating city called The Arc has collapsed under the burden of the needy and desperate into out-and-out civil war. It’s reminiscent of the floating city state in Snow Crash.

Of course this is all set dressing. The grist of the game is the conflict between The Arc’s ‘Security’ and ‘Resistance’, the rag tag group who are forced to live in the shipping container and rusting-hull shanty towns that surround the city proper.

Then there’s the fact that what we’re looking at is an 8 vs 8, class-based conflict with staggered objectives through interesting and fascinating environments built with idTech. It’s not as special as the hype from Splash Damage and Bethesda may have had you believe, but it’s good solid gameplay of a kind I enjoy.

This all combined to make a game that seemed right up my alley. Then they revealed their parkour system. A button that when held down not only makes you character sprint but also enables them to freely traverse the environment, free-running style. I was a huge Mirror’s Edge booster and I’m a fan of the environment navigation in Assassin’s Creed. I was hooked.

Then I second guessed myself.

Living in the UK one of the things we have to deal with is our media release dates are often somewhat behind our transatlantic cousins. Indeed, they got hold of Brink several days earlier than I could have and just as I was about to pre-order the game I started to hear a host of bad reviews and negative comments. In the end I decided that I’d brave it and bought the game.

The reason I decided to brave it anyway was that the vast majority of complaints I saw were, by and large, from people criticising the single player experience, specifically for the AI of the bots (AI opponents provided in lieu of human competitors). This didn’t concern me and the reason it didn’t is simple. Not only is the issue one that Splash Damage can and have said they will address in a patch but it’s also irrelevant.

Splash Damage are a British developer who got their start developing multiplayer mods for id games. They ended up forming a relationship with id so close-knit that they developed multiplayer content for Return to Wolfenstein and Doom 3. As stand-alone games they made Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Both based on id properties and both multiplayer games. So, with an exclusively multiplayer release history and with Brink announced as an 8 vs 8 class-based objective scoring game… who expected it to have a single player mode?

That’s not to say the critics of the single player experience are wrong. My ISP had an episode whilst I was playing this game for review and I was forced to fall back on the single player experience and witnessed the bots’ antics first hand. Team mates running past objectives whilst enemy characters stood and stared at me, even as I shot them to ribbons, trying to work out what I was. Or perhaps what they were. Perhaps I was interrupting deep and complex existential crises about the nature of existence and whether their code and purpose should define their actions. Whatever the reason, they just refused to return fire a lot of the time. When they did, however, they were hellaciously accurate. Another complaint. Even on easy the few times they decided I was an enemy and needed to be dealt with, there was no hiding place. So it’s true; the AI is as dumb as soup. If you’re looking for a compelling single-player experience this is not it.

Brink is clearly a multiplayer title and that’s where it shines. Your first step into the world is to create a character. Don’t be tricked into thinking you’re choosing a side when the game asks you to. In multiplayer a round consists of each team taking the roll of first one then the other faction, so you’ll be playing both pretty regularly. More on that later. Before you jump in you should spend some time customising your character and familiarising yourself with the available weaponry. Customisation is another aspect of Brink that Splash Damage has vaunted as a selling point and it’s admittedly impressive. Perhaps not as impressive as the soon-to-return APB: Reloaded’s character customisation but leaps and bounds beyond the hat-based differentiation of characters in Team Fortress 2 or the limited number of models in Brink’s ancestors such as Quake 3. Unfortunately, for whatever reason (and Splash Damage employees have posited several) the vast and multitudinous options for making your character different from everyone else’s simply don’t include your gender. It’s an all-male party on The Arc. Which poses some serious questions about how it lasted this long. At least the men are highly multicultural. Voice actors and character customisation options span a pretty broad range of human beings. The Arc is of no nation, it attracted people from all over the world and it shows.

Having created your avatar you throw him into conflict. Well, to be fair, you could familiarise yourself with the levels by enduring the single player campaign. You could hone your skills using the challenges. The former, I can’t recommend, the latter however might prove genuinely useful. Not only does it sharpen skills needed to succeed but it will provide you with some much needed starting XP and some genuinely useful weapon upgrades. I, however, threw myself into the fray.

Unlike some class-based games, Brink lets you change your class on the fly at command posts. These are control points that the teams can capture during the flow of a mission that provide you with places to heal up, resupply and change to a more useful class. This is important because in Brink objectives are class specific. Only an engineer can blow up a barricade. Only a medic can keep a VIP on his feet and healthy. Only the operative can hack controls of enemy installations. That said, I’ve never felt (as I’ve seen some complain) that I was forced into playing any particular class against my will. A well-balanced team will have operatives and engineers aplenty to fulfil their objectives and as a medic I serve the team best by keeping those players on their feet rather than trying to ham-fistedly play the same class as them to reach their objective. Of course, the fact that medics (who actually want to heal other players) are always welcome on a server might have given me a biased impression of this particular issue.

An interesting quality of Brink is that it is simultaneously difficult to navigate the environments and easy. One of the things that makes it easy is the freedom of movement. This works as advertised and you and your team will be flinging themselves over fences, scrambling up cargo containers and generally running about like loons which looks and feels incredible. For too long I’ve felt like my multiplayer video game characters have been somewhat Dalek like in their movement. As hectic and natural as the surrounds might be, limited to flat movement over carefully prepared terrain, incapable of vaulting even ankle-high walls. Coupled with the objective wheel, which allows you to choose an objective to highlight on your display, this makes getting around easy. The objective wheel is an invaluable resource. Not only can you highlight mission objectives, such as crane controls your team needs to seize control of but you can also highlight class objectives. Engineers will find doors they can cut through to provide the team a route to flank the enemy. Medics can receive automatic indications of where the nearest fallen friends are to revive.

The level design, however, is unbalanced and complicated. Turning the wrong corridor will bring you face to face with the enemy team’s spawn area and see you cut down in a hail of turret fire. You can easily wander away from the fight and find yourself coming in from a flank that affords the enemy an excellent chance to cut you off from support. This might sound like a complaint but it is in many ways a compliment. Brink seems to harken back to the days of pure competitive multiplayer where knowing the environment was key. The more little tricks, short cuts and vantage points you knew, the greater your chance of out smarting your enemy. In one mission I was able to completely outflank the enemy’s bottle-neck and emerge safely behind their lines and reach our objective unhindered simply because the other team didn’t guard the little side corridor I had discovered in an earlier game. It’s also irrelevant that the levels are unbalanced. It makes sense that the team defending any given objective should have the upper hand. Attack is harder than defence. Whilst this is unfair, the unfairness is reversed immediately when the teams ‘change end at half time’ and swap round. Attackers become defenders and vice versa.

It’s a highly enjoyable multiplayer experience provided you’re the sort of person who can suffer through the frustration of trying to break a secure choke-point and watching your team get cut down repeatedly because you know that your turn is coming to do the same to them. It’s similar, in this regard, to Left 4 Dead. That’s not the only similarity either. When you are knocked down and incapacitated, waiting for a medic to come and heal you, the ambient music reminds me strongly of Left 4 Dead. Equally, the difference between playing on a server with random people from the internet or playing in a coordinated team of friends with microphones is just as great in both games.

Ultimately I don’t think Brink is a game with mass appeal. This is not a game for everyone by any means. It is a very narrowly focussed competitive game that is deeply unforgiving in many of its’ design choices. This works, in the most part, but if I had one true complaint, one observation of a design decision that was flat out wrong rather than falling short of its’ aim it would be this; the players are hard to tell apart. In the height of combat, determining who is on whose team becomes difficult. The heavy emphasis on customisation means there is no uniformity between the teams and the slight hint of colour isn’t sufficient to determine friend from foe. If the players’ names above their heads were simply colour coded or if enemies were more clearly visually highlighted, the game would be immensely improved.

Pros:

The kind of customisation that makes you feel your character is yours, not just an off the peg choice.
The free running that makes you feel you’re really exploring the world.
Intense combat and a return to the old-guard principles of multiplayer.
A rich world that, frankly, needs a game with a plot set in it.
Developers who vow to fix the issues and provide at least the first set of DLC free.

Cons:

Almost a waste of its’ backstory and setting, the levels don’t make the most of the potential.
Intense fights become cluttered and busy making friendly fire all too easy.
Bots as dumb as soup. There’s no I in these AIs.
Issues bad enough developers actually need to promise patches.

It’s now the day after the latest Call of Duty game was released. The game is called Modern Warfare 2 and I have a few thoughts I’d like to share.

First of all I should probably start with the good points. The game looks excellent and obviously has very high production values. The voice acting is excellent and the music, main theme by movie score giant Hans Zimmer, is perfect. Unfortunately it pretty much stops there.

The game is split in to three types of game play. Special Ops, Campaign and Multiplayer. Being that I play games along I played through the campaign mode. Sadly that took around five hours. Remember that Activision are charging £54.99 for this game. You can pay far less than that if you shop around with Sainsbury’s having the lowest price I could find at £26. Let me assure you if you pay full price you’re going to be far more disappointed than I was.

The campaign mode follows a very confusing story. Something about a Russian guy causing a war. This is bad point number one. I have played the game through, watched every cut scene and I’ve got absolutely no idea what the story is about. That doesn’t happen with better games like Fallout 3, GTA 4 or any of the Halo series.

Gameplay is very poor, so poor in fact that it might as well be an “on rails” kind of game. The emphasis is very much on run to one point, shoot a few guys, run to another point and shoot some more guys. There are no puzzles to solve, very little though required and if you get killed you simply pick up at the last check point and carry on. No matter what difficulty level you play at you can pretty much blast your way through to the end. Something that makes the annoying “test your skills” section at the beginning of the game quite pointless and ever so slightly more annoying.

The game’s graphic designers have clearly put a lot of work into this creating good looking lush environments that you’ll have absolutely no time to look around or explore. You’ll spend most of your time following computer controlled characters. At some point in the game you’ll bump into a laptop computer and be presented with the option to collect enemy intelligence. Then you’ll realise that you’ve missed a part of the gameplay. Then you’ll realise that you can’t actually do that point of the game even now you know it’s there because you’ve got to follow the computer controlled characters. Even when you try to wonder off course to have a look around you’re constantly bombarded with the character shouting at you for not following him. Very annoying.

MW2 has got one level in particular that has caused a bit of controversy, so much that Activision have given you the opportunity to miss the level out if you think you’ll be offended. In this level you play a terrorist walking through an airport shooting people as you go. It’s very slow, feels like it’s on rails, presents absolutely no challenge and so feels like it’s there just for the sake of it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really care what you have to do in the missions. After all it’s just a computer game and it’s not about to make me actually go on a killing spree at Leeds Bradford Airport. Once again we have un-needed attention on violent games for absolutely no reason. Levels like this should be banned, not for being violent, but for being really boring.

There is a vast array of weaponry that all does pretty much the same thing. There’s machine guns, sniper rifles, hand guns and one or two rocket launchers. That’s it. It doesn’t matter which machine gun you use, they all do the same thing. Eventually you’ll run out of ammo and while there is extra ammo spotted around there’s very little to identify it or even tell you that you’ve picked it up. Not a sound is made when you replenish your supply. Guns just keep reloading.

The Special Ops mode is even worse. It’s simply made up of sections from the campaign mode only you have to do them even quicker. You’re awarded gold stars by doing missions as quick as you can. Being that my main problem with the game is that levels are too fast and frantic, Special Ops isn’t exactly something I feel like wasting my time on.

I’m told that the main attraction of the Call of Duty games are the multiplayer mode, and it’s something that they’ve always done well. Unfortunately there’s no real difference between the multiplayer in this game and the multiplayer in Call of Duty 3. Just better graphics and different maps. You can even choose to give Activision even more of your money for more maps to run around being shot by 11 year old kids.

All in all I really feel like I pissed away £26. If you want a good FPS there are far better ones than this available.

There I was, in the middle of a dead city, crouched behind a rotting wooden door, with a few hundred wandering corpses in shouting distance. I was fresh out of ammo, just the handle of a frying pan clutched in my palm.

But the guy next to me was still packing his shotgun, and that skinny girl we picked up was hefting a pipe bomb while running her thumb down the edge of a machete. A little ways away, creeping along the shadow of a rusting car toward a pile of loose bullets near the riot barricade was the shifty-looking fella in the wrinkled suit.

He didn’t make it to the shells before ten sets of eyes were on him. The horde picked up his scent, started baying to alert their lifeless brothers: It was feeding time.

Romero acolytes, eat your hearts out. Those classic zombie flick tropes are alive in Valve’s land of Left 4 Dead 2, due for general release Nov. 17. But those of us who fronted the $45 for the pre-release have been gifted early access to the demo (which is sharp as a knife and, sadly, just as short). After three days with the demo, I’m thinking the video game sequel is Day of the Dead to the original Dawn of the Dead.

The day-lit streets of New Orleans, which at first I thought made the game feel too cartoonish, soon grew creepy as the undead swarmed me in the half dusk. I couldn’t help but dredge up our old voodoo associations the city harbors, or the not-so-faded memories of the devastation there in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Still, there’s no denying the run-of-the-mill staple zombies aren’t as terrifying this time around, so it’s good we have new mutant ghouls to ramp up the fear factor. I jumped and squeaked the first time a “Charger” surprised me from an alley by knocking me into a brick wall with his rhino-sized fist. The best of the new breed, though, are the riot-gear-clad plague victims who keep getting back up through several clips.

To ward off the infected, there is the good ol’ cache of molotovs, pipe bombs, pistols, rifles, semi-automatics, sniper rifles, medkits — plus machetes, nightsticks, grenade launchers, and even electric guitars. The new melee weapons all (mysteriously) seem to do the same amount of damage, but I’m reserving judgment until next month when I get my hands on the axe and chainsaw. At that point, the full game will also unlock a baseball bat, incendiary and explosive ammo, and a few other promised goodies.

A bizarre skipping problem ruined my first attempts to run the demo with friends (even with my Nvidia 9800 GT) but tinkering with the video settings eventually ironed out the issue without too much noticeable rendering sacrifice. Not so long later, novel level design won me back when I realized Valve developers were throwing some fun challenges my way. For instance, simple bottlenecking — a cheap trick — isn’t a frequent option anymore. The urban gamescape gives zombies many routes to reach and harry my team of players as we try to escape, making me think harder to avoid them.

Ammo is also scarcer this time, so managing resources well becomes crucial. Levels are larger and not so very linear, meaning you have to constantly watch your back. From one play-through to the next, obstacles can change (as well as the places where zombies spawn or rush, but that’s nothing new). And regular ol’ infected are harder to kill, since they often keep coming after losing one or two limbs, but that just makes ‘sploding them even more fun.

With just two short levels to experience in the demo, I have to give Left 4 Dead 2 a cool four severed fingers up. With more gore than before though, I wouldn’t recommend it for kids. If you’re old enough for 28 Days Later, you can probably handle it.

~ JASON, the oldest surviving MYSS listener

P.S., Jakob and Mandy, the reason we like zombies so much is because they are an excuse to exorcise our darkest violent desires on people who aren’t really people. There is a liberation to unloading a few hundred rounds into a shell of a person that we’ve labeled as “evil.” It dissolves our guilt and sates our fear of the unknown.