The next day you fire up the game and select a file to load — and the game crashes to your desktop.  Annoyed, you try another file — with the same result.  Now you’re more than annoyed.  So you try one more time — another crash.  Now you realize that you’ve just wasted 25% of a day that you’ll never get back playing a game that you’ll never finish.  You search for patches in vain, discovering that a patch was supposed to be in the works two months ago and it still hasn’t been released.  So you admit defeat and decide to uninstall, only to find that the game just doesn’t want to be uninstalled!  It fights back against Windows Control Panel for more than five minutes before finally giving up the ghost.

Sound familiar to anybody?

This is the dark side of the world of PC gaming.  Console gamers have the upper hand on us mouse-and-keyboard folks in very few areas, but this is one of them.  Xbox users don’t have to worry about patching their games when bugs that have escaped the QA process leap up and bite them in the virtual behind.  But when things go wrong in a PC game, we have to search through website after website for patch files to rescue us from our frustration.

What brought all of this ranting on?  Guild 2: Venice, that’s what.  JoWood’s stand-alone expansion pack for Guild 2.  Without doubt the buggiest retail PC game I have ever played.  So buggy, in fact, that I was told not to write the Avault review of the game, the first time this has ever happened to me.  Let me give you just a taste of the things that are wrong about Guild 2: Venice:

Character pathfinding makes no sense.  Characters will take the most circuitous route possible to get from Point A to Point B, but other times will walk straight through walls and other characters.  My character once stopped walking in the middle of a bonfire and never reacted, as if he were some sort of superhero (and believe me, he was the biggest dork to be found in 15th-century Venice).

A 24-hour clock marks the time of day.  At the end of the day, the screen goes black and a title caption shows that you have advanced one season and four years before the start of the next day, yet your characters never show a single sign of aging, other than on their profiles, which indicate that their numerical ages have increased.

Your characters speak Latin most of the time.  Not even I am old enough to have had Latin classes in high school; the only Latin I know I learned from singing classical music in college choirs.  These characters could have been making all sorts of nasty comments about me and I’d never know the difference.

Indentured servitude seems to have been prevalent in the 1400s.  The poor soul pulling the cart that took my manufactured goods to market never left the cart, never slept, didn’t even try to get out of the rain.

One of the ways to increase your standing in the Venice community is to get married.  You do this by stalking an appropriate prospective mate, plying them with compliments, kisses, embraces and gifts.  When they finally say “I Do” and you retire to your marital bed, the curtain leading to your bedchamber is drawn, and after about 10 seconds of silent wooing, you hear your character’s voice saying (and this is a direct quote), “I believe you are with child, my wife.”  Was everyone an OB/GYN in the 15th century?  Or as fertile, for that matter?

Occasionally your buildings come under attack by ruffians from rival families.  You know this because a narrator voice urgently intones, “A building is under attack!”  Why it’s worded this way, I don’t know, since it’s never anyone else’s building being attacked.  Anyway, if you change the camera and watch the battle, you notice that the attackers are completely oblivious to the city guards who arrive to stop them, and never even turn to face them as the guards pummel them to dust.  Which is almost literally what happens, since dead ruffians slowly melt into the ground after they have been defeated.

And at least once, I heard thunder rumble out during a snowstorm.  When’s the last time you heard that happen?

All of this is bad, but the straw that breaks the cart-puller’s back is the constant corrupting of save-game files.  Figuring this game out was tough enough.  I had never played the original Guild games, the seven-part tutorial in Venice is helpful but not even close to being comprehensive, and the publisher did not include a printed manual, choosing instead to put a PDF file on the install disk.  But after finally getting comfortable with the game’s mechanics and making some progress, to have to go back almost to the beginning because most of my save-game files were corrupted finally forced me to throw in the towel.

With all the nonsense we as PC gamers constantly hear about the imminent demise of our favorite hobby, you’d think that publishers and developers would put more care and effort into making games playable out of the box, a problem that our console brethern never really have to endure.  But the thing that burns me the most about the travesty that is Guild 2: Venice is that I have wasted almost 20 hours of gaming time that could have been put to much better use.

Excuse the blasphemy, but it almost makes you want to be a console gamer…

The Lost and the Damned is the name for the new DLC for GTA IV. For those of you that resisted the urge to trade in your GTA IV games, you will be rewarded with a new character, Johnny Klebitz, and a new story line to add to the GTA IV mythos. Expect plot points to intersect from time to time with the main story thread of the original game, however, what is noteworthy is the new missions, weapons and multiplayer modes available to make this foray an entertaining one. Rockstar even added some new music to spice things up. Expect the Lost and the Damned February 17, 2009.

- Ralph Tricoche

I sometimes wonder if my favorite games would seem as great now if I played them for the first time today. Are the elements we loved in the classics now tired and cliché? For instance, in the age of 3D graphics, epic plotlines and high-quality voice acting, would Castlevania: Symphony of the Night still capture my interest so effectively that I could hardly pull myself away to go about my daily life? After playing Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, I can emphatically say yes. The game smacks of everything great about the Castlevania series, with a few new tricks added to keep things interesting.

Ecclesia is set shortly after Symphony of the Night, and involves neither the Belmont clan nor our favorite backwards vampire, Alucard. Instead, players take control of Shanoa, a member of a secret society devoted to destroying Dracula once and for all. Shanoa has the unique ability to absorb and command glyphs, magical weapons she conjures from thin air. The Order has created a glyph called Dominus that they believe to be capable of defeating Dracula, and Shanoa has been chosen as its host. When Albus, a young colleague of Shanoa’s, discovers this, he becomes enraged and steals the Dominus. Shanoa is then sent to recover it.

Unlike some other Castlevania titles, you don’t spend all your time in one castle, trying to find ways to open up new areas of the map. Instead, you have access to several more linear levels. Once you make your way through a level, you’re taken to a map screen where you can revisit areas you’ve already seen, or you can move to a new unlocked area. Of course, you’ll have to return to several areas of the map, but this new interface provides interesting side quests and keeps you from having to backtrack through entire levels, as in some previous titles.

The glyph system isn’t all that different from the old melee style of combat, but it has its own idiosyncrasies. In the menu, players can set one glyph to each hand and one auxiliary glyph that typically isn’t so much a weapon as it is some kind of magic ability or battle aid. When Shanoa uses a glyph, it uses up a portion of her MP, which gradually replenishes over time.

Stig Asmussen, Game Director for God of War 3, stated that although the recently announced God of War 3, will be the last in the series, he is supremely confident that the series will go out with a bang. Citing refined gameplay and jaw-dropping visuals, he personally guaranteed that he would send the series off with all the respect due to both the franchise and the fans. This time around Kratos will bring the pain in both Mt. Olympus and Hell itself. No one is safe from his revengeful bloodlust.

- Ralph Tricoche

Microsoft has launched its ‘Free your Avatar’ campaign. A new, exciting feature designed to export your Xbox avatars and share them with family and friends. You may use these exports in all of your favorite gaming and social sites/blogs. Just another way to spread the love.

Just type in your gamer tag and PRESTO! Your avatar appears. You have many backgrounds to choose from so you can get your creative thinking cap on. If you don’t have an Xbox avatar, no problem. This new service allows users to choose from pre-created avatars. Just choose the one that resembles you the most. You may also place more than one avatar in the same picture, so now you can have that group picture you always wanted.

To celebrate the ‘Free your Avatar’ campaign, Microsoft is running a competition. Make your avatar, post it on a popular social networking site, and if you have that certain pizzazz and creative flair you may have a chance to win some very cool swag, including a personalized statue of your Avatar. Head on over to official site for the complete 411.

- Ralph Tricoche

While I enjoy a good first-person shooter, the one thing they often lack is some of the hardcore small-unit tactics often employed in the real world. Multiplayer matches, while entertaining, tend to devolve into frag-fests and silly, suicidal behavior because of seemingly important statistics and the ability to respawn. While it’s fun to grab a good set of realistic contemporary weapons and hunt down your friends on various maps, it’s no substitute for games that emphasize group tactics rather than individual skills. Games covering World War II and its squad-level engagements are quite plentiful, but developer Battlefront has decided to move into the 21st century with the release of Combat Mission: Shock Force – Marines, an expansion to Combat Mission: Shock Force. The original game covers a fictional conflict between the U.S. and Syria, set in the here and now, and the expansion follows the exploits of an MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit) as it takes on missions in this fictional conflict, adding to the U.S. Army-dominated content of the original.

CMSF - Marines is intended to appeal to the hardcore strategy crowd. Battlefront has taken events since 2002 and used them to update combat modeling in an effort to more accurately simulate modern ground warfare. It is not the kind of game in which you issue only three commands (move, shoot, change aggressiveness). Instead, even the simplest unit has a variety of commands available to it, requiring multiple menus just to cover moving, firing, calling for fire and performing special tasks. Also, you do not control individual troops, but rather fire teams composed of a few men. Selecting a large group of warm bodies and ordering them to fire on a target (as you would in an RTS) is not even an option, much less tactically feasible. Those looking for detailed, realistic micromanagement will find themselves pleasantly busy just coordinating a minute’s worth of movements for a rifle platoon.

This emphasis on details finds its way into every unit, weapon and vehicle in the game. The Marines are not just carrying assault rifles, but rather M16A4s, with fire team leaders carrying M203 grenade launchers. Snipers don’t use generic sniper rifles, but instead are equipped with either the M82A3 SASR or the M40A3, with the actual performance of the troops modified according to the specific capabilities of either weapon. The Syrians fare no worse in the realism department. Everything from T90SAs and BMP-3s to IEDs and RPG-7D3s can be employed in response to the incursion of American forces. The inclusion of IEDs should raise a few eyebrows; true to the nature of what a conflict like this might be like, Battlefront has chosen to include headline-grabbing tactics and weapons as part of their realistic portrayal of such events. No one should expect the overwhelming superiority of Marine firepower to be nerfed to make the game balanced; the Syrians have all the tools of asymmetrical warfare at their disposal, enabling at least the chance of inflicting a humiliating defeat on the U.S. player.

Playing CMSF - Marines is all about issuing the right orders in the right circumstances rather than just massing units and firing on the enemy. The game can be played in either turn-based or real-time format, but regardless of which style you choose, you give detailed orders to units based on terrain, time of day, visibility and the particular rules related to the difficulty level selected. Normally I prefer turn-based play, in which a typical turn would involve giving units arcs of fire, moving some units under covering fire, spotting concealed enemy units, trying to maintain control of friendly units (harder than you might think at higher difficulty levels), and calling in artillery and airstrikes. This last action deserves special mention. Long-range fire is not an instant way to obliterate enemy forces. It takes time to set up and execute, and poor strategy will cause your own forces to be pinned down and picked off.

Midway Games Inc., maker of the popular Mortal Kombat video game series, will cut its head count by 180 people, or 25 percent of its work force, close a studio in Austin, Texas, and halt development of “noncore” games, according to a government filing today.

Midway expects to take a charge of $1.6 million in the fourth quarter for severance costs. The company said the job cuts will come at its facilities in Chicago and San Diego, in addition to Austin. The company posted a widening loss for the third quarter and expects another loss for the three months ending in December.

Billionaire media figure Sumner Redstone and his holding companies sold 80.3 million shares of Midway for less than a penny at a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars, according to securities filings this month. Midway shares fell 2 cents to 17 cents in midday trading today, down from a 52-week high of $4.20.

Source: CNN

“Legs,” in entertainment industry-speak, means movies that perform well at the box office for a while, instead of just doing some business on their opening weekend and then quickly fading. In the videogame business, legs are rare. Most games in NPD’s top 10 ranking came out that month or the previous month. Gamers, by and large, seem to know what they want and they buy it pretty quickly.

There’s one big exception, however: Nintendo. The continued presence of Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit in the top 10 every single month since they debuted (eight and seven months, respectively) is simply astounding. Then there’s Wii Play which has been in the top 10 for 22 months, though more for the extras it comes with than the game.

The core gamer audience is still eager for the right titles, of course, as the huge launch of Gears of War 2 shows, but what any media company, whether it’s a film studio or videogame publisher, wants is legs. A big launch takes a big marketing budget, but when a game is still performing six months after debut, it’s mostly selling itself.

Nobody else has figured out how to do that. Sony couldn’t even keep LittleBigPlanet, which has plenty of mass appeal and replayability, in the top 20 for two months. Even the terrible Wii Music managed to sneak into the top ten during its second month. If it stays there in December and beyond, that’s officially scary.

Source: Variety

In the three years since Guitar Hero stole the video game stage, fast-fingered consumers have purchased more than 22 million units. Now, Activision and developer Neversoft are looking to kick the franchise up a notch with Guitar Hero: Metallica, due early in 2009.

The time is right for a Metallica game. The band is back atop the heavy metal world. Its latest album, Death Magnetic, has gone platinum after premiering at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 200 chart — its fifth consecutive album to do so. It also received four Grammy nominations that include best rock album, best recording package, best rock instrumental, and best metal performance. The band is also a 2009 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominee.

Source: USA Today

SCEA development boss, Michael Denny, emphatically states that their new game, Heavy Rain, can be played by both the casual and hardcore crowd. Itchy trigger fingers and greased lightening reflexes play no role in this venture. Only the mind can free you in this new game, so leave your Halo helmet home and pick up your Bat-utility belt for this one.

- Ralph Tricoche